Astronomy Online.

Sam and I went to Iceland in January in search of the Northern Lights and had no luck unfortunately, but since then I’ve been looking around for astronomy stuff online, and have found a couple of really cool things, although I am sure there is much more out there. Here’s a little sample:

Google Sky: http://www.google.com/sky/ (OK for playing around)
Microsoft World Wide Telescope: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/ (Much richer, but you need to download the client, pretty cool though as it uses Microsoft’s PhotoSynth Technology)
Stellarium: http://www.stellarium.org/ (Open Source, multi platform Planetarium)

Each have their own merits, WWT is great for exploring and has guided tours through the universe, but Stellarium is awesome for “What is that star I can see over there” type stuff, you can also look at the sky from 2000 cities in the world and look back over the history of the solar system “What did the night’s sky look like in the time of the Pharaohs?” for example.

I was going to say: “So get out there get exploring” but maybe it should be more “stay at home, get exploring”. Aalthough nothing beats seeing the real thing, this is great stuff if you don’t have a telescope or can’t see the sky past smoggy London lights.

 

Team City.

Hey ho. So I thought I would throw up a quick blog about how good Team City is. What is it? It’s a Integrated Build Environment from Jetbrains, those people that lovingly bought you IDEA and Resharper. Go along to their site and check it out: Team City Site.

What’s good about it? Like all Jetbrains things it’s highly configurable, highly plugable and the Web-UI is also probably the slickest “Web 2.0” ajax application i’ve seen. If you are into Unit Testing (you should be) then it runs and records all your tests, how long they take, which ones fail more often etc. It’s basically a “Cruise Control” but done with some real love.

Something really cool we are about to do is integrate unit tests from VB and even VBA (not that VB or VBA is any way cool) as well; this is done using a nice little team city trick I found in the documentation: Integrate any testing framework.

Also it’s free for 20 projects, and 3 build agents. If you are a reader from “any particular organisation” where I work: Hey you’re in luck; we have an enterprise license, send me a mail and I can put you in touch with the right people.

Happy Integrating.