During the recent Perseid meteor shower, on a whim I decided to try man hand at Astro Photography for the very first time during which I learned three very important things:
Firstly, it really helps if you take fully charged batteries.
Secondly, where I live it is pretty much impossible to get away from light pollution.
And thirdly, in meteor pictures, size is everything.
Unfortunately, I somewhat failed in the latter by using a relatively wide angle lens.
So, here are three of the pictures taken on the night, somewhat messed about with to hide as much of the light pollution as possible. It seems that green is the in-colour for meteors this year.
Technorati tags:
perseids,
meteors August 19th, 2007
Frankly, Windows Vista strikes me as just XP with some makeup on and a whole heap o’ DRM technology added. I can dual boot it on my pc but frankly there is no compelling reason for me to use it so far.
Windows Home Server (WHS), however, is an entirely different kettle of fish. This is a product I want, and I want it now. Although in all my uber-geekdom I can easily build a Linux box with most of the functionality offered by WHS the whole package looks slick enough to make me want to use it. As soon as I get around to building a new server for it I’ll be purchasing a copy.
Plus, as a software developer I’ve got several ideas for WHS addins that will be of use to me and potentially other people so I eagerly logged onto MSDN to see if I can download a copy for development purposes, because, you know, you really don’t write code and test it on a production platform. Not there. Oh well, it has only just gone to RTM perhaps they’re taking their time.
Apparently not, for some insane reason they’re not going to put WHS on MSDN. Since there is zero chance I’m going to buy an additional copy for development purposes after Microsoft already have taken lots of money for the MSDN subscription, I guess that my home server addins will simply have to wait until they get it through their corporate heads that as a developer I may want to use my Microsoft Developer Subscription Network subscription to develop software for, arguably, their most interesting new product for several years (much more exciting than Vista, by a long shot).
They tried a similar thing with the Expression products, arguing that developers never write html or do graphics so they don’t need access to them. After a while sanity reigned and I have a hope that this also happens with WHS sooner rather than later.
But I’ve been wrong before…
August 15th, 2007
