USNO NOMAD 1e8 Support for KStars – Screenshots

Stars to mag 16.x in KStars

SNU


Stars to mag 16.x in KStars



The Core of the Milky Way

FOSS Events for Students @ Shaastra 2008

This time, we’re going to have a bunch of FOSS Events at the annual Technical Festival of IIT Madras, Shaastra 2008.

So what’s in store? A small FOSS developers’ Conference with a few talks by Indian FOSS Developers, with a large bias to students, and a Hackfest where folks can sit and hack open source projects.

For the talks, we have Shreyas, Dr. Kapil, Sup3rkiddo, myself and Arun as of now. This list might increase, considering that we have 6 hours of talks to fill. More details on the FOSS Conference can be found here. The only prerequisite for being able to appreciate these talks is enthusiasm and probably some familiarity with FOSS. Shreyas, Arun and Dr. Kapil will guide you through the rest.

Prepare to stay awake through the nights of 2nd and 3rd October, for we are going to sit and hack on FOSS till we drop at the Hackfest. Tentatively, the projects that are going to be hacked on are Anjuta, KStars, Whatever-Shreyas-wants-to-hack-on, OpenMoko and Debian GNU/Linux. That’s because we will have developers on spot to aid in these areas.

I just wanted to make some of my comments on the events. I think Hackfests are important. I notice that I do large “quanta” of development everytime I get to sit at a Hackfest – like the KDE.IN Monsoon Hackathon or the one at aKademy. I hope this Hackfest will actually enthuse folks to contribute to FOSS.

For the participants who applied for accomodation the Hackfest, we had a questionnaire to fill out which was to measure how much a candidate deserved accomodation. We had some entries from folks with Qt fundaes. (Obviously they got their accomodation, while anyone with GTK+ fundaes were immediately dropped . Kidding, of course.). The inference is that it is probably not the lack of fundaes that prevents someone from doing FOSS development. It’s just that you have to dive in.

If you require any clarifications, you can call up one of us. Our contacts are inviting spam at http://www.shaastra.org/2008/Events/Hackfest and http://www.shaastra.org/2008/Events/FOSSConference

KStars now supports 100 million stars!

The only trouble I have is with uploading the catalog. It’s 1.2 GB bzipped!!

The stars are the brightest 135 million from the USNO NOMAD catalog.

KStars does freeze to a good extent when zooming into Sagittarius / heavy Milky Way regions even at reasonable star densities. Probably it is worth optimizing the draw loop after all.

I was at aKademy 2008

Ah, finally some time to waste on a blog post, because I have absolutely nothing productive that I want to do (I have lots of productive things I must do, but I don’t want to. Eg: Read for the quiz tomorrow) right now. The USNO NOMAD 1e8 star catalog is slowly trickling into the MySQL database at 1700 stars per second on my system (which I fsckin don’t have access to because of pathetic internet connectivity measures in IITM campus. I can’t even get a progress update) and the 20-hour long process should complete in another 2 hours, after which I should be running the week long process of putting that data in a binary file, while I’m trying to forget the heat of the quiz tomorrow and waste my time on blogging.

The content of this and the subsequent blog posts here (if at all they come) should be about my sudden trip to aKademy 2008. I think this is a story worth writing in great detail about, because it was very exciting:

1. It involved planning a foreign trip in 5 hours’ time (at some stage)
2. It involved some VISA application transport hassles
3. It involved several brick walls [Ref. Randy Pausch, the Last lecture] and talks about how Pradeepto managed to push me up each one of them (of course, with my volunteering)
4. It was my first foreign trip alone – I learnt a lot, and it was a whole new experience for me
5. I met a whole bunch of KDE folks and did a good amount (I think) of stuff for KStars

So this blog post is just to inform those who didn’t know, that I was at aKademy 2008, Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium for exactly 2 out of 7 days. [Yes, it _is_ crazy]

I got the idea of going to aKademy 2008 after reading a mail from Thiago saying that we GSoC students could attend aKademy. I spoke to Pradeep, Pradeepto, Pradeeptoto, Pradeeptototo and so on… (nay, Pradeep’s my dad and Pradeepto’s the chap who was my baby-sitter at Belgium), took their advice and decided that I must not go this year, in the purview of aKademiKs and various other factors (despite my dad agreeing to let me go).

Suddenly I had a change of mind and decided to go – this was on 2nd August 2008. aKademy was starting on 9th August 2008. I called Pradeepto and my dad alternately leading to a drop in my prepaid balance by about 200 INR :O.

Pradeepto convinced me that I could still make it on time. The same evening, I flew to Bangalore in 2 hours’ notice and went home. Next day, in Bangalore, I applied for my VISA at the Bangalore VFS Global Center. Believe me, they suck. On Thursday, I generally relaxed, commited to KStars, got mentally prepared etc. Friday morning, I left to Mumbai and went to the VFS Global Center at Nariman Point. What a pathetic waste it was. The courier from Bangalore to Mumbai that carried my VISA application was delayed by a day, thereby not reaching the consulate before Friday. @#$@#(*%^(*@#(!$*(@%*#$%

On Friday, I got a negative response, flew back to Bangalore. Went back to Chennai on Sunday morning. Finished recovering from missed “Analog Circuits” classes.

[Timeout on server. More later. Have to go]