Who wants to be Commenter Number 100?

I’m glad to announce that Thought Box has 99 comments at the time of this post. Be the 100th commenter and I will feature you and your website in my next blog post!

Long live the Thought Box!

Review: Stellarium 0.10

Saturn’s rings, as seen from the surface of the planet

The art of 85/88 constellations is available

Mars rising over the moon Phobos

A 360 degree view of the sunset

Stellarium is a great planetarium program available at stellarium.org. In fact, it’s such a good planetarium program that it could be used with planetarium projectors. Of course, planetarium projectors have to get an image onto a dome, but Stellarium has a built-in projection method for doing that. Like the different methods to draw a map, Stellarium has a variety of methods to draw the sky, including gnomonic projection, perspective, stereographic, and a lot more.

It’s not just the projection methods that make Stellarium so versatile. Stellarium comes built in with a catalog and images of 13,226 NGC (New Galactic Catalogue) objects, art for 85/88 constellations, constellation lines, and an extensive catalogue of stars from the Messier and Hipparcos catalogues, which can be expanded, but these would be nothing without the advanced effects Stellarium has. These effects include super-realistic sunsets, sunrises, and even solar eclipses. Stellarium does a superb job at making sunsets look realistic.

In addition, this program is also very customizable. You can turn the atmosphere off and walla, the Earth’s atmosphere is taken away, allowing you to see the sun and the stars in the daytime at the same time. There’s also a setting for fog, which appears as a thin haze around the ground. You can even simulate light pollution on a scale of 1-10. Other customizations include sky culture, where you can select different constellations by cultures around the world (e.g. Chinese constellations, Maori constellations, Inuit, etc.)  You can set a custom date and time and speed through time at a minute a second or go backwards at comparable rates. You can set your location almost anywhere in the Solar System, be it at Seattle, Washington; at the south pole; in the crater on Phobos; or at Pluto.

Other cool features include:

• Twinkling stars
• Meteor shower simluation
• Different landscapes
• Find an object, which includes search suggestions
• Scripts, which allow Stellarium to run a “mini-program”
• Fog effects, atmosphere on/off
• Convenient keyboard shortcuts

Stellarium is a simple and yet powerful planetarium program. It deserves a 10/10 and I recommend it to everyone.

Google Search gets wider

A while ago, Google decided to make it’s search box wider. I found out through a tweet from Mashable (here.)

I’m not sure how I like the widened search box. All of a sudden, Google’s “minimalistic” search page has gotten a lot more disproportionate. The Google logo looked much better the way it was before with a smaller text entry area and smaller buttons. However, it emphasizes on the fact that the Search is Google’s main function.

On Mashable.com, there was a blog post about it, which is reblogged here.

This post first appeared on Mashable.com under the title Google Goes Looooooooonger, Supersizes Its Search Box. It was written on September 9th, 2009 by Barb Dybwad, and has been edited by Deathgleaner for publication on this blog.

What’s better than a search box with two buttons? A bigger search box with two buttons, says Google.

Today the search giant implemented and announced a subtle but noticeable change to the size of the search text field on the Google home page: it’s bigger. It also features a larger font size as you type in the field, with correspondingly larger text for Google Suggest results below (that are occasionally good for a laugh).

The company says the reason behind the change is to remind us that Google’s focus is on search. That’s a relief, because with that smaller text box in place before, we just weren’t sure.

The change is interesting in light of Google’s recent patent on its minimalist homepage interface… that the company is now changing. Of course, it’s not the first time Google has tweaked the homepage, and if you’re interested, here’s a slideshow timeline showing off the various changes through the years.

What do you think: does a larger textbox make the search engine more “fun to use”? Or if we hadn’t told you, would you even have noticed?

MuseScore: A free music notation program that’s actually good

I’ve been looking for a music notation program forever that’s free, powerful, and isn’t a demo, and I finally found it.

I got the MuseScore application through a newsletter from Mac OS X freeware. It’s quite a big program though, but 100 megabytes later, I finally got to open the application for the first time. At first glance, it was much simpler than other similar programs I had tried previously. There were only a few toolbars for note input, playback, and editing, but that’s all I really needed. I knew this was an app that I would actually keep and use.

Entering notes in MuseScore is a piece of cake, and there are so many ways to do it. Just select a note value in note input mode and move the mouse to where you want the note to be. Or, you can type in notes with the keyboard (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) and move them with the Up or Down arrow. Inputting chords was also easy; just press Shift + (A, B, C, D, E, F, G) and it will build a chord. MuseScore will even fill in rests for me so that I didn’t have to! I especially appreciated the many ways that I could enter and edit notes, whether it be with mouse input, keyboard input, MIDI input, or a combination of the three.

Slurring and ties were also easy to accomplish in MuseScore. I just had to press “S” or “+”, respectively, and it would automatically form a slur. Then, to change the start and end positions, I just did Shift+Right or Shift+Left. Ties were done automatically just by pressing the “+” key.

MuseScore is also very intelligent. It follows the standard rules of music notation. It knows when to beam up, beam down, and how to break the beams of notes. 1st-and-2nd endings, dynamics, articulation, fingering, and grace notes are a walk in the park in MuseScore. However, there are still a few difficulties with voicing, where there are two or more voices in a single staff. MuseScore supports up to four voices per staff, but it can take a while to learn to input with voicing, and MuseScore still has a few bugs to address before voicing gets really simple.

One of the most useful features in the program is the playback. Unlike other programs, you can specify how you’d like the music to be played back, be it at a soft or loud, fast or slow, reverberant or not; it’s your choice. The playback tool is great for checking accurate note input, which brings me to one other point: when entering notes, MuseScore cannot tell the difference between E-flat and D-sharp, that is, no matter how you enter E-flat or D-sharp, MuseScore will recognize it as E-flat. However, there is a script pre-installed called Pitch Spell that tries to guess which one of the enharmonic notes it is.

Along with piano music, MuseScore also handles chamber music, violin music, symphony scores, and even kazoo music, although I haven’t tried them yet.

Other features in MuseScore include:

• Cross-beam notation (see figure at right):
• Automatic note head positioning in a staff
• Highlighting out-of-range tones (which apparently doesn’t work all the time)
• Plug-ins to create chord charts, color notes, insert note names, etc.
• Page and text style editing
• Export as PDF, PNG, SVG, MusicXML and many other formats
• …and pretty much anything you can write on real music notation paper, including triplets, line breaks, and so much more!

A few things don’t quite work yet:

• Voicing has a few bugs, including chord note positioning
• Arpeggiando positioning
• Slurring across multiple lines
• Beaming with triplets
• Mixed meter/key signature

I give MuseScore an 8.5/10 and highly recommend it to anyone who has been looking for a free yet powerful music notation program. Download at http://musescore.org.

A visual guide to Opera 10

Just a few of the many new features in Opera 10:

Mousing over a tab shows a preview of that tab

Opera comes with widgets

Of course, there are a few bugs.

Opera 10 has the most advanced statusbar of any web browser

The search bar supports multiple search engines

Opera’s preference dialog makes the browser highly customizable

Opera 10 has a sidebar featuring widgets, mail, notes, and much more

Opera 10 comes with a very stylish RSS feed reader

You can search from the address bar or the search bar

The main window

Speed Dial is highly customizable and provides quick access to your most viewed sites

The tab bar can be expanded to show previews of webpages

Right-clicking a web page brings up this context menu

100/100 on the Acid3 Web Page rendering test

Opera 10 is the latest installment in the Opera Browser series. It features the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, an accelerator for loading web pages on slow connections, customizable skins and many more that make this browser such a versatile web surfing application.

Unfortunately, it can be very complicated to customize Opera, since there are so many buttons and drop-downs to digest, but once you get the handle on this great web browser, it will integrate seamlessly into your online life.

I give Opera 10 an 8.5/10 rating and recommend it to anyone who hasn’t tried it out yet.

Why other people really hate Wikipedia administrators as well

I’ve been complaining recently about how much I hate Wikipedia’s administrators. When I wrote my first blog post here about why I really hate these admins, all comments I got were against me. Well it turns out that all these comments were made by administrators trying to defend themselves. Guess what, admins? Other people hate you too. Here’s a blog post I found that highlights some of the fallacies of administrators on Wikipedia:

August 2009 Blog Report

Statistic	Value	Change from previous month
Number of views	635	+96.6%, +312
Number of days	31	0%, 0
Average views/day	20.49*	+96.6%, +10.42
# of Tags (total)	267	—
# of Categories (total)	17	—
# of Comments (total)	77	—
# of Posts (total)	53	—
Busiest day	August 27, 117 views*	N/A
Most viewed post	Why I really hate Wikipedia…, 304 views (in August)*	N/A
Top referrer	fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/…, 85 views*	N/A
Top search term	“gargbhawna9@gmail.com”, 6 views	N/A
Top click	commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mount…, 16 clicks*	N/A

Statistics are for this month only unless otherwise stated. Asterisk denotes all-time record, N/A = Not applicable, “—” = unavailable.

Total blog views since inception: 1149
Notes from the author: It’s scary how much my blog views jumped this month, all because of the popular post “Why I really hate Wikipedia administrators.” This post generated the most diverse audience my blog has ever seen and the most controversy I had ever had to deal with.

This blog report is also the first one I have done, and it took me over 20 minutes to compile all the data. If you have any suggestions for further blog reports, please leave a comment.