I haven’t been blogging much. Part of it is that I’ve been busy at work. Part of it is that I have writer’s block – I want to finish up my “bad work experiences” series and I want to write about the cruise, but I haven’t felt like it. And part of it is that I’ve done some good work on my CoPilot waypoint generator.
At work, I’ve been working on a way to push software upgrades out to customer sites. Not just our software, but also the RPMs that it depends on. And because our software modifies the configuration files that those RPMs install, the upgrade process has to make sure that the configuration file updates aren’t wiped out by upgrading the RPM. Oh, and since a customer site consists of up to 32 separate computers, while I’m at it, I also have to make sure that all the computers get upgraded at the same time, and not while the customer is using them. It’s been fun.
And while I was at it, I’ve added some new capability to the CoPilot waypoint generator. It’s always annoyed the hell out of me that my two main data sources, the FAA and the DAFIF, are incredibly inconsistent when it comes to labelling fixes. When I’m flight planning, what I usually care about about airway intersections, and any IFR chart will show you hundreds if not thousands of them. But in the database, there are only 8 fixes with the type ‘AWY-INTXN’. Whereas there are 56,000+ ‘REP-PT’, some of which are the sorts of fixes I care about, and some of which are points that either appear on other charts, or don’t even appear on any charts except maybe a radar controller’s overlay. So what I’ve done is use some other data which was available, namely what chart(s) the fix appears on. So now instead of trying to guess what fix types I want in my hand, I can specify that I only want fixes that appear on IFR en-route low altitude charts. Or maybe I’ll want ones that appear on IFR en-route low altitude charts or approach plates. Now I, and the other users of my waypoint generator, can do this. I think this will be a huge help for people.