Today I stumbled across some really interesting things and I wanted to share it via this document. If you know me, I am subscribed to quite a number of mailing lists, one of them being gmane announce. There isn't a particular reason why I subscribed to this other than curiosity, messages are rare so It does not bother me.

Today a new mailing list was registered for the community around XEphem. Now, I didn't know what was XEphem prior to reading this mailing list, but now I am super happy to have discovered it. EXphem is a "scientific-grade interactive astronomical ephemeris package". The word Ephemeris comes from greek and It means diary or journal. In astronomy, It refers to a book of tables describing the trajectory of astronomical objects. Those books were used and are still used today (in a more modern fashion) to navigate the sky and to study celestial bodies.

XEphem is a powerful MIT licensed software with so many functionalities and a look from the 90', you know this is a good software. Even though It is practically useless to me, I started playing with the program. Is is packaged on variaous linux distributions and even on other operating systems such as FreeBSD and Solaris. It looks amazing to me, I encourage you to take a look at it, It is full of functionalities. Also the program is written in C, beautiful C.

I then read the wikipedia page and discovered so many things. First, cilivizations have been making ephemeris since the Babylonians in the 1st millennium BC. Moreover, the term "epoch" in astronomy refers to a moment in time used as a reference point for some other astronomical quantity, what is interesting is that the calendars used in astronomy are not the same as the terrestrial ones, so sometimes there are funny dates such as January 0.

Overall, it was fun going on a different place where I know close to nothing about and be intrigued this much like a kid.

Some other interesting things. Someone made a funny reddit post about the 10 rules of the emacs church that was fun to read. Also, another blogger I follow shared some photos of flowers in his city and I feel inspired to do the same in the following days.

One last thing. Today Linux 6.14 released and the usual message from Linus made me laugh:

So it's early Monday morning (well - early for me, I'm not really a
morning person), and I'd love to have some good excuse for why I
didn't do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon
release schedule. 

I'd like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and
delayed things. 

But no. It's just pure incompetence. 

---

Travel: Ephemeris, Index