May 2007 - main - earth.li

Astronomy Software
by Yvonne Everett 11 Jun '07

11 Jun '07

Hello Could anyone recommend some open source astronomy software? I'm looking for something to do the job of "Starry Night" and "Registax" so if anyone has any personal recommendations, I'd love to hear them. Thanks -- Yvonne Everett Email: ye103910(a)googlemail.com

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Weird blackout on browser!
by ted.harding＠nessie.mcc.ac.uk 31 May '07

31 May '07

Hi Folks, I just observed something strange, using Firefox. I wonder if others find the same. 1. Go to http://www.rspb.org.uk/supporting/campaigns/suttonfen/index.asp and get a nice page. 2. Now scroll down and find "Find out more", and click on A wonderful site for future generations to enjoy I get a complete blackout! 3. Now click the "Back" button to return to the previous page. Again, this is completely blank. Check that the URL in the location window is the same as you originally entered at (1). 4. Clear the URL, and re-enter the URL from (1). Again completely black! 5. Open something else, e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/ and normal service is resumed. Now clear the URL again and enter the URTL from (1). It's still black! But if you clear the cache and re-enter, it's OK again. The only explanation I can think of is that the cache of the page at (2) is considered to be the cache for the URL at (1), even though (2) is not at the same URL as (1), being http://www.rspb.org.uk/supporting/campaigns/suttonfen/wonderful.asp What's interesting is that if I do it the other way round: 6. Clear history, cookies and cache, close down broswer, restart browser, and enter this last URL above, I then get a parfectly good page. But now find the "> Sutton Fen Appeal > ..." at the top, click on that, and you get a black page again. This of course should take you to where you were at (1) in the first place, since it is the same URL (as seen in the URL box). So it's the same effect: the transition (by any means) from either page to the other makes everything black! I'm a bit puzzled by all this. Any ideas? With thanks, Ted. -------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding(a)manchester.ac.uk> Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 31-May-07 Time: 14:33:29 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------

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Epson picturemate 100 printer
by Barrys linux mail 31 May '07

31 May '07

Hi Has anybody been able to get this printer to work with Ubuntu as all I get is printer recognised and then starts to feed paper and then it stops.Any Ideas? Barry

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Calendar/diary - I've found a usable solution
by Chris G 31 May '07

31 May '07

I seem to have found a solution to my calendar diary requirement. I've been looking for a simpler wiki (than TWiki) for personal use and after a fair amont of hunting around and wasting time trying things out I decided on MoinMoin. It's widely used (and I almost tried it myself once before) and it supports reStructured text as one of its markup languages so fulfilled quite a few of my wiki 'wants'. It turns out that MoinMoin has a ready made 'out of the box' macro that generates a calendar with clickable days that take you to the page for the day which (as with any wiki) you can create if it doesn't exist already. That's a large chunk of what I want, if I can link some sort of appointments utlity to the pages I create then so much the better but that will be a bonus. -- Chris Green

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Re: Missing Touchpad (Solved)
by Matthew 31 May '07

31 May '07

Hello all, It works! Having found a 'how I got Ubuntu to work on my HP 510' article (http://arewold.wordpress.com/2007/05/26/installing-ubuntu-704-on-a-hp-510-l…) I followed instructions to make a small change to the kernel (forcing the outcome of a check that was presumably going wrong, I think). My custom kernel boots it with the touchpad working as hoped. dmesg now includes: input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /class/input/input3 Thanks for all your help, Matthew

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Re: Missing Touchpad
by Matthew 30 May '07

30 May '07

> What does the output of dmesg say, in particular anything with "PS/2" or serio mentioned? The only line that mentions 'serio' is the one that loads the keyboard controller, and doesn't look relevant. The output of 'dmesg | grep PS/2' looks a little more interesting: PNP: PS/2 Controller [PNP0303,PNP0f0e] at 0x60,0x64 irq 1,12 mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice That might be it, since I have no PS/2 ports (although it probably doesn't prove anything: maybe it can gain PS/2 ports with a docking station or something and needs a PS/2 controller for that). > I had a feeling that some modern machines put the pointing device on the usb bus and not the ps2 serial one. > does lsusb show anything that might be the touchpad ? With my [external] USB mouse unplugged, lsusb looks like: Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 I think those are the ports themselves, or something. I hope that gives someone some ideas: thanks for the help. Matthew

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bbc 'play it again'
by Jenny Hopkins 30 May '07

30 May '07

Hullo there, Has anyone on list had any luck with getting the bbc website 'play it again' working? Thanks, Jenny

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Calendar/PIM application that allows links
by Peter Alcibiades 29 May '07

29 May '07

I think the PIM that would have - or might have - met Chris' requirement reasonably well isn't available any more. It was the old Claris Organiser for OS9 and earlier. Years ago now. You had a calendar with appointments, notes, contacts, one or two other things. Then any one element of these could be linked to any others in some simple way. So you had a sort of ad hoc grouping of (say) a person's contact details, every appointment you had with them, every note of every phone conversation, and maybe the text of all correspondence. You got to each element of the set by clidking a link. And you could have as many of these bundles as you wanted. In addition there were the usual categories. So Chris could have had journal entries associated with agenda items, or anything else. Snippets of code associated with a project. Reading lists from people at a given class. Anything at all could be made into a set and once you hit one, the others became available, but if you also wanted to look at items by category, you could do that too. Later on it was sold to Palm and marketed in two forms, the Windows form of Palm organiser not having any of this linking functionality, but the Mac version kept on with it. It was amazing. I kept looking for something like this too, and hoped maybe Chandler might turn into it, but alas... It may have been a functionality that was too obscure for most people to bother with, but once you got used to it, it was very powerful. Al

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Calendar/PIM application that allows links
by Chris G 29 May '07

29 May '07

I'm still searching for a calendar/PIM application that suits my needs (or at least vaguely approximates to them). I want a very simple application that allows me to enter reminders etc. so I can remember appointments etc. I don't want the complexity that most seem to offer but what I *do* want to do is be able to add links of some sort to appointments that can point to what are effectively diary entries. It can be web/HTML or just desktop, I'm not too fussed. I.e. I want a simple appointments diary with a way of linking it to the entries in a journal/diary. It strikes me that this is a very obvious sort of thing to want but I can't find anything that seems to do it. I have installed and tried plan by the way, it seems very 'clunky' to me. It is quite flexible though, e.g. it's one of the very few such applications which lets you actually see a view of today plus the next few days rather than a week that starts on a fixed day or a month. The 'execute' doesn't do what I need either, it runs a program when the appointment is due (or at a time before). What I needed was a way to run a program (to add a dairy entry) when you click on a date, I've found a fairly crude way of doing this using Xdialog. -- Chris Green

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re: odbc, iodc, sqlite, howto
by Peter Alcibiades 29 May '07

29 May '07

Hi Richard, Am I trying to work with sqlite through a gui? Not quite. It was probably less than clear. I have the database all set up. I also have an sqlite ODBC driver installed - the one that comes in the Etch repositories. The programming language doesn't do sqlite natively, it only does ODBC. Yes, probably I should get another language one of these days.... However, all that is OK - I can manage the language, and I can manage to use the ODBC commands and functions it has built in, but to make it talk to the database, I need a DSN apparently. From synaptic, I installed the sqlite ODBC driver, and on checking, it really does seem to be there in /usr/lib. This is where the problems start though. I can't make a DSN for the database, because I can't see how to add the driver using iodbcadmin-gtk. In the gui, it simply doesn't see it even if pointed at it, and it crashes out with the error when you try. So I can't address the database from the language using the ODBC functions, with no DSN. I was attracted to doing this step with the gtk interface that comes with iODBC, because there seemed to be a lot of things to go wrong if you edit it by hand. And I'm very puzzled about why having installed a couple of ODBC database drivers, it cannot see them. Maybe the answer is give up on iODBC and edit the configuration file by hand, and then if that doesn't work, another option is to go out to the shell. Apparently with sqlite you can go out to shell, call it, and then pass a command to it, and that can be a script. This will have to do if I can't get ODBC to work. Which does seem increasingly problematic. Cheers Al

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