The meeting was in Paris during the past weekend. I’m glad I made it there and back safely, and without any complications. Well I did manage to make a long detour while going from Gare du Nord to La Chapelle métro station. Two streets had a very similar name and I somehow ended up on the wrong one which confused me a bit. Me and my roomies, Aleix Pol and Albert Astals Cid, were the last to arrive at the hotel.

After a nice breakfast the next day we went straight to the Mandriva office where the meeting was actually taking place. First Anne-Marie Mahfouf, who we all have to thank for the organisation, had a short welcome talk and then everyone introduced themselves. We have then set up an Icecream network for speeding up the compilation. My laptop with Gentoo for some reason decided not to cooperate. Maybe because I had the tools compiled with CPU specific optimisations or maybe because I was the only one running in 64-bit mode.

During the first day we had two presentations. Patrick Spendrin told us how and why he is porting KDE applications to Windows. There are so many great free and open-source educational applications in KDE that it would be a shame if people on Windows couldn’t use them. Well with KDE 4 this will finally be possible. Later Vladimir Kuznetsov prepared a demonstration of Step, an amazing interactive physical simulator, a virtual physical laboratory for your computer. He started working on it during Google Summer of Code 2007 and it has come very far. Step has many cool features, even more than some similar expensive commercial applications. Every physics teacher should definitely check out Step.

On the second day we started working later because the security card didn’t work and so we couldn’t enter the office. Lucky those who decided to sleep an hour longer that morning :). We continued our work and then had a presentation about the future of KDE Education project. Later Patrick managed to get Step running on Windows. At 5pm I was sad as I had to leave the meeting and travel back home.

During those two days I was checking out how translations work in educational applications. For that I also needed to update some of the Slovenian translations. While testing I noticed a bug in Kickoff menu which didn’t show search results of entries without GenericName specified in their desktop files. Albert quickly fixed this and while we were debugging I found out about DDD frontend to GDB and learned how to teach GDB so it is able to print Qt data (look into kdesdk/scripts/kde-devel-gdb), for example QString data. Another “important” thing I learned was how to add Plasmoids to the container that replaces kicker. When you have the Add Widget dialog open you have to drag the Plasmoid directly to the panel. Thanks to Benoît Jacob for this, and for the trip around Paris.

I had a really great time in Paris and it was nice to meet all the people and get to know all the faces and voices that are behind IRC nicknames. With face to face meetings like this our community only gets stronger. Can’t wait to meet them all again next year at aKademy 2008 in Belgium.

Tags: kde, community, meeting, education, physics, free software, open source, linux, windows, paris, france

New year of 2007 is almost here and you can be sure that there will be plenty of astronomical phenomenon to wonder at in the coming year. Whether you use a telescope, binoculars or even the naked eye, many celestial objects are worth to gaze at. To help you explore the night sky there is an excellent book, that is prepared just for the year 2007. It title is What’s Up 2007 - 365 Days of Skywatching and was written by Tammy Plotner. The best part about this book is that it is available for free download. A perfect gift for any amateur astronomer, beginner or experienced one. If you like the book, you can also buy it in printed form and by doing so also support the author. He deserves it. Thanks to Wil Wheaton for the post with a pointer to this book.

Tags: astronomy, space, science, books, education

Up until today our Solar system had 9 planets. From this day forward it only has 8. No, one of them didn’t get destroyed by some Death star or something. What happened was that stronomers at International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly 2006 redefined the term planet. So the new definition is this:

A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.

The consequence of this is that Pluto doesn’t qualify as a planet any more and now belongs to a new group called dwarf planets, which are defined as (pay attention to points (c) and (d)):

A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.

And then we have a third group:

All other objects except satellites orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as Small Solar-System Bodies.

So there you have it. Some books will have to be rewritten, people will have to learn some new facts, and celestial bodies still don’t care about any of this

Tags: astronomy, space, planet, planets, solar system, iau, science

To get the notification about the latest news from European Space Agency I’ve been subscribed to several of their mailing lists. I was extremely happy a couple of days ago when I found out that ESA has added RSS feeds to their web portal. So now I can finally use my favourite feed reader, Akregator, to follow news more conveniently. If you are using Firefox web browser, you can also subscribe to news, simply by adding the feed link as a new live bookmark. Besides feeds for top news, there are also feeds available for specific programmes/projects and for national news. For more information see the list of RSS feeds from ESA.

Tags: esa, european space agency, rss, feed, feeds, news, space, astronautics

A couple of hours ago Harish Kukeja submitted quite a lot of new source code for Physiks into SVN repository at KDE. The basic features of the physics simulation framework should mostly be functional now and I’ll have to take some time later to take a look at the new code more closely. Probably I will also have to brush up my knowledge of the C++ that is related to this code. If I’ll have enough free time, I may try to write some simple Qt application to test the current state of physics engine and see how it feels using it. Maybe I could also start working on a web page for the project. It would also be nice to come up with an icon that represents something (someone) that immediately makes you think about physics. But first I have to catch Harish on Jabber so we discuss about this idea.

Tags: physics, engine, simulation, simulations, education, kde, linux, soc, summer of code, programming

In just a short few minutes European astronaut Thomas Reiter from ESA will start his EVA outside of International Space Station. EVA stands for Extra-vehicular activity, or if you like it, a spacewalk. Together with a fellow astronaut Jeff Williams from NASA, Thomas will be out in cold space for six and a half hours. Among other things they will install some equipment to prepare ISS for future assembly work. Editors from the Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany, will be posting about this adventure in the EVA blog.

Update: Some photos from the spacewalk are now available in the NASA’s International Space Station gallery.

Tags: iss, international space station, esa, nasa, astronautics, space

While updating my local copy of source code from KDE SVN repository and reading the latest issue of KDE Commit Digest (I’ve translated the interface into Slovenian language) I noticed that Harish Kukreja has imported Physiks into the repository. The original name for this Google Summer of Code project was KPhysics (you can read a bit more about it in my previous post), but since many new KDE applications have dropped the K prefix KPhysics was renamed to Physiks. Now I have its code on my hard drive and I will keep my eye on the development so that after the SoC is over I can start to help as quickly as possible and help make Physiks a great tool for physics teachers who will use it to show virtual physical experiments to students.

Tags: physics, kphysics, physiks, education, open source, free software, linux, kde, google summer of code, soc

After almost a year of no flights and two delays of launch because of bad weather Space Shuttle is finally flying again. As part of mission STS-121 the Space Shuttle Discovery was successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. The main mission objectives are to test new safety and repair techniques introduced after the Columbia disaster. There are also more then 2 tons of supplies that will be delivered to International Space Station (ISS). On board is ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter from Germany who will join Expedition 13 on the ISS and is expected to stay there for six months. Good luck to all the crew and the mission in general. I hope that from now on all goes well and that other missions will continue as planned. Modules for ISS assembly are already waiting to do their job.

Tags: space, astronautics, space shuttle, iss, nasa, esa

Nekaj trenutkov nazaj sem končal tudi s posodobitvijo prevoda programa KStars. To je odličen astronomski program, namizni planetarij, ki je namenjen predvsem ljubiteljskim začetnikom v astronomiji. Zelo prav pa lahko pride tudi pri učenju astronomije v šolah. Zaslonski posnetek poslovenjenega KStars si lahko ogledate tukajle.

English summary:
A few moments ago I finished updating the Slovenian translation of KStars, a great astronomy application. Screenshot of KStars with Slovenian user interface is available here.