Rants and Revelations

I’ve written before about my doing practice approaches with a safety pilot in order to be current for IFR operations. Well, there is another way to restore your currency, and that’s to perform an Instrument Proficiency Check with an instrument instructor (CFI-I). The main difference between doing 6 approaches with a safety pilot versus doing an IPC with a CFI-I is that you can only do the 6 approaches with a safety pilot if you’re still current (ie. you’ve done 6 approaches, holding and tracking courses in the last 6 months), and you can do the IPC up to 6 months after your currency expires. Also, the IPC has a list of tasks to be done, but doesn’t specify how many approaches you have to do, so if you’re sharp and complete your tasks quickly and without any bobbles, you can do it pretty quickly.

Our club’s Dakota got a new Garmin 530 GPS and a new engine this winter. Over the summer, the club arranged a ground school on how to use the GPS, instructed by a CFI-I who is a member of the other club on the field who put Garmin 530s in all their planes. He seemed like a very good and patient instructor, and knew the 530 pretty well, so when the engine break-in was finished on the Dakota I decided to kill two birds with one stone and have him give me some air instruction on the 530.

I was still within currency, so at first Jim said we’d just do the 6 approaches. But we went out and did a couple of GPS approaches - RNAV (GPS) RWY 28 and RNAV (GPS) RWY 25. One of them we did the full approach, including the missed approach hold. I can’t believe how easy it is to fly approaches with this thing. Even the hold was easy - it told me what hold entry to do, it showed me the hold legs on the map, it timed everything and showed me the distance. After the second approach, Jim said that as long as I didn’t blow the next approach, he’d be willing to sign me off for an IPC if I didn’t want to do a full 6 approaches. He called for an ILS to a full stop.

Then, before I got established on the localizer, he went and slapped covers over the DG (Directional Gyro) and AI (Atitude Indicator). Oh oh. It was hard trying to use the “TRK” reading on the 530 to stabilize on the course, but it wasn’t good. I went full deflection, but Jim let me continue because we were still outside the FAF (Final Approach Fix) in VMC. I brought it back, and soon settled the sword fight down to keep both needles within a dot or two of centered. I think for partial panel like that, it’s probably easier to use the HSI on my hand-held. But for normal approaches, I like the panel mount GPS.

Man, I wish they’d put one of those Garmin 530s in the Lance. The Lance’s carrying capacity and roominess make it my favourite plane, but I’ve got to say with its smooth peformance, beautiful paint job, and great panel, the Dakota is a very close second.

I’m with orc, in his post Crossing the line.

I’m putting the Democratic Party as a whole, and candidates individually, on notice: If you don’t come out strongly and clearly against this torture bill and any other attempt to legalize illegal detention and torture practiced by this administration, you will not receive one penny from me. You say that will leave the House and Senate in the hands of the Republicans? So what? If you’re not against torture, then you have demonstrated that you wouldn’t be any better than them on the most important issue facing this country.

The future of America is at stake. Take a stand, or fade into oblivion.

This morning, gravatar.com is throwing a wobbly, which it does with depressing regularity. When that happens, the front page of my blog loads fine, but anytime you click on an entry with comments it takes forever. I was wondering if there was a better solution, and a quick google reveals the presense of a “Gravatar2″ plugin.

This one caches gravatars for all the people who’ve commented on your blog, and instead of going off to consult gravatar.com when a user views a post, it does it out of a cron job that runs in the background. This means the users don’t get slow page loads when gravatar.com is responding slowly. I guess I’ll have to wait and see if it actually loads and displays them properly when that site is responding again

I guess I’m going to have to marry my girlfriend. Sure, I don’t know anything about her, but I’ve completed all the girlfriend quests and I need to level up.

I keep encountering players who just run from quest to quest, ignoring any of the detail along the way. It’s like the game is something to be gotten through as quickly as possible. I tried to praise the art and mood of the game on the forums, and got jumped all over by people complaining about the frame rate or how low resolution the beta graphics are, and how so many of the animations suck. It’s as if all the art and beauty that the designers slaved over is inconsequential because it doesn’t help them level up.

I’ve always said that no user interface could possibly be worse than that of Lotus Notes. Well, our company recently announced that you could access your Notes through a web interface on the intranet. Hooray, I thought, I could get rid of Cross Over Office and the bletchery of running a Windows emulator on my Linux computer.

Then I tried it.

First problem - every 5 or 10 minutes, it pops up a window to tell me that my session has expired, which requires me to click on it, then enter the first character of my user id in the pop-up authentication window, then tab to accept the Firefox fill-in of the user id and password, and click again on the login button. Then retry whatever I was doing. Ugh.

Second problem - every time I accept a meeting invitation, it disappears into the ether, and I get some warning about it being outside my available time. So I looked, and evidently I’m only available from 10pm to 3:30am. I tried to change that to something more sane, and my meetings didn’t come back. I guess they’re gone for good.

Third problem - after leaving the application running for three straight days, I start getting a Firefox popup saying that the script is unresponsive and do I want to end it. If I say “Continue” the operation I’m doing will complete, but I’ll get the same popup a few minutes later. If I say “End script”, the operation I’m doing won’t complete, and I’ll get the same damn popup when I *do* want to do the operation. Shift-reload won’t fix the problem. Even closing the tab the Notes client is running on and re-opening it won’t fix the problem. I suspect I’m going to have to exit Firefox, and that’s just ridiculous.

So I’m back to running Notes under CrossOver Office. Sigh.

I had to go into work today (Sunday) to investigate a couple of bugs. Couldn’t reproduce either of them, unfortunately, But that’s not the point of this rant.

The building I work in is ancient and poorly maintained. It’s also an industrial/manufacturing building at heart, with offices sort of grafted on as an afterthought. Really, it’s horrible. Between the annoying desk-shaking thumps I’ve mentioned before, the chemical smells, and the notices posted all over the place warning about asbestos, I feel like Great Big Sea’s “Chemical Workers Song” - “every day you work here you’re two days nearer death”.

It was also very rainy this week, so Thurday and Friday marked the appearance of several new buckets catching water from drips in the ceiling. One of those buckets was in the main hallway, where water was coming through acoustic ceiling tiles. The tiles were bulging and discouloured. Today, the inevitable happened - they didn’t fix it, and so one of the tiles had disintegrated and collapsed into the hallway. Plus the drips are in different places than where the buckets were, so while they were lucky that the tile collapsed didn’t knock over the bucket there was dirty water all over the floor. Since I had the only car in the parking lot, I thought I’d do the right thing and report it so that somebody can come out and clean it up before somebody trips over it.

I called security, because I doubted maintenance would be around on a Sunday. Over the next couple of hours, I got called back by two different people, both of whom called and left messages when I was out of reach, and then called me again when I was - Evidently security had called people, but given them my phone number as a contact. First guy to call me was an on-call pipe fitter - I told him I didn’t think it was a pipe, I thought it was a roof leak. Then another guy from maintenance called and wanted to know all about the details, and whether I thought they could wait till tomorrow or not. How the fuck should I know? Why don’t they send out a maintenance guy to look at it and have him decide?

All I know is that if it was happening in my house I’d want somebody to come out and deal with it right now. And if it had been reported to me by somebody working in my home, I would have come home to have a look at it rather than grilling them about the details.

Last night I got home at 9:30, and decided to blow off steam by playing a bit of the MMORPG that must not be named.

While I was playing, the graphic screen went away and was replaced by the Windows desktop with a popup on it saying that updates have been installed and I need to reboot. I clicked the “reboot later” button and went back to the game. I figured that would be the end of it, but about 4 more times in the course of playing the game, it did the same damn thing. This would be an annoyance in a single player game, but when you’re playing with other people it’s infuriating to you and everybody else around you.

Why isn’t there a “REBOOT LATER, I REALLY MEAN IT AND STOP ASKING ME FOR FUCKS SAKE!” button?

Meanwhile my Powerbook was sitting there, needing to reboot after installing the new version of iTunes and Quicktime, and all it was doing to annoy me was the Software Update program icon was hopping up and down in the dock. I’ve never seen it change the video mode or do anything more obtrusive than that, even when I was playing DVDs.

I went to the fly-in breakfast at PTW, Pottstown Limerick Airport Pottstown, Pennsylvania. It was surprisingly well attended - I thought it would be just a little sleepy airport and a few people and planes, but it was wall to wall. Evidently this is their 52nd annual fly-in breakfast!

I went down there because a bunch of people I know from a mailing list have been gathering at this gathering for a number of years. (Pictures from 2003 and 2004 and 2005.) This was my first time going. One of the list members I’ve actually met before, Randy, is based at PTW so his hangar is sort of the center of festivities.
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I’ve been using Linux since 1992 or so. I don’t remember the date, but the distro was SLS 1.03 and the kernel was 0.99.14. Linux has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of usability since then, but it still has a LONG way to go. Mac OS X has gone from 0 to way, way better than Linux in the course of 3 or 4 years. It’s amazing.

Some Linux developer considered this a decent error dialog. Can I get a “Sheesh” from the crowd?

I spent this weekend in a welter of frustration, all caused by blog add-ons and content management systems.

First thing, I saw that Jen had installed a plugin to enable her Wordpress blog to embed Gallery images both in the content and on the sidebar. I used to have a “WPGallery” plugin, but it didn’t really work well when I switched to Gallery 2, so I haven’t used it in a while. This one promised to work on my current versions of Wordpress and Gallery.

Except it didn’t. The blog entry editor allowed me to pick a picture to embed in my entry, but when it appeared on the blog it just said “** NOT FOUND **” where the picture was supposed to be. And when I attempted to do the sidebar thing, I just got an “Error 1″. Plus it was screwing up the comment system - if you attempted to comment on a blog post, you saw what looked like a Gallery themed message that said “database error”.

Ok, fine, time to get rid of that. Next on the list was to try to get a different content management system (CMS) working for my Browncroft Neighborhood Association test site.

I’d decided that the CMS I’d picked, MODX, wasn’t going to let me do all the stuff I wanted, or at least not easily. Unfortunately, the “test site” is appearing high on Google ranks and people are using it for real, so I couldn’t just blow it away and leave it blank while I’m fooling around with another CMS. So first I tried installing the new CMS, Xoops, on my personal web space somewhere. But Xoops is a bare-bones CMS with a huge library of plugins to install, and I couldn’t seem to get any of the plugins working. So I thought that maybe they didn’t like not being on the docroot, so I made a fake domain on my local DNS and installed it on the docroot. I tried about 6 different plugins, but none of them worked. Some of them threw errors that indicated they were trying dangerous programming practices that my version of php explicitly warns you not to enable in the php.ini file. Others just would show an empty screen or a menu that didn’t actually do anything in the module configuration page.

That’s when I decided that I’d follow the recommendations of a few people the last time I’d asked about CMSes, and install typo3. The problem with typo3 is that the documentation is abysmal, and it basically sneers at you for needing it in the first place. It also tells you it’s going to take weeks to get your web site set up, and maybe you should consider hiring one of the many typo3 consultants instead.

I’m still struggling to get my first page up on typo3. I put in some content, and then it complained I didn’t have a template. So I chose one of the templates, and the content showed up, but there is no menu or anything else that I’d expect on a CMS page. Since the template choice page didn’t give you any indication which templates did what, I want to switch to a different one and it won’t let me. Every time I go back to the template page, it shows me stuff about the existing one, and I can’t for the life of me figure out how to go back to the choice page.

All I want is a simple CMS that works the way it’s supposed to work and which is easier to set up than hand-coding an entire site. Is that so hard?

I’m showing my age again. That title line is from a commercial from my callow youth, when I didn’t know what “Preparation H” was for and so I wondered why the hell he didn’t just scratch it, then. It seemed very unnatural to me to just yell out to his (formerly) sleeping wife “This itching! It’s driving me crazy!” without actually scratching it at the same time.

I got a bad sunburn on my scalp at the airshow last weekend. It started peeling yesterday and today I look like I’ve got leprosy. Every time I scratch I leave a shower of skin flakes on me and my surroundings. When I have to be with people, like in meetings or when I go to lunch later, I have to wear a hat so that I don’t gross people out, but that makes it even itchier.

The same problem I mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Java Thread Locking cropped up again. This time it was quite random, but repeatable. I dreaded going through the crap I went through last time to find where the lockup was happening, until I discovered a nifty new trick - if you do a “kill -3″ of the java process id, it dumps a stack trace of every thread, including what locks it’s holding, to stdout.

Going through the stack trace, I could see where one thread on the client had three locks and was calling an RMI method on the server that was locked waiting for the delete thread to finish. And the delete thread was calling a callback on the client that was waiting for one of those three locks, so the delete thread was locked as well. Not good. I removed most of the locks and things started working. Maybe eventually I will put some of the locks back.

Rohan suggests that I might have to rewrite parts of the server to take care of the next bug report on my list - the complaint is that deleting content takes too long. Unfortunately the bits he wants me to rewrite are his code, and it will take me 2 weeks just to understand it well enough to start to make the changes, and I’ve only got 10 days to clear all the bug reports off my list.