Just had a look at the logs for Portal Forums this month. The newly released Internet Explorer 7 preview of beta 2, has had a storming month. MSIE 7.0 10846 hits which is 7% of total traffic. Firefox 1.5 7805 hits which is 5% of total traffic. The preview of beta 2 has surpassed Firefox! It's not just the Portal Forums site, all the sites are showing a similar story.
Made some further progress. Then the cloud rolled in again.
This was taken through my TAL 2M 150mm reflector with a Toucam Pro II webcam at prime focus, the resulting image was stacked and processed from 5 frames. It's just a shame the barlow lens I've got is too long for the webcam to be in focus, so I'll have to consider my options on that. As I'll need a longer focal length to get more resolution on Saturn....
The European Space Agency is making a very big announcement tomorrow at 16:00 UTC. Nobody knows quite exactly what, other than it's at least related to an extra-solar planet. But the rumour mill is in over drive - an Earth-like planet? Who knows for sure, but it seems pretty special, a lot of hype is building - a lot more than when they announced the planet with half the mass of Uranus orbiting Gliese 876 - until that point all the planets had been huge, tens and even hundreds times more massive....
New Horizons finally got the all clear to launch at 18:52, resumed the countdown at 18:56 and launched at 19:00 on an Atlas V rocket. It's on it's way to Jupiter and then on to Pluto where it should arrive on the 14th of July, 2015.
This was e-mailed to me and I don't know the original author, I just made some changes and threw it up on my blog. The ladies know geeks rock, here's why for all those who haven't worked it out yet. Geeks are useful, they can fix your desktop, laptop, … Those skills are very useful and can make your life run smooth. They are more romantic than they’re given credit for....
This thing should just about halve Google's over-inflated share price. I've got a few problems with the Google Pack. Firstly once you've installed it your left with loads of applications all over the system tray and your desktop, it looks like your computer has been the victim of a huge malware attack. Unacceptable. Ad-Aware is severely out of date, which makes it basically useless, it includes no real-time protection so the user is forced to run manual scans all the time....
The hype around this thing is spreading across the net, even Robert Scoble is talking about it. But what's it really do? OK sure it's a very fancy piece of technology, and the idea itself has potential. But seriously if you want to spend $400 and get into learning about the sky. Buy yourself three things: Decent pair of binoculars, with at least a 50mm aperture. A solid tripod, won't see much without one....
With Windows Vista getting closer by the day, they're slowly getting all the little things people rarely think of together. Check out them recording some of sounds over on Channel 9, it's no longer one guy infront of a keyboard, told to make a sound 6 seconds long and a bunch of dings that are some of the most heard noises in the world. A lot bigger budget than that now, but let's see if they can really top the Windows 95 sound....
Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web started up a blog last month, I've just got around to reading it now. The first entry I thought was brilliant and really comes at a good time. In 1989 one of the main objectives of the WWW was to be a space for sharing information. It seemed evident that it should be a space in which anyone could be creative, to which anyone could contribute....