The wait is over, early this morning Apple approved my app. Now the iPhone has a respectable meteor shower reference. You can read a bit more on the support page.

Don’t have an iPhone? An app is available on the Android platform from Chris Wilcox. This has a ‘feature’ I don’t like but understand the motivation for: ads. Another app is available for Windows 7 mobile but I have no idea how well it works or what data it contains (let me know if you try it out).

Obviously I’m pretty biased but I don’t think any other meteor shower app has all the features of Meteor Shower Guide.  Now that version 1.0 is released I can start incorporating new features into future releases.

Last year I searched for a iPhone meteor shower app and what I found was pretty poor.  Pathetic actually. So I decided to write one myself. Thus began a journey that has taken up much, no, all of my spare time the past months.

In the beginning I had grand ideas  carried over from an unfinished web project. Along the way I scaled back my expectations.  I don’t have the expertise yet. Just learning the intricacies and quirks of Objective-C was enough to keep me busy for many months.  This has been fun, I’ve not been so immersed in code and algorithms as this for a long, long time. I focused my attention and skills on a simple goal: write the best meteor shower app.

Over this time I have learned much more than I ever knew about meteor showers.  I can’t even count the number of technical articles I’ve read on them. Sometimes I wonder if that has changed my outlook. Before I simply enjoyed watching them, perhaps trying to capture them in a photograph. Now I ponder how to incorporate various data points into a table, how to quantify the duration of a meteor showers peak, why there is conflicting data on shower timing and intensity.

Tonight though I’m happy to say I have submitted version 1.0 of Meteor Shower Guide for approval in the Apple app store.  The waiting for approval begins.

The best camera is the one you have with you: all my years of seeing sun dogs without a camera changed yesterday. As I circled up the ramp from K-10 E to K-7 N en-route to the Jack Johnson concert what do I see before me?

For once I had a camera on me, albeit a little 3-megapixel iPhone.  A bit of PS work to clean it up and ta-da, my first sun dog picture (click picture to embiggen).

Having a seriously geek moment tonight I was perusing the ‘official’ time zone data file found at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/ There are two files there, a tzcode* archive and a tzdata* archive see (http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm for info).  My wandering there came about from a recent biongbiong.net post.

What I found interesting was the comment in the northamerica file located in the tzdata archive, qouting:

#    I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some
#    agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving
#    daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind.
#    I even object to the implication that I am wasting something
#    valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen.  As an admirer
#    of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to
#    reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving
#    scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager
#    to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make
#    them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.
#
#    – Robertson Davies, The diary of Samuel Marchbanks,
#       Clarke, Irwin (1947), XIX, Sunday

Emphasis added by me,  I could not have said it better myself. So as everyone gets shocked again by the sudden loss of an hour of daylight, I ask “What do we gain by doing this daylight savings time crap?”.

I upgraded my website files to WordPress 2.7 and likely did not follow the instructions closely (‘We don’t need no stinkin directions!’) so my moon applet over there on the right is broken. I’ll fix it someday.

The new look and feel in the posting and administration section is really nice. Good job WordPress!

New moon week starting June 3rd and just as the past months have been the forecast for clear dark skies was terrible. So if its going to be cloudy why not listen to music and party at the Wakarusa Music Festival? Even that four day event had trouble with the weather when a strong storm blew through Thursday night. But Friday was an excellent day and I spent twelve hours enjoying the atmosphere, beer, music and the people.

Picture above from the Sun Down stage field overlooking the beer tent (Fat Tire!). Click for a larger view. I’m thinkin I was one of the few that noticed the three day old moon hanging beautifully in the sky. Naturally it clouded up shortly after this picture.

Sidewalk art, rock chalk.

Photograph from the ‘Celebration in South Park’ event in Lawrence, KS last Saturday. I never saw Kenny, Cartman or Stan there. But it was pretty neat anyway.