Month: December 2005

One Six Right

I got my DVD yesterday of the movie One Six Right. One Six Right is simply the best movie about flying ever made. I think every pilot, everybody curious about flying, and everybody who lives in the noise footprint of an airport should watch this movie. The guy who started the project was originally going to make a simple history of Van Nuys Airport (VNY), but ended up realizing that all these people who were being interviewed were talking more about why they love to fly, what flying means to them and also what it means to the community. And it’s interspersed with some of the best flying sequences I’ve ever seen.

And the people interviewed! People that non-pilots would recognize like Sidney Pollack and Lorenzo Lamas and Paul Moyer. People that pilots around the world would recognize (especially if they read Flying Magazine) like Barry Schiff and Clay Lacy. Old guys talking about meeting Charles Lindburgh when he visited the airport, or about flying in the war. Women talking about flying air ambulances for the local children’s hospital or for a new crew, or ferrying fighter and bombers during the war.

Everybody should see this movie.

Wiki!

While I liked Michael Greb’s suggestion of trac, it seemed like an awful lot of work to set up, since I don’t currently use subversion and I have no idea how to set that up. So I went for an easier solution and installed TWiki. It seemed easy enough, except for the fact that it’s got two “Webs” devoted mostly to settings, tutorials and the like, Main and TWiki. It would make more sense to me if all that stuff was in one place and the main Web was free for you to edit as the main purpose of the site.

Maybe if I’d seen Jen’s comment earlier I would have tried DokuWiki instead. It seems to compare favourably if you look on WikiMatrix.

So anyway, the NavData Wiki is now set up here. So far one person has already found it and started to contribute, much to my surprise because it hadn’t been announced yet.

Wikis?

My NavData project is in serious danger of overwhelming my blog, and just having a comment section doesn’t seem like the best way to collaborate on the design (assuming I get any actual collaborators). I’m wondering if I should set up a Wiki for the design. Does anybody have any experience with Wikis? Can they suggest a good one for doing software design collaboration, and give me pointers on how to use it for that purpose?

How to do this?

Update: I’ve moved this discussion to the Wiki where Douglas Robertson started a conversation on a few other approaches.

One of the things I’d really like to do in this project is provide the capability for people to leverage the previous editors, but not allow them to accidentally or on purpose ruin the data. Thus I don’t want some random stranger to delete a DAFIF waypoint, or move KJFK to Timbuktu. So I was thinking that each editor would have a “dataset” of their own, but it’s based on previous datasets. There would be a heirarchy of datasets, with of course FAA and DAFIF data as the base, then an editor or end user could decide to include or exclude the other datasets based on whether that dataset intersects their area of interest, their perception of the dataset owner’s credentials, the recency of updates, or other criteria. Not sure exactly how to accomplish that. Maybe a rating system or a public comment area where another editor or an end user can say “Hey, this guy’s points are really inaccurate” or the editor himself could say “I didn’t type in the lat/longs from a publication, I just took my GPS to the airport fence”?

I don’t want an editor to be able to delete another person’s waypoint, but I also recognize that waypoints disappear or change names. So I think there needs to be a way in dataset “a” to indicate that waypoint “FOO” no longer exists. That way if you’re using dataset “a”, you won’t get waypoint “FOO”, but if you don’t trust “a” and so exclude it, you’ll still get “FOO”.