Midnight Mars Browser, Midnight Mars Browser discussion Options

[cozmsbrpng]

Postscript:

I am thinking of getting the word out a little more about the program. Until now it's been a bit of a "secret" mainly known to the Unmanned Spaceflight crowd. Now, I think it might possibly be of more general interest, and could even help promote MER a bit amongst some people. If anyone has ideas about where (what sites) I could mention the program, or wants to mention the program themselves there, I'd appreciate it. For one thing, as soon as I get some basic documentation created, I plan to submit the program to Apple's OS X software tracker, since there is a special OS X version of the program.

If you're going to go for slashdot, just be prepared for a hefty bandwidth bill and warn your ISP that the horde is coming. Why not go gradual and try to get a mention from the planetary society (http://planetary.org/blog)? Emily Lakdawalla writes a widely read blog there, and has linked to good MER-related sites in the past. She seems to mostly deal directly with the project scientists, but maybe MMB would be an exception.

[mhoward]

Okay, that was a bit of a fiasco... Suffice it to say that Version 1.2.4 had a couple problems, such as the Panorama dialog not working for new users, and the home directory selection option not working. Let's just say I planned this as a test of the new software update reminder dialog (and hope *that* doesn't have problems...)

Anyway, version 1.2.5 is now up, and should fix those problems, and if you downloaded Version 1.2.4, then please get rid of that and download version 1.2.5 right away. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Midnight Mars Browser home page

[elakdawalla]

I am thinking of getting the word out a little more about the program. Until now it's been a bit of a "secret" mainly known to the Unmanned Spaceflight crowd. Now, I think it might possibly be of more general interest, and could even help promote MER a bit amongst some people. If anyone has ideas about where (what sites) I could mention the program, or wants to mention the program themselves there, I'd appreciate it. For one thing, as soon as I get some basic documentation created, I plan to submit the program to Apple's OS X software tracker, since there is a special OS X version of the program.

If you're going to go for slashdot, just be prepared for a hefty bandwidth bill and warn your ISP that the horde is coming. Why not go gradual and try to get a mention from the planetary society (http://planetary.org/blog)? Emily Lakdawalla writes a widely read blog there, and has linked to good MER-related sites in the past. She seems to mostly deal directly with the project scientists, but maybe MMB would be an exception.

Ask and ye shall receive...
http://planetary.org/blog

Emily

[Rxke]

Too cool for words!

Only shows-once again- what a great communication tool the intarweb is.

mHoward: totally impressed by the speed of your updateing/bugfixing. Huge thumbs-up and thanks!

[mhoward]

Ask and ye shall receive...
http://planetary.org/blog

Emily

Wow! That looks fantastic! Thank you!

Michael

[djellison]

Bieng /.'d is my #1 fear about this place

Doug

[cozmsbrpng]

Very cool. It's an Emily "The Genie" Lakdawalla sighting! <cozms> <-- big fan; politely wants your job

I am glad I did not post MMB to slashdot. I came real close...maybe I've finally learned some net manners. I've forgotten how I stumbled on this little secret, but I definitely had to dig around for a while.

Many thanks again to Michael for all your hard work.

[SFJCody]

If you're going to go for slashdot, just be prepared for a hefty bandwidth bill and warn your ISP that the horde is coming.

Putting the MMB software up as a torrent would also reduce the bandwidth cost.

[mhoward]

I am glad I did not post MMB to slashdot.  I came real close...maybe I've finally learned some net manners.  I've forgotten how I stumbled on this little secret, but I definitely had to dig around for a while.

I don't know... I honestly wonder at this point if getting /.'ed would make too much difference at this point. Interest in the rovers is not what it once was.

As for me, I put my site on Blogspot, my images are hosted on Flickr, and the downloads are on dotMac, so at least other people can worry about the bandwidth. My biggest worry would be dotMac, I suppose I might at least have to take the movies off there. I guess the next thing I would do though is submit the program to some software sites, and see what happens from there.

[mhoward]

Version 1.2.7 fixes problems where the program wouldn't work unless Java 3D was installed. Update and Slideshow should now work without Java 3D installed.

Midnight Mars Browser home page

[Airbag]

I don't know why I hadn't installed MMB until just a couple of days ago, but WOW, I am very impressed. It really does do everything I always would have liked to do with respect to the MER pictures. No more laborious clicking and saving for me!

I have a question and a request though:

In the slideshow criteria, I tried to specify L4L5L6 images only (on the right), while keeping the pre-set false colour pancam setting (on the left). But, when the slideshow starts, I still see L247 etc images. I must be missing something...am I specifying the filter criteria incorrectly, or is there something else I must select too?

The pano feature with the pancam insets and free scrolling etc. is just amazing. And so many pre-set panos to look at. That is where my request comes in...would there be some way to add a flag to indicate which ones I have already looked at? There are so many and I just can't remember them all.

As an aside, what is the system limitation that results in the "out of memory error" when making a panorama full size? My system has 1G of RAM so I would not have thought that was the restriction. If it is an MMB one, would there be some way of specifying a larger memory size?

Thanks again for such a wonderful program; I'll be exercising my Paypal account soon.

Airbag

PS Before I discovered this forum, I spent many hours, no days, making my own false colour images and panoramas. Now I see others's efforts before I even knew the new images were up. Thanks to all of you for your time and effort; I know how much time it can all take.

[mhoward]

Airbag: Thanks; these are good questions that mostly arise because I haven't documented these features much yet. Let me answer them here and I will work on the documentation later.

In the slideshow criteria, I tried to specify L4L5L6 images only (on the right), while keeping the pre-set false colour pancam setting (on the left). But, when the slideshow starts, I still see L247 etc images.  I must be missing something...am I specifying the filter criteria incorrectly, or is there something else I must select too?

The "Limit pancam filters to:" field only works for pancam raw images, not color composites. For example, if you wanted to see only L7 pancam raw images, you could put L7 in the field, or if you want to see L4, L5 and L6 images only, you could put L4,L5,L6 in the field.

The pano feature with the pancam insets and free scrolling etc. is just amazing. And so many pre-set panos to look at. That is where my request comes in...would there be some way to add a flag to indicate which ones I have already looked at? There are so many and I just can't remember them all.

I'm trying to figure out the best way of handling that; especially I'd like to have some way of notifying people when new pans show up. That'll take awhile. In the meantime I might properly label some of the more complete pans that have names associated with them ("Thanksgiving Pan" etc.), plus I'm thinking of a checkbox for displaying only "complete" pans as opposed to the many, many pans with only fragmentary image coverage.

As an aside, what is the system limitation that results in the "out of memory error" when making a panorama full size? My system has 1G of RAM so I would not have thought that was the restriction. If it is an MMB one, would there be some way of specifying a larger memory size?

The limitation is the Java maximum heap size parameter, which is specified in the MidnightMarsBrowser.bat on Windows and the MidnightMarsBrowser.sh file on Unix/other. On Windows, you can edit the .bat file and change "-Xmx192m" to a higher number like "-Xmx256m" or even "-Xmx512m". "-Xmx512m" would be the highest value I'd try; that's 512Mb. On Unix/other, do the same in the .sh file. Mac OS X is a bit more involved; there you need to ctrl-click on the MidnightMarsBrowser executable and select "Show Package Contents", then edit the Contents/Info.plist file using TextEdit (search for "-Xmx"). Do this carefully.

I may make these numbers higher to start out with in future releases, but it's kind of a balancing act at the moment, because if I make them too high, the program might not work as well on systems with less memory.

Thanks,
Michael

[Airbag]

The limitation is the Java maximum heap size parameter, which is specified in the MidnightMarsBrowser.bat on Windows and the MidnightMarsBrowser.sh file on Unix/other. On Windows, you can edit the .bat file and change "-Xmx192m" to a higher number like "-Xmx256m" or even "-Xmx512m". "-Xmx512m" would be the highest value I'd try; that's 512Mb.

Thanks for your quick response! I tried the 512M setting as shown above, and now complex panos (such as the great Spirit 566-572, with the sunset) no longer run out of memory. Cool!

Airbag

[planet_guy]

hi
very nice software.. just installed it and downloaded the image data - I just love our fast connection
However the panorama function is not working
I have no panoramas in the list and when I try to update the metadata I get a strange error message:
Error reading C:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\x2x\MidnightMarsBrowser\metadata\downloaded\homepage.htm: did not find expected tag.

Already tried to delete the file and update the images again.. did not solve the problem

[mhoward]

planet_guy: That's strange... Could you email me that file (homepage.htm) from your harddrive, so I can see what it looks like. Thanks.