#1
http://www.google.com/search?q=midnight+ma...:en-US:official

Ha! Well that would make sense... I haven't announced it anywhere else. (Except on the official site, but who would know about that.)

Hey, if there are any artists out there who feel like contributing to the project, I probably wouldn't say no to a 128x128 icon that could be used on Mac OSX, if it were cool-looking... I don't know if I'll have time to whip one up myself and my artistic skills, well, suck. Heck, if there are any takers, we could even post the entries here, and vote on the best. Just throwing out an idea.

I'm not much of an artist but I created some potential icons for MMB:



I also posted these and some .icns files on my blog. Let me know if you like them or suggest minor changes in the comments on the blog.

Also, the feature request I would like to make for MMB is to be able choose between anaglyphs and cross eyed stereo 3D images.

Y

Michael: what about something like "a tool to link Earth and Mars closer"?

Those are great!

If anybody else wants to try, I guess you've got until I release v1.0.1, which might be early next week. This'll primarily be a bug-fix release with just a few other enhancements. And an icon on MacOS X.

Good news is I might have those weird freezing-up problems licked, I hope, or at least I have it so it'll spit out an out of memory error (which is what I think it was) instead of just playing dumb. I'll need to do some more testing to be sure.

Mike

You're welcome Nix. One thing to point out is that Windows wasn't designed to constantly run in an MSCONFIG clean boot. I've never heard of specific issues when that's been done - all I'm saying is that once you're done with the Midnight Mars Browser it's a good idea to go back to normal startup. If there's one or two items in the startup group that consistently give problems unless you uncheck them, then try removing them through add/remove programs. If that's not possible the item may be spyware that needs to be removed by something like Spybot or Spyhunter.

Anyway, two other things on my wish list: a "play" button option for the slideshow so that I don't have to keep hitting the right arrow for something like viewing all hazcam images over the course of the mission. Also a feature for the slideshow where you can specify which set of pancam filters to use for viewing a slideshow of color images. (I know that you can specify the filters for generating the color images themselves when you download them).

Bubbinski/Space Cadet

Yes Bubbinski I'll keep an eye on it. Everything is doing great however.
I added an icon too to give you some ideas...

> a "play" button option for the slideshow

Yep, already have that in mind. Also a configurable delay, etc.

> Also a feature for the slideshow where you can specify which set of pancam filters to use for viewing a slideshow of color images.

That image criteria dialog is going to start getting pretty full. I'll see what I can figure out, though.

I decided to try my hand at an icon after all. Mine is more abstract.

You had to use the picture of the sundial

Are the servers at the exploratorium site really able to cope with the amount of data that people are downloading from them? Once again i'm unable to access the site, I just get a message saying "Document contains no Data" It did this a few days ago too.

Somehow I can't believe that there are that many people using the program, since I haven't exactly been promoting it anywhere but here. Maybe they are still upgrading their internet connection. Let's see what happens.

Still nothing

Put it this way.

Theres about 5 gig on there.

10 people download it all - thats 50 gig

50 gig would kill THIS website instantly.

Doug

It's just this minute come back online.

No, it's still down.

The page for opportunity worked a few minutes ago.......spirit doesn't

These links work:

http://qt.exploratorium.edu:16080/mars/opportunity/

http://qt.exploratorium.edu:16080/mars/spirit/



hmmm....well they did for a while lol

Dear Mike,
Your software has so much success that it put the "Qt" server down... for more than one day now !
Anyway, all my congratulations for this nice work of yours !

I know I mentioned this a few posts back, but I emailed the webmaster, he's aware of the program and even supportive. I presume he'll let me know if there is a problem. As far as I can see, the site is back up.

Edit: if the site is not back up for you, my guess is it's because they changed something with their internet address and the change is taking a while to propagate. It happens. We already new they were upgrading their internet connection.

Dear Mike,

http://qt.exploratorium.edu/mars/

just tested a few seconds ago at 07:45 pm ECT is still out of reach !

Could you, please, provide us with their another web address and/or their new one provided to you by their Webmaster ?
Many thanks in advance !

It works for me on the west coast with PacBell as my ISP...

This may depend on who is your internet service provider - their DNS machines might not have the new info online yet....try clearing all caches, etc as well.

try:

nasa.exploratorium.edu/mars

Neither work here in the UK via Zen or Plusnet

Doug

http://207.7.139.5/mars/opportunity/
http://207.7.139.5/mars/spirit/

Thanks for saving my DNS from working for a living

Doug

I apologize for not passing these on myself - it would have been the next logical thing for me to do -

Didn't want to seem like I was gloating about getting through...

The server "Index of Mars" was back this morning (at 07:00 am ECT) at all Web addresses listed above (including the old one) !

Bug report

After downloading images and with the browser sitting idle in slideshow mode, it uses almost all the CPU - seems like some loop. Restarting the browser in slideshow mode does not have this problem.

Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but a quick search of the topic didn't show it.

Version 1.0
Java 2 1.5.0.10
Win98SE

Yes, sounds similar to other problems that have been reported. I think this this has been fixed in the upcoming version.

Wow, this program is great for casual Mars Rover observers. I mostly work on Titan and the Saturnian system and have no time to make anaglyphs and color images from the Rover images. This is a great way to automate this so that people who don't have to the time can enjoy the experience.


Thanks!!

Thanks volcanopele, it was certainly the casual observers (such as myself) that I had in mind. Maybe someday there'll be a mission that returns as much imagery from Titan as we're currently getting from Mars; that would be something else. What a strange place!

Version 1.0.1 is now up. http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: yuriwho wins the icon contest, since his uses transparency. His icon is used in the OSX version now. Thanks, yuriwho!

I just downloaded and used 1.0.1, and it has many of the features I was hoping for. Thanks, and congratulations. I didn't really have any problems with 1.0, but I didn't try to download the entire image set, just a few hundred megs. One of these days I'll take the laptop to work and grab the whole set.

I can't wait for 1.1. I am happy to read that you are already working on some of the other things at the top of my wish list.

I am still downloading the images directly to a thumb drive via the fast connection at work, and then copying the directories to my machine at home. That is so nice.

I know I should invest the time saved on my wife and family, but now I find myself engrossed with Cassini and other missions. Is that a mistake?

I've just downloaded the new version and I'm enjoying the new slideshow features. Thanks a lot!

Bubbinski (thinking what if there were a Midnight Saturn/Titan browser as well...Whoo hoo!)

1.0.1 is working well here with Java 2 1.5.0.10 and Win98SE. no sign of the looping and the new clipboard and run features are really helpful. thanks!

Dowloaded MidnightMarsBrowser1.0.1, works fine, can choose the last day of the update!
Thanks a lot Michael.

I changed my mind...if you can look into adding a proxy access I would much appreciate it.

My office uses Novell Border Manager and we use our Network sign on id with a different password to access the internet. I sign on before attempting to access the midnight browser app, but it can't get past the proxy for some reason.
When I update the AdAware program I have to set the proxy information each time within AdAware.

Great program though, I have been successful using it at home.

Thank you so much. Just installed it, it's downloading missing Oppy images right now...
Slideshow features are great work too!

After much experimenting (thanks to the improvements in v1.0.1) I've found these settings work well for the anaglyphs:



However, looking at it now, I should change the order of the generate color to have the L4L5L6 combination as the first choice...

If you find better settings for the anaglyphs, let me know...pancam at 0% gives best depth of field (though nothing really helps the anaglyphs of the sundial...)

>>However, looking at it now, I should change the order of the generate color to have the L4L5L6 combination as the first choice...

I agree; in 1.0.1 I changed the generatePancamLeftFalseColorTypes default to this:

L4L5L6,L4L5L7,L3L5L6,L3L5L7,L2L5L6,L2L5L7,L2L4L6,L2L4L7

But it doesn't automatically take affect for people who are upgrading, your old settings stay around. So you might want to make this change manually.

Midnight Mars Browser is stalling with a "Java Heap Space" error. Win2k, sp4. Java 1.5.0. Does this after downloading quite a few images.

MizarKey, I'm trying those anaglyph settings now, they seem to work pretty well on the whole. I may even switch to those for the defaults.

MahFL, I've been hearing scattered reports of out of memory problems on long downloads, I'll have to look into it some more. At least we're getting an error message now (before it would have just hung).

Is it possible to allow a negative number for the Pancam Anaglyph setting? I tried to use -0.03 but it said the number had to be between 1 and 0. I think it could benefit from being less than 0.0, though 0.0 does ok for 'long' views, anything close to the rover is still not great...maybe for the next version, if it is possible at all.

Thanks,

Version 1.0.2 adds the abillity to update images from the JPL site, and hopefully fixes the remaining out-of-memory errors.

http://midnightmarsbrowser.blogspot.com

I'd appreciate it if some of you folks who were having out of memory problems would let me know if this works for you now.

Thanks a lot! Excellent timing, I was starting to check exploratrium every hour like some addict
I thought I was going to have to download files one at a time from JPL.

bug report: It checked for forward hazcam images on sol 410, didn't find any, moved onto the next sol, missing the pancam shots for that day.

I downloaded them one at a time and was wondering why it didn't turn them into anaglyphs until I noticed they were L2 R2: add ,L2R2 to anaglyph types.

I hope people will be sensible when downloading data from the JPL RAW website.... it may be just a coincedence but i've had lots of problems accessing exploratorium since users started downloading massive amounts of data - and now the site is no longer updating at all.

Regarding the bug report, are you sure it didn't download them? The "Update Latest Images from JPL" option downloads things in kind of a goofy order (by camera, and backwards by sol), because it's actually scanning the main page for the rover and looking for sols marked *NEW*.

Regarding the L2R2, I noticed that, it's on my list of "Things to Get To". Fortunately you can fix it yourself, just be sure to put it after L7R1.

Mike