Stellarium: open source planetarium for your computer

Last Updated on Thursday, 28 February 2008 09:54 Written by Steve Thursday, 28 February 2008 09:54

Because Microsoft is going to launch a planetarium product soon, I heard about an open source package called Stellarium. It’s a cross platform piece of software that shows you the sky and a lets you navigate through it. It’s pretty cool, especially if you have a Mac and kids who expect you to know the names of stars in the sky.

During the lunar eclipse last week, we were outside looking at the stars. I was trying to navigate using a star chart in a book and saw a red star that I couldn’t quite place. After 2 minutes on Stellarium, I realized that we had been looking at Mars, a fact that would have sent Malcolm through the roof had I know it at the time. I can’t wait for the next clear night!

Storing Media Clippings in Salesforce

Last Updated on Monday, 25 February 2008 03:35 Written by Steve Monday, 25 February 2008 03:35

I posted a bookmarklet a while back that helps you create Salesforce Tasks from web research. That’s swell and works with all versions of Salesforce.

But what if you want to do more specialize web research, like tracking media mentions of certain issues? Here’s a short video of a custom Clippings object that I created along with a bookmarklet that makes capturing web content a snap:

As you can see, it makes capturing, storing, and cross-referencing content quite easy. This trick will work with any custom object, just get familiar with how bookmarklets work and how Salesforce constructs URLs and edit forms.

Ralph, redux

Last Updated on Monday, 25 February 2008 01:49 Written by Steve Monday, 25 February 2008 01:49

Thanks to Dean for passing this on.