Lunarium Blog

My Sun/Jupiter firdar started yesterday, and it is amazing how the whole atmosphere in my life has changed overnight. I find firdaria extremely important, especially considering the simplicity of their use. If you don't know about this method yet, here is my website where you will find all the necessary information: Firdaria.com . Another very important and very simple factor to consider when trying to understand your life is the nine year numerological cycle of personal years. I haven't described it in my numerology lessons yet, but I am certainly to do that. Here is a link to my Numerology School .

I came to understanding that having astrology lessons hidden deeply inside Lunarium isn't a good idea. As a result, I created a new website, What Is Astrology , that will now host the lessons and all the related to them resources. I've also published a new lesson, Qualities and Polarities in Horoscope . I hope you will like it. There is still work to do here and there, the text of the whole website is still being copy edited but all the lessons are all there and I am working on the website daily. There is a proper newsletter subscription in place, so if you want to keep in touch, please subscribe.

I am starting a new Numerology School . It is based on my numerology book that was published in Russia about ten years ago and was quite popular. Now I am presenting my work to the English-speaking audience: free lessons of numerology, online numerology calculator, book reviews, reports, and more.

My train to London came 10 minutes late because some brief power outages. The first piece of news that I saw after coming to the office is this: Authorities were investigating a rush-hour power blackout in parts of Southern California, Arizona and Mexico on Thursday that left more than 1 million customers without power and caused widespread traffic jams. The day of power outages across the globe? I will check the transits when I have time.

Sorry, I am keeping silent for two long, so wanted to give you a heads up. I am working on a completely new version of the Five Signs app which could be a completely new app, but I decided that it will be nice to make it available for free to those who has already purchased the app. The new version will come with Facebook integration and a couple of very new features that I hope will make the app a lot more interesting for it owners. The new version of Five Signs will initially appear for iPhone, but soon after that I am hoping to complete the Android version of it.

It was announced that RIM (the maker of BlackBerry) recalls 1000 of its new PlayBooks that were recently launched in the end of retro Mercury period. This is a good example of how things can go literally backwards when something important is done during a retrograde Mercury.

Back in March there were rumours circulating that in the beginning of April Apple is going to announce something new, something exciting. I was doubtful about those rumours, because, in my experience, Apple is usually quite clever when it comes to timing. The beginning of April wasn't a good time for a major advancement in business because Mercury was retrograde. You can read about the peculiarities of retrograde motion in the “About Retrograde Planets” article . Basically, projects started at this time either don't live long or prove to be irrelevant. They can often be half-baked, not very well thought through. The time has shown that I was correct. Apple didn't make any announcements while Mercury was retrograde, except of the astonishing report of their financial results. That, however, was a thing of the past and so was appropriate for the symbolism of retrograde motion. Only in the last days of April, when Mercury already went direct, did Apple make a couple of major s...

Finally, I decided to create an application that I always wanted to have myself, instead of trying to guess what other people might find useful. Meet Lunar Diary . The problem with lunar days is that their traditional descriptions are often quite contradicting, and still I find it important to take into account lunar days when planning something important. I know that the 29th lunar day isn't good for anything, but the 21st day is good, especially for traveling. Quite often I notice that some event is very close to the topic of the lunar day when it happens, but then I forget about it, and the valuable knowledge gets lost. Lunar Diary allows to quickly write a note and associate it with a specific lunar day, and store any number of such notes. This way, the user can accumulate the personal knowledge and experience of different lunar days and use it as a guide - the more valuable the more notes are collected.

Yet another experiment - I have created a new type (well, at leas for me) of an astrological iPhone app, Love Oracle . The idea and text belong to my friends from Media Cosmics while the technical implementation is mine. The interesting thing about this app is that it has a very popular appearance and is very easy to use and yet it is based on some serious astrology. I can tell you that the partners' natal planet positions are calculated properly and then a certain non-trivial analysis is made, similar to what an experienced professional astrologer would do. Works very well for me :) And we are planning to add more power and insight in the future versions. The price is symbolic - 99 cents - but might increase in the future.

You might have noticed that I haven't updated Lunarium in any significant way for a while. That's because while I was rolling out New Lunarium, my other projects were patiently waiting, and finally the time came to give them an opportunity to be born. Mostly those are iPhone/iPod touch projects. A couple of them were completed, both are based on numerology: Your Life Graph and Life Path . Although the names are alike, the apps are different. I am going to make a separate posting to explain why I appreciate numerology so much. Also, I was able to complete my first Android app, that's iLuna for Android . iLuna for BlackBerry is still in development and is a bit stuck. I am somewhat disappointed by BlackBerry platform, it is so... 1990-sh compared to iPhone and Android. But I hope to do something for that platform as well one day. Nokia with its adoption of Qt begins to look interesting but Qt licensing isn't very exciting I'd say, at least for now. I was planning to ...

I have already received three questions from different visitors of Lunarium with a similar content. They are asking: your lunar calendar shows that the Moon is void of course and at the same time it is in some sign of the Zodiac. That should be a mistake since when the Moon is void-of-course it isn't in any sign isn't it? The answer is: NO, this isn't a mistake. The Moon is *always* in some sign of the Zodiac, there are no empty spaces between the signs. Consequently, the Moon cannot be in no sign. It will take quite a bit of text and a few diagrams to explain what exactly void-of-course status is. So I will have to write an article on this topic, but that will take some time. In the meanwhile, let me try to explain the topic in as few words as possible. If you feel this explanation isn't comprehensible enough - wait for the article please. First of all, the Zodiac is akin a ruler that helps us to specify where a planet is situated in the sky. I am going to explain this...

I am spending a lot of time and energy doing my new job, so I have only an hour or two in the evenings to work on Lunarium. Yes, and weekends of course. As a result, the work goes ahead very slowly, but it still moves. I have completed rewriting of the article about planetary days and hours . I am gradually translating and uploading the descriptions of the lunar days , both by Vronsky and Globa. This last work goes exceptionally slowly, mainly thanks to Globa, his language and terminology. Please don't ask me what did he mean here or there: some of his advices are quite puzzling or ambiguous in the original, so all I can do is translate them as closely to the original as possible. Translation goes so slowly that I allow myself to distract to the other topics. The next distraction is going to be the second lesson of the astro school, it will be devoted to the basic symbolism of planets.

Finally, I started implementing something I have planned many years ago: an extended description of the lunar days from different sources. I decided to concentrate on the two main sources for now but will add more whenever I find some additional information. This work will take some time, and time is the scarcest resource for me these days, so it will continue for a while. But you will be able to see the progress if you check the status of About the Lunar Days article . However, this is not the only thing I am doing at the moment on Lunarium. I feel uncomfortable that the explanation of planetary hours and days that existed on the old site is missing now and I have started adding it again, gradually, updating and reviewing it bit by bit. There is a constant lack of time however, with most of the work done over weekends and the rest of it done on the evenings after the whole day of work. I have also just signed a contract and started writing a book on some aspects of iPhone development....

I was so happy when I thought that Google AppEngine team fixed their time zone implementation overnight - but I was wrong. Quite soon, time zones went awry again. Then returned back to normal, then got broken again. The truth is that this is an intermittent problem. I have recorded it in the AppEngine bug tracker and let's hope it will be really fixed one day. But this is only one of the problems with which I am struggling at the moment, instead of filling Lunarium with interesting and useful content. Another major problem is that three Google Gadgets that I have created a few years ago stopped working. I have spent just too many evenings trying to find out what went wrong. Everything seemed to be right as before the migration of Lunarium to the new platform I made sure that the feeds used by the gadgets keep working. Yesterday I have discovered that the problem was in the fact that the main URL of the site was changed from lunarium.co.uk to www.lunarium.co.uk. This change was forc...

It looks like Google team has fixed the problem with the time zones overnight. If you couldn't get correct time - please check again, it should work now. Phew... What a relief!

Unfortunately, I have just discovered a problem that prevents Lunarium from working properly for many locations right now. This problem is not mine or yours, it is a problem of the platform on which Lunarium is running - Google AppEngine. The guys haven't implemented most of the world's time zones yet. I have reported the problem to the AppEngine's news group, let's see if anything will happen soon...

Now I am having more constructive feedback, there are less and less emails saying that I have ruined my site by replacing a dark background with a light one... The most important complaint is that Lunar Calendar now doesn't provide all the textual information that was provided by the old one. This is true, of course, but the information is coming and significantly more rich than it was before. My approach has two levels: 1. Right in the calendar, each bit of information will have a 'tooltip' - a brief textual explanation of what it is and what it means that appears when you hover your mouse over that bit of information. The information displayed in such tooltips is exactly same that was available in the old calendar. Right now, I have implemented tooltips for the lunar days in the universal calendar. I believe this is a much more convenient solution than the old one. In the old calendar, you had to click on a link, say, for the same lunar day, and the link would bring you t...

The New Lunarium has replaced the old site. I have already received a number of emails asking to bring back the old site as people prefer the old design. Well, design is a very personal thing and although the old colour scheme wasn't too bad, it couldn't be used for a truly extensive resource - like what Lunarium is going to become in close future. Many complaints are very fair though as I wasn't able to complete many important details before launching the new site. Also, a few things that were supposed to work, like Lunar Informer gadget, got broken despite of my best efforts. Of the important details that are missing the two that I am going to fix in the first place are: 1. In the universal lunar calendar, clicking on various symbols will display an appropriate information, like what this or that lunar day means etc. 2. On the planetary hours page, the current hour will be highlighted and the time format will be the one that the user has selected in the Settings. I am goi...

The New Lunarium is not completed yet but the core functionality is ready and I am receiving quite a few emails asking when lunar calendar for the next 2010 year will become available. So I decided that on the 20th of October, soon after the Moon will enter Sagittarius, I will make New Lunarium public (which means I will redirect the lunarium.co.uk domain to the new online content). Many pages will be left empty, but those are pages with textual content and the text will be added to them gradually after the new site launch. There will be already the first lesson in the Free Astro School. In the overall, New Lunarium will be much bigger than the old site and I will keep adding content to it and grow it ever after the 20th October launch.

As the date of New Lunarium becoming public approaches, I am concentrating on the most essential functionality, leaving cosmetic polishing for a later stage. A number of volunteers has tested the solution for selecting locations on the Earth based on Google Maps, and most of them told me that although it is very flexible, too many steps are needed to select a location. Most people would prefer the old solution where a city can be selected from a drop-down box. Well, the old solution was good for a limited number of locations only, while I am constantly receiving requests to add more and more cities. I wanted to find a solution that would involve as few steps as possible, like the old drop-down box, while at the same time provided the flexibility of Google Maps. And here is what I decided to do. There will be two pages, one of them very simple, named Settings, the other one is Location, with Google Maps but redesigned to make it simpler. The Settings page will offer two drop-down boxes:...