mikemo

An uncle of mine has recently gotten interested in astronomy, so I was looking for an astro-related Christmas present for him, and I found an extremely cool program, which also turns out to be free (and open-source): Stellarium.

When you run it, it displays a full-screen rendering of the sky, and in a very cool and realistic way: In the foreground you can see the ground, e.g. grass, trees, etc.; and the sky is beautifully rendered with colors appropriate to the current time of day where you are, e.g. dark blue with a pink horizon at sunset (the sky is always beautiful in Stellarium-land; be sure to check out the screenshots on the website).

But hey, you want to see what stars would be visible if it weren’t daytime? Click a button, and the atmosphere disappears. You want to see what stars are currently hidden below the horizon? Click another button, and the ground disappears. You want to see the sun and stars move in fast motion? Want to see how the sky looked in 1966 during the heaviest meteor shower ever seen? Want help learning where the constellations are? Where the planets are? Click click click. Want to see close-up photos of all the planets? Of a number of interesting nebulae? They’re all there. Want to see how high the sun is right now in Alaska? Change your location to Alaska. Want to see how the sun never sets when it’s summer at one of the poles? Change your location, and accelerate time, and watch the sun move across the sky without setting.

When you start the program, it defaults to a viewpoint from Paris; to change that, click configuration (the wrench icon at the bottom of the screen), go to Location, and click the map. Also, to zoom in on your general area so it’s easier to click the right spot, hold the mouse over your part of the world and rotate the mouse wheel.

I’ve burned it onto a CD, and I’m going to give it to my uncle. Yes it’s free, but he never would have found it on his own, and also I’m gonna give him a hand with it since he is only moderately computer-savvy.

Merry Christmas!

Suppose you want the main HTML file that wraps your Flash app to be deployed as index.aspx instead of index.html. It’s a little trickier than you might think.

If you look in the html-template directory of your project, you will see that the main file is called index.template.html. This is a special name — Flex Builder recognizes filenameit, and says “Oh I know what that is,” and uses it to create MyApp.html and MyApp-debug.html in the bin folder.

But if you just rename it to index.template.aspx, you’ll have problems. Notice that after doing that, and then cleaning your project, you now have only index.aspx in the bin folder. There are two issues with that: For one thing, the app name isn’t part of the , which cause trouble if you have more than one app in the project; and also, it doesn’t differentiate between the debug and release versions of the file. If you examine it, you’ll see that it contains a reference to MyApp-debug.swf. Where did the release one go?

The answer is that since the file no longer has the special index.template.html name, Flex Builder doesn’t know what to do with it. It does see the “.template” part of the name, and it uses that to decide that it should do macro-substutition within the file; but beyond that, it does nothing more.

And since there are two SWFs (release and debug), Flex Builder ends up processing your file twice. First, it creates the release version of index.aspx, then it creates the debug version of the same file, overwriting the release version. (It probably should report an error in this case, but it doesn’t.)

But the solution, it turns out, is very easy (although not at all obvious): Give the file the rather cryptic name of…

${application}${build_suffix}.template.aspx

That does the trick. The ${application} and ${build_suffix} macros are substituted when creating the filename that goes into the bin directory (build_suffix is “” for the release build and “-debug” for the debug build); and “.template” causes Flex Builder to do macro substitution inside the file.

To wrap up:

• Any file in the html-template directory can have macros in the filename. Substitution will be performed when using those template files to the create the files in the bin directory.
• In addition, if any filename contains .template (either at the very end, or followed by a punctuation character such as “.”), then the contents of that file will have macro substitution performed, and the .template part will be removed from the filename when copying to the bin directory.
• Finally, the name index.template.html is a special case, and is essentially equivalent to ${application}${build_suffix}.template.html.

So, what macros are available? ${project}, ${application}, ${version_major}, ${version_minor}, ${version_revision}, ${build_suffix}, ${swf}, ${bgcolor}, ${width}, ${height}, ${title}.