Author: Paul Tomblin

Oh, bugger!

Ok, the big load job just finished, and it appears I was loading the old FAA data, not the data that became current on Wednesday. Also, it appears I have a bug in the code that loads the runways – the old scripts seemed to have taken “U” or “” for the runway end latitudes and longitudes as null, but the new ones are putting those values in as 0. Oops.

I guess I’ll have to run it again – using nohup this time. See you next week.

Hey, Google

If you’re going to send a guy a survey to find out his impressions of your recruiting/interviewing methodology, you might not want to send it to somebody who has been waiting two months for you to pay his travel expense claim. Because he might just think that you’re a bunch of disorganized fuckwads. Just sayin’.

And a bit of further advice – you might want to make sure your expense spreadsheet actually prints out correctly using Google Docs and doesn’t require one to steal a copy of Microsoft Office in order to use it.

Darn it!

Some years ago I got a set of Shape Files (much as I hated ESRI at the time, they did beat us (GeoVision) fair and square with an inferior product and superior marketing) for the provincial and territorial boundaries of Canada and wrote a short little C program to do a “point in polygon” to determine what province a particular point is in. It’s set up so that it parses the shapes, then sits there waiting for a lat/long pairs to come over a pipe and writes the province code back over the pipe. I write a special lat/long pair (-999/-999) when I want it to exit. I use it all the time when I’m loading waypoints. The program has continued to work while my waypoint generator moved from being hosted at home to a webhost (Gradwell.com) to a virtual private server (Linode) to a colocation box. Unfortunately, I just discovered that somewhere along the way I lost the source code. Right now it has a small bug in that when the program that opened the pipe to it dies, it starts consuming all the CPU instead of shutting down. I can live with that, but it’s annoying while I’m doing all this testing with buggy load scripts. That’s why I went looking for the source code.

Maybe I should write a new one just in case?