Program Still For Sale

I relisted CXA on eBay - click here

I had a hundred or so people look at the eBay listing for CXA and I received a couple of questions about it but no bids. Ah well... I've dropped the price and relisted it. I'm going to add a link to this blog on the eBay listing too. I don't know what that might achieve, but what the hell.

If you happen to look at the item listing and it interests you, please add any questions you have through the eBay page so they show up on the auction listing, rather than adding them as comments here.

Program for sale

Please check this out - click here.

A couple of years ago I wrote a program called CXA. It's a bulk email program, 100% pure Java, designed to let small and medium size businesses send out personalized mail to their customers automatically, quickly and easily. (Before you ask, gentle reader: No, it's not a spam program. There are specialized bulk mailers that scurvy spammers use - they do things like generating random, fake email addresses, and the spammers are rarely interested in knowing open and click-through rates for their junk so those programs don't bother with them. Responsible emailers only send to people who signed up, they adhere to the law and generally they're more interested in seeing what percentage of the mail they send is being read. CXA was written for the responsible crowd.)

It never sold. Not because it's a bad program, but because although I'm a damn good Java programmer (Master-level, according to Brainbench) I'm not a salesman by any stretch of anyone's imagination.

So, rather than just having it sit there doing nobody any good, and because right now a little cash injection (or even better, a big cash injection) wouldn't be a bad thing, I've put it up for sale on eBay. The item listing is right here.

I'm not selling individual copies here; what I'm offering is the whole package, lock, stock & barrel. Source code, user documentation, development documentation, the license generator tool that goes with, everything. Whoever buys it will be able, assuming they have better marketing skills than I do (which isn't hard), to market it themselves.

If you're interested please take a look. The auction ends about this time next week.

Eclipse Report

Following on from yesterday's post, we did get a glimpse of the eclipse at about 5:20pm (so I did convert those Universal Times to CDT correctly after all). I used a pair of binoculars (and no, I didn't try looking at the eclipse through them - I may be a bit of an idiot at times but I'm not terminally daft), holding them so that an image was projected onto a flat piece of wood in the shade. The image was wobbly because I was hand-holding the bins, but you could still see clearly that there was a chunk out of the side of the sun.

Eclipse today

If you're in the southern US you may see a partial solar eclipse this afternoon. Here are the times for Dallas, TX:

Start: 21:26 UTC (4:26pm)

Max: 22:11 UTC (5:11pm)

End: 22:53 UTC (5:53pm)

At least, I think I've converted UTC to the local time correctly...

Times for other places can be found on NASA's web site.

That's enough unhilarity

It occurred to me that most news recently - on the news sites and in the blogosphere - has been far too depressing. Bush and the rest of the Radical "Religious" Right and their agenda to turn the US into a theocracy and take us all back to the dark ages; the continuing criminal antics of Tom "Sleazy Crook" DeLay; the sad story of Terri Schiavo and how what should have been private family business became a wagon for the right, the church and just about everyone else with an agenda to jump aboard; the incredible, crass, unbelievable stupidity of people who will do anything to protect their beliefs when they have never spent even ten minutes to stop and think about why they believe what they do, in most cases without even a shred of evidence, let alone solid proof...

I'm sick of hearing about it all.

It's time instead for some real news. And here it is...

Astronomers capture photo of extrasolar planet

It doesn't sound like much when you say it quick, but just think about this. For one thing it's difficult enough to get pictures of planets right here in our own solar system. It's been seventy-five years since Pluto was discovered and we still don't have a picture of it that shows more detail than a fuzzy blob, for example. The best and most detailed photos we have of planets and moons here in our own planetary neighbourhood are taken by robot probes that get pretty close to their targets.

You may be aware that over the last few years astronomers have discovered over a hundred planets in orbit around other stars. All of these other planets were found because of the way their gravity makes the stars "wobble" a bit from side to side as the planet goes around. In other words, we know they're there but we've never seen them. Until now. For the first time ever, we actually have an image that we can say is a planet in orbit around another star.

Admittedly the astronomers had a few things going for them; the planet they tagged is very hot (over 3000 Fahrenheit), very big (twice the diameter of Jupiter) and far enough from its parent star so that the light from the planet didn't get swamped by the light from the star. And the photo by itself isn't that spectacular, either; you can't see clouds or oceans or land masses - just a glowing blob.

But that shouldn't detract from the fact that this is an incredible and historic acheivement. Telescopes are getting better and better with every passing year. It's only a matter of time before we're able to get pictures of extrasolar planets that show some real detail - clouds and oceans and land masses. And perhaps one day, even cities.

So click on the link and take a look at the picture and bear in mind that while it may not look like anything much right now, this picture will be in our grandchildrens's history books. Because it's the first of its kind, and that only happens once.

Reality overshadows Blog shock horror probe

I haven't posted recently and I probably won't be posting very much over the next few weeks either. Maybe the odd short note now and again. The thing is, I'm working on a couple of other projects that are taking most of my time right now. One is a program I'm working on; the other is a woodworking project - I've just about finished building a stand for a new tank we bought for Sierra, Kate's python. It's amazing how long it takes to build what is basically nothing but a table.

Another reason I haven't written much is that most of what's been going on recently - Terri Schiavo, the Pope and that d*ck Tom DeLay, for example - has been all over the blogosphere already and there's nothing I can really add. Sure, I've got my views about these and other things but right now I just don't feel much like putting them out there.

So I guess the only real reason I'm banging away at the keyboard right now is to tell my regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Crouch End) why my blog hasn't been too active. That, and the fact that I spent most of today doing wood-butchering and getting sunburnt and now it's 3:20am and I'm still winding down. The time has come to slap a movie in the DVD player and stretch out in bed, I think.