chrisbekas.com

In 1869, the largest fully-steerable telescope the world had ever seen was built in Melbourne. Known as the Great Melbourne Telescope, it boasted a speculum metal mirror of 122 cm (48 inches). The Victorian Goverment at the time spent £5000 for the construction of this telescope and from 1869 until 1908, the Great Melbourne Telescope was the largest steerable, reflecting telescope in the world.

The GMT House (the building that the telescope lived) is in fact where the Astronomical Society of Victoria still has the member’s meetings; not much is left from the old telescope though these days, but the building itself is a true timecapsule.

(images removed)

Sadly, the Great Melbourne Telescope (what was left of it) was destroyed during the Canberra bush fires of January 2003.

The past few days have been hectic trying to resolve a weird SMTP issue at a client’s site; brand new Win2K3 server, Domino 6.5.1, firewall all in a relatively standard configuration. But, some SMTP emails from some hosts just don’t come through; they show up as the ‘…connected, 0 messages received’ in the Domino logs. Clients were complaining that Domino was responsible, so we were forced to put in a MS SMTP server and the problem persisted there too (so the problem is not Domino). There’s some discussion going on in the R6 forums about it, and Chris Linfoot’s site has some useful tips, but still no solution.

We changed some SMTP settings on Domino like turning off the ESMTP pipelining extension and some others, but still no go… Changing the TCP MTU on the server is one of the other suggestions (but we haven’t tried that yet as it would affect a number of other things). So what on earth is going on? This one is surely for the x-files team.

With all the popularity surrounding Firefox at the moment, no wonder there’s plenty of sites to praise this gem of a browser. Switch2firefox is plain obvious, www.betterbrowser.org tells us why Firefox is better, and Mozilla tells us why we should switch. Looks like the browser wars are back!

Oh, I also managed to fix my RSS feeds (now they’re valid again) after Joe Litton’s article prompted me recently. Those nice guys over at News4Notes updated my RSS entry on the OPML Directory and Lotus-Links too.

What’s up with R6’s notesSession.UserGroupNameList property? According to ‘Help’, it returns the groups to which the current user belongs. And the groups include those to which the user belongs in the Domino Directory or Personal Address Book where the program is running. Hmmm, it returns nothing but that for me (although for some users it did return the groups in their personal address book. Weird.

It has been a while since my last PC upgrade so I was itching to get it going. Far Cry (ahem, Lotus Notes) was running so slow with my old Athlon XP 2000, so I picked up an Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton core) and some 512MB of GeIL DDR400 RAM (rated at 2.5 6-3-3 but can run at CAS 2 when underclocked @ 333MHz). All this, from Scorptech at a decent price. Come on Half-Life 2, I dare you to get released now! (if not, I’ll be forced to install Lotus Workplace 2.0).

We’ve won Euro 2004!! Congratulations Greece, these are the times Greeks abroad like myself are proud as it can be. And what a precursor to the Olympics too!

Cassini successfully makes it into orbit around Saturn, and the Greeks make it into the finals of Euro 2004! It’s a shame the Greeks don’t have a space program; I reckon we would do really well (after the Olympics perhaps? anything is possible now!)