Category: Geekery

Free aeronautical data

Because of the imminent death of DAFIF data, it is my intention to create a web site where people can create and edit aeronautical data, and use the data that they and others have created in their personal computers, PDAs and web sites for flight planning, navigation, flight simulation, or other uses. This data would be free in both senses of the word, both free from cost, and covered by a Creative Commons or similar license allowing them to use it and distribute it free from legal encumbrances.

My first thoughts on the design would be that it would import and export data in an XML format, probably an extension of GPX or possibly another custom format. I’d like to make the editing as interactive as possible, so I’m currently learning AJAX (Asyncronous Javascript And Xml) programming, and possibly I’d like to leverage the Google Maps API.

I haven’t decided on the back-end language, only that it must run on a Free operating system like Linux or one of the BSDs, and use an Open Source web server like Apache or Tomcat because that’s what my stuff is currently hosted on. But if a bunch of you say you’ll do programming work on the site only if it runs on .NET, I’d still want to be involved in the project, but you’ll have to find a different web host.

I’d like to get an idea of how many people out there would be interested in

  1. Participating in the design and construction of such a site
  2. Using such a site to enter or edit waypoints
  3. Use such data in programs or sites that they have

If you’re interested in participating in such a role, please comment on this post describing which you’d like to do. If the first, describe what sort of programming you’re interested in doing. If the second, describe what sort of data you would expect to enter – just one or two local airports, a whole state/province/country, or what?

If I get any interest, I’ll probably create a mailing list or wiki for this. In the meantime, I’m putting posts on this topic in a separate category which you can read here or you can RSS subscribe to here.

Ok, that’s better

I had an appointment with my physiotherapist today. She’s pretty pleased with the progress on my wrist – I’m getting more range of motion back every day, and my grip strength is increasing as well.

I got my KVM switch working again, by unplugging the monitor cable from it and plugging it back again. Not sure if that’s a KVM problem or a monitor problem – next time I’ll try power cycling the monitor instead.

And the network connector arrived for the upstairs TiVo. That means I can do a daily call using the network, instead of the phone. That’s not a huge win, although there wasn’t a convenient phone jack near the TiVo and formerly I’d been using this device that puts the telephone signal through the power lines. But far more importantly, this enables multi-room viewing. I just tried it, and it works ok, but not great. On one Tivo, you can browse the “Now Playing List” (ie the list of recorded programs) from the other TiVo. You can choose a show and “transfer it”. It doesn’t quite transfer in real time, so you have to wait a bit before you start watching, although you can go back to the menu and watch something else, or even choose more shows to transfer, while it’s transferring. And when it’s done transferring, it’s on both TiVos.

If I had any wishes, I’d want the transfer to happen fast enough that instead of transferring, you could watch it directly from the other machine’s hard drive, and therefore when you finished, you could delete it or otherwise manage it on the originating TiVo’s drive. Oh well.

Not my day

I came home to find that my USB KVM, which I’ve had for about a month, is dead. It switches, the screen shows the resolution as sort of a double image, but neither computer comes out of the screen saver. If I power off the KVM and power it on again, the Linux box at least shows messages indicating that it’s come alive again. But it doesn’t work.

Bugger it, doesn’t anybody make reliable equipment designed to work 24/7 for months at a time?

When does a unit test become a system test?

In my part of the big project I’m on, I have a class called a Playlist, and a corresponding database table. Based on my analysis of how many Playlists are likely to be used in the lifetime of a system, I decided that an int would be more than adequate storage space for the sequential internal id number. Actually, a short would probably be adequate, but there isn’t any compelling reason to use shorts on modern systems since they don’t save much storage and they’re slower to process (is that true in Java? I know it is in C/C++.) And so I happily used this id all over the code.
Continue reading “When does a unit test become a system test?”