No news is good news

Hi all,

As you know I went in for surgery on 11/18/2013, and since I am writing this I think you can all guess it went reasonably well. I woke up in the recovery area after surgery and man did it hurt, spent a day on the pain button then moved to liquid Vicodin, which I am almost done with today. The pain really goes down from day to day.

Right now I am struggling to get my daily intake of nutrients down, its not too much it is in fact two little, I am getting maybe 50g of protein a day and about 300-400 calories, the good news is that yesterday I was able to get all of my supplements down for the first time. If I may make a suggestion, never buy the chew able wild cherry Calcium Citrate "lozenges" it is either like sucking on chalk with a bit of flavoring or chewing on chalk with a bit of flavoring.

Now my weight loss has slowed down a bit owing to my lack of activity after surgery. Here is the ever growing chart:

Order of Operations

Hi all,

Now that I am a week into my liquid diet, I think its time to admit that this is happening. If you want tips for surviving a liquid diet I would be more than happy to help. However, its time to talk about The plan again. So the goal is to be able to go to the Grand Canyon Star Party as our first expedition this will happen next summer assuming all goes well. However I need a road map for my acquisitions. Things have been made more complicated by my insistence on a Losmadny G11 for my mount.

It suffices to say that the first purchases need to be the laptop and the telescope, these will be the biggest expenses next to the purchase of a new SUV at some point in the next year, probably next fall. But we can break it down even further, the main problem with building a telescope from scratch is that you will inevitably mess things up. You can have all the wishlists and planning that you want but your going to inevitably meet with the fact that Murphy's law goes double in Astronomy.

Your main enemy is the complexity of open loop tracking systems. Everyone solves this with a guide camera, however there is something much more insidious. I have often said I will never buy a used telescope mount and here is why,

This is as close to a precision mechanical instrument as you can get in our hobby, it requires knowledge of mechanical and electrical repair and it is very sensitive to the weight that you put on it. There is no way you can just flip a switch and let it do its work. It has to be coaxed and finessed into doing its job. You cannot loose patients with it, you cannot try to reason with it. You can only be patient and work with it. If you try to take it out of the box put weight on it and get it to track and point, you are probably going to destroy it. 

This is the problem with mounts, they are a lot like cars, and this leads people to treat them like cars. That is to say that for the most part people treat there cars like shit. They assume that its going to work and when it does not they get frustrated and/or irate, when a car is a mechanical object and hence it must be maintained and taken care of, it does not need near the coaxing as an astronomical mount but the point is that you should not just abuse it and then expect me to purchase it. 

So I am going to buy the mount first, take my time assembling it, powering it on learning to balances it, getting to know its nooks and crannies and when I am done I will buy a telescope and put it on the mount, but not before I have taken the time to understand this object. After the mount then I will probably by a Camera, then the telescope and guide scope package. The laptop will also go in there somewhere since it is just a very useful object to have around. And once that is all acquired there will be test runs in my back yard then maybe in Tucson. The reason not to just get into my truck with a new scope and take it to a dark site is simple, it won't work. The scope won't work, the trip will probably be a disaster. 

Netbeans on Windows

I am more than a little bit irritable since I have started my all liquid diet. We are two weeks out from surgery as of today. The major aggravation is MiKTeX, let me do a stack trace to the beginning, after extolling the virtues of Netbeans, I decided to run it on my windows machine.  This was a mistake as I am using Avast anti-virus software and it sees compilers and IDEs not made by Microsoft as malware. In order to install Netbeans I had to disable Avast. So the procedure for that is:

1. Download Netbeans for windows 
2. Disable Avast
3. Install Netbeans for windows. 

Next I installed MinGW, the minimalist gnu software distribution for windows. (Here is a link to the MinGW installer.) After all of this Avast decided that any attempt to scan the MinGW exes by Netbeans was an attack. So after adding the following file system exceptions:

Then adding the following exceptions to the "Deep Screen" feature:

I was finally able to compile C++ programs. Before I got this far I needed to do something even more annoying. It turns out that MiKTeX comes with its own version of libstdc++, and thus causes your programs to bail, so you have to statically link to libstdc++.a in the MinGW lib directory in order for the damn thing to work. So yeah fun times all around for my first day without food since I was a toddler. It should be noted that on Linux this ish just works. 

The Final Countdown (and thoughts on Cross Platform IDEs *finally*)

Hi all,

As I write this I prepare for my last weekend of eating "normally." On Monday I go in for preoperative testing, that also happens to be the day I start a two week diet of specially formulated protein shakes from Bariatric Advantage.  This is both good and bad, good in the sense that I have my meals planned for the next two weeks, bad in the sense that my stomach is full sized and so these shakes will not in any way satisfy me.

Now, I have been promising a blog post on cross platform IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) for awhile so here it is. To start, there are no good cross platform IDEs, because there are no "good" IDEs. All IDEs are about trade-offs, all of them are idiosyncratic and we must accept this because an IDE is the most general programming tool available. With that out of the way the next problem has to do with language. Oddly the most useful IDEs around are for JAVA.

Eclipse leads the pack of course, and it fits the bill for a cross platform IDE, the problem is that production JAVA code is pretty much an in-house affair, most of the code that escapes into the wild, for better or worse is, C/C++ or Python. This is where Eclipse falls down, it is the ultimate in shitshowing when it comes to C/C++ because CDT is terrible, terrible to set up, terrible to use on a daily basis. The next cross platform IDE isn't cross platform but maybe if your clever, the code it produces is, I am talking about Visual Studio, which is the standard coding platform for any professional outfit. Hopefully your code is ANSI C++ avoiding any of the proprietary stuff you could get some cross platform code, I have done this and it is a monumental bitch.

Finally I have found a solution I think, Netbeans is the best IDE I can find so far. It is truly cross platform it does pretty much every language imaginable and it has a feature for selecting available libraries installed on your system, which is much better than Visual Studio where you have to go through a metric tonne of windows just to add a single DLL to your project. However this a compromise choice, it is not as good for JAVA as Eclipse, it is not a fully featured as Visual Studio but I think it may be the sweet spot.