Moonset and Jupiter again

Same telescope as in the previous post, different situation: waxing moon.
After some time wasted (the temptation to point the telescope to the ground and spy innocent people from the top of my house is unimaginable) I convinced myself to watch the orange setting moon a little nearer (20mm eyepiece):

 

And after I proved that Jupiter's moons (obviously) move and then (indirectly) that gravitational laws are true. As you can see in the pictures below, with the same telescope (20mm eyepiece) the moons have a different configurations and it agrees with Stellarium. (mouse rollover to circle the moons):

Stellarium (mouse rollover to name the moons):

I've seen what Galileo saw

Clear sky, Tramontana (a Northern wind known to be very dry in Southern Italy), new moon, neighbourhood lights off: perfect occasion to dust off my brother's telescope and do some night-sky observations.

A refracting telescope, 10cm objective lens and two 34mm and 20mm eyepieces; not so bad for the Moon and planets.

I tried to spot some stars but they were too faint because of that damn light pollution, so I decided to see one of the most luminous astral bodies in the Northern Sky: Jupiter.
After some focusing, I spotted Jupiter with its prominent lighter-hued zones.
But I also noticed what at first sight I thought were some refractions/reflections. There were smaller dots aligned near Jupiter, with different brightness. They were too strange to be some optical effect, so the second assumption was: the Jupiter's moons!
That dots were quite far from Jupiter, in my opinion, to be its moons so I wasn't so sure about that, but they were four (as the Galilean moons), aligned and with different sizes.
I took a picture with my phone (one of the most difficult things in my life, but I was determined to take it) and the result is a very fuzzy and dirty image. Unfortunately the view through the telescope was much clearer and defined, but it can get the idea across (click on the image to enlarge):

After reversing and some photoshopping (or better "gimping"):

Then I immediately checked with Stellarium what kind of bodies they could be, whether Jovian moons or stars. This is the screenshot:

Fascinating.

Stellarium: night sky simulation software

Exploring the educational section of softwares for Gnome, I stumbled upon this incredible program: Stellarium.

You just enter your location and it simulates the sky over you at that moment. Very useful for amateur astronomers or night sky passionate.

There are also a lot of cool features to make the sky similar to the real sky: you can regulate the magnitude and the light pollution, or you can accelerate or choose the time, you can label costellations, stars or nebulae (so you can learn star's names or costellations), make zooms and a lot more.

Practical, easy to use and interesting.
It is also available for Windows.

Incremental Backup using BATCH commands

There is an easy and geek way to make incremental backups in Windows using just the bloc notes and the command-line. There are just a few steps, easy to follow:


Copy this string into a new text file with bloc note or your favourite text editor:

@echo off

xcopy “C:\Folder 1” “D:\Backup Folder 1” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

xcopy “C:\Folder 2” “D:\Backup Folder 2” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

xcopy “C:\Folder 3” “D:\Backup Folder 3” /E /H /R /Y /I /D

pause

Save it with the .bat extension (it can be done in the bloc notes selecting "All Files" as extension and naming the file such as backup.bat).

It's done!


If you run the file just created, a command-line will open and it will make an incremental backup of Folder 1,2 and 3 (the source folders) into Backup Folder 1,2 and 3 respectively (the destination folders).
You can remove or add more folders to make simultaneous backups.

New files in the source folder will be written in the destination folder, existing files will be kept, updated files will be overwritten, deleted files wont be deleted in the destination folder (from this the name "incremental").

Firefox and Thunderbird Backup folders (Windows and Linux)

Making backups periodically is a very good habit.

Personally I've lost a lot of data thanks to thunderstorms, super-heated HDDs or just random broken hardware, enough to make backup of every single bit of data on my notebook.
Sometimes it's like a curse: if you don't make backups, some thunder will burn your hard-disk... and it happens... regularly.

I find very useful to save settings, especially those on my web and mail browser, that is full of themes, add-ons, feeds, bookmarks and other preferences that I wouldn't really like to lose.
I use Firefox and Thunderbird as internet browser and mail platform and I find them the most customizable and fluent software in that field.

So I'd just like to remind you to make a backup of your settings (yes, don't be lazy, make it now!). The profile folders (that contain almost everything) are located in:


Firefox

Windows XP: %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\ (note: %APPDATA% is equivalent to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data)
Linux: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/


Thunderbird

Windows XP: %APPDATA%\Thunderbird\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\
Linux: ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxxxx.default/


A very good tool to make automatic and scheduled backups in Firefox is the FEBE add-on.

From Windows to Linux?

I haven't been writing for a while here, since I've been busy particularly with installing, using (and enjoying) Linux.

I decided to install the Fedora distribution (a free Red-Hat product) in a dual boot with the intention of using Linux sometimes and keeping Windows as the main OS. I also decided to try Windows 7 RC, so I built 3 partitions and installed each operative systems:

The reaction to Windows 7 was not so exciting as I thought. The user interface is very similar (if not the same) to Vista. Yes, it was much better than Vista under a lot of aspects, so I was almost convinced to swap to Windows Seven, even if it did not really bring many improvements from XP.

What really shocked me was the compatibility with hardware and software. A lot of programs were not working under Seven, and this is quite acceptable since it is still a RC. But what made me upset were the ATI drivers for Seven, made only for the newest graphic cards (and not for my ancient but still working Radeon X600).
Without the drivers, the "powerful" Windows 7 didn't even recognize the resolution of my display (1440x900) so I was constrained to use a crappy 800x600.
I immediately removed Seven.

Then I installed Fedora 11! In less than 20 minutes the OS was on the hard drive ready to be used, with all the components installed automatically (and the right display resolution).
There are no accurate words to describe it: flexible, light, fast, user-friendly.
I'm not planning to use Windows again from that day.
Maybe one of the few drawbacks is the lack of programs (untrue! I could never be more wrong, repositories are full with programs and much cooler ones than Windows) so I decided to keep Windows for that, but often there are good, if not better, alternatives and there are a lot of more interesting applications.
I can't list the benefits of using Linux here, it is seriously difficult to list them all!

Anyway, I'm not using Windows any more, so I'll write quickly some post about some Windows programs that I planned to write and then I think I'll begin to write IT posts exclusively about the Linux world.