Category: Flying

“Anticipated Separation”? I don’t like it.

The mission was to get two planes back from Batavia, one of which was the Lance. We tried on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, but the weather didn’t cooperate. The weather was fine today, but only two of us could make it, so we only managed to bring back the Lance.
Continue reading ““Anticipated Separation”? I don’t like it.”

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.

Sigh

I made some major changes to the way data gets loaded into my navaid.com waypoint generator database, mostly in the processing of the “combined user data”. Mostly, I wanted to make sure that if “Bob” provides me some data on Canadian airfields that includes communications frequencies but no runway data that it doesn’t wipe out the runway data from the dataset of Ontario airfields that “Alice” provided me last year, but only updates the data that has changed in the overlapping part of those two datasets. Add in the possibility that a waypoint might have changed identifier or been resurveyed so the location has changed a bit, and you can see that there are a lot of possibilities to consider.

Unfortunately, considering all these possibilities is time consuming. I’ve been testing these new scripts with a dataset from one person that covers the entire UK and some nearby locations in varying levels of detail, and another that covers Ireland in great detail, but which is unfortunately no longer being updated because the person who provided it moved. Running both datasets would be an overnight job. But now that I’m satisfied with the results of that, I decided it was time to reload the old DAFIF data though these scripts to get the combined user data exactly the way I want it. But this has caught a couple of bugs in the scripts, one of which only manifested itself after 36 hours or so of running. That one didn’t even give me enough information as to why it failed, so I had to add some “use Carp” and “use Data::Dumper” magic to my scripts and then I re-ran it and found the actual cause after another 36 hour run. I’ve been almost continually running load scripts all week. I’m hoping this run will be it, but I’m not sure.

Since my new home box is so fast, I’m thinking one possibility might be to do the load processing on it, and then just mysqldump it and bring the dump file up to the colo.

This looks incredibly promising

Thanks to a post by Skud, I’ve discovered Freebase, which is, as Skud described it, “crack for information nerds”. It appears to be exactly what I was hoping to develop or find for my aviation navigation data project – a flexible structured information agregator, almost like a wiki with user definable fields.

You probably can’t see much of it, because right now it’s in alpha and by invitation only, but so far they’ve imported all of Wikipedia and added some links between then, and people have written some demo applications.

Like many AJAX applications, it has a tendency to get the dreaded “a script on this page is running slowly”, but otherwise it’s pretty nifty.