Category: Activities

So how’d I do? (Aviation edition)

For 2006 I set myself a few goals for my flying. If I recall correctly, it was

  • Fly 50 hours this year.
  • Do some airwork and get more proficient at smooth flight, especially the use of the rudder.
  • Start work towards a Commercial or Float Plane rating.

Well, it didn’t quite work out that way. I only got 37.9 hours flying time (25.3 complex), although I would have been 5 or so hours closer to my goal if the Lance hadn’t been broken on the day we departed for Oshkosh, and maybe another 3 hours if we’d been able to fly to Albany on Thanksgiving weekend. Oh well. That’s still up for the 20-25 hours I normally put in a year. I also didn’t do much airwork, mostly cross country. So I still finding myself having to look at the ball and putting in rudder as an afterthought rather than feeling what needs be put in. However, I did get training in the Garmin 530, and I think I’m getting more precise in my approaches and IFR en-route flying. I also had a little adventure with ice avoidance and negotiating with ATC for what I needed on my way home from Pinckneyville. So while I didn’t meet my goals, I think I had a pretty satisfying flying year.

I’m not sure if I’m going to get to Oshkosh this year – this is our 10th anniversary and I think I’m going to be spending my vacation time on a cruise or something. So I probably won’t be heading down to Florida for Jack Brown’s Seaplane Base or up to Parry Sound for Georgian Bay Airways for a float rating either.

So my goals for this year remain

  • Become a more proficient yoke and rudder pilot.
  • Continue to fly more than I have been in the past.

What a pain in the ass

This morning while perusing my logwatch mails I see a strange result from the script that is supposed to email me with the day’s changes from my DAFIF Replacement wiki. It was complaining about a missing perl module in the twiki/bin directory. So I look, and the twiki/bin directory is totally empty.

Some low life found a vulnerability in TWiki, and used it to remove everything in twiki/bin. I guess I should count myself lucky that he didn’t find any way to remove or corrupt other files that were writable by the web browser, since he managed to do it *before* the nightly backup ran.

I was running a pretty ancient version of TWiki, so it was probably long past time to upgrade. The upgrade to 4.0.5 seems to have been pretty painless. But it’s not what I wanted to be doing this morning.

Dammit!

What the hell is wrong with my colo box? For the second time in 10 days, it has gotten all weird on me and needed a reboot. This time, my “tail -F” on the various log files on my main domU was showing all sorts of ext3 errors. An attempt to log into the dom0 to reboot it got the now dreaded

ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host

I had to call Annexa to power cycle it.

This is ridiculous. Is it the machine? The disk? The combination of Xen and lvm? I’m not finding any clues in the logs.

Today’s interesting discovery

My navaid.com web site uses a tiny bit of Ajax in order to refresh a portion of a page showing how many waypoints have been generated so far, when you’re generating a database. A couple of people reported that it wasn’t working right with IE 7. I discovered that IE 7 has attempted to implement the XMLHttpRequest the same as standards compliant browsers (Firefox, Opera, Safari), and that was my first thought. I upgrade IE on my Windows box to IE 7 and tested it, and sure enough it didn’t work right, and turning off the option that says “Enable native XMLHttpRequest support” did make it work right.

But I can’t expect every user of my site to turn off this option, so I went searching for a better answer. And I discovered something else – IE is fanatical about caching pages, no matter what the web server tells you about the age of the page. So I added the following line to my page’s javascript:

this.req.setRequestHeader(‘If-Modified-Since’,
‘Sat, 1 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT’);

and that seems to have fixed it. Unfortunately, because IE is so fanatical about caching stuff, I’m betting that a bunch of my users won’t see the changed net.js until they’ve already decided it doesn’t work.