Seems like the software world isn't the only one in which weird patents crop up... Hysterical Patents documents an interesting selection of weird and wonderful patents collected by the late attorney Edward D. O'Brien.

Yesterday at the security check at the airport , my zip-lock bag containing a 100 ml bottle of moisturiser and a tiny bottle of eye drops caused a problem. You see, the bag I had put them in was too large. It was slightly smaller than A4 when flattened out, which it almost was what with it having only two tiny items in it.

I was informed I would need to purchase a smaller bag from a machine, and transfer the two items into it before I would be allowed to walk the 10 meters to the departure lounge. After that of course I would be permitted put them back in the original bag if I wished.

Stellarium 0.10.3 has finally been released (Windows + source for *nix... OSX binaries to follow).

This release includes my Satellites plugin by default (although you have to enable it manually). Also, the script console is included, although there are some known bugs still with the scripting engine (whoops!). I'm working on it... :-)

Yesterday one of the poorest nations on the planet, Haiti, suffered a terrible earthquake. What little infrastructure existed there before is now badly damaged and it looks certain that the situation is very severe.

Please consider making a donation to MSF (UK | global) or Oxfam (UK | global) to help with the relief effort.

Recently I've been doing a bit of web development. The goal is to make an attractive looking art portfolio / gallery site. To start with I looked at a couple of open source image gallery web apps like coppermine, gallery and so on.

I did some installs and they worked well as far as they went but the resulting experience always felt a bit sterile. These projects often allow for a lot of customisation, and I realise that making my own theme could do a lot to make the site look better. However the functionality of these projects is huge and complicated, and to be honest is massive overkill for a simple portfolio gallery. They don't feel right for the task.

Work continues apace on the "new" Stellarium script engine. As part of my work on this I found my workflow a little inefficient - switching between Stellarium and vim in a terminal all the time to edit scripts and then re-run them.

What better then, than to spend a little time making an integrated script editor tool inside Stellarium?

After a lot of work, we managed to release version 0.10.0 of Stellarium - the planetarium for your desktop computer.

There were some sticky problems which we had to sort out with the hosting of the web site... Sourceforge's recent migration has caused a few headaches which were rather badly timed, but it all seems to be running pretty smoothly now.

Progress has continued fast in the last few weeks. The two new features which will be most visible are luminance adaptation and dynamic object labeling.

Luminance Adaptation

This feature is part of an overhaul of the calculation of brightness of objects. When enabled it dims all objects when a very bright object is visible. Thus, when the full moon is visible, dim stars will drop out of view.

This should not be confused with scattering of light in the atmosphere when a bright object like the full moon is in the sky, or because of light pollution - that effect brightens the sky, overwhelming the brightness of dim objects, and is only in effect when atmosphere is turned on. By contrast, luminance adaptation is effective even with atmosphere turned off.

I just finished another example Stellarium plugin. This one might actually be useful, although it would benefit from having a few configuration options.

The plugin allows the user to measure angular distance. For example, the plugin might be used to measure the apparent size of a planet:

When installed the measurement tool can be toggled on and off using the control-A key. When turned on, the left mouse drag action changes to drawing the measurement line. The right button click is used to clear the current line. Turning off the tool with a press of control-A will revert the mouse actions to normal behavior.

One of the recently added features of Stellarium is a plugin system. Although the feature has been present since the 0.9.x series of releases, it has not been widely advertised or used. Part of the reason for this is that it is a new feature, and part of the reason is the heavy re-structuring of the core Stellarium code, making the code-base a little too unstable for easy maintenance of plugins.