And now it's May

Prompted by fierce internecine rivalry with Tampa Bay Breakfasts, I'm finally putting in an update. My supervisor is my four year-old son, who's busy reading "You are the first kid on Mars" beside me while holding on to Power Ranger and Terl action figures.

Work: I've got a summer student. She was at one of the labs I work with for the last 8 months, and showed a real aptitude for computers. My boss agreed to pick up the bill for her salary, so here we are.

It's working out really, really well. She's got a lot to learn (basic networking, for example) but it is SUCH A WONDERFUL THING to have someone to send off on jobs. "Hey, have you got a minute to..." "She'll take care of it." She can help with what she knows, and what she doesn't she takes careful notes on. I've even had a chance to work on other, larger projects for, like, an hour or two at a time. It's great.

I'm going away for three weeks in June/July, and there's a lot to teach her before then. Fortunately, there are a couple other sysadmins who can help out, and a couple of other technical folk in the lab who can take on some duties. But it's been a real wake-up for me, realizing how could be made easier for someone else. It'd be nice, for example, to have something that'd let people reboot machines easily when they get stuck. Right now, I SSH to the ILOM and reset it there; what about a web page? It'd be its own set of problems, of course, and I'm not going to code something up between now and June, but it's something to think about. Or at least coming up with some handy wrapper around the ipmipower/console commands.

Home: The weather is at last, AT LAST becoming sunny and springlike. I took the telescope out on Saturday -- full moon, so I spent most of my time looking at Saturn. And holy crap, was it amazing! I saw the Cassini division for the first time, the C ring (!) and five moons. I'm starting to regret (a little) having sold the 4.3mm eyepiece; the 7.5mm is nice but does badly in the Barlow, which I suspect says more about the Barlow than anything else. (Also that night: tried looking for M65 and M66, just to see if I could find them in the suburbs under a full moon. Negative.)

I'm trying to port an astronomical utility to Rockbox; it will show altitude and azimuth for planets, Messier and NGC objects. My intention is to use it with manual setting circles on my Dob. The interesting part is that Rockbox has no floating point arithmetic, so it's not a straightforward port at all. Thus I've had to learn about fixed point arithmetic, lookup tables and the like. My trig and bitwise arithmetic are, how do you say, weak from underuse, so this is a bit of a slog. But I'm hopeful.

And now my other supervisor is coming for a status report. Time to go!