Category: Rant

Probably time to throw in the towel on the waypoint generators

For years now I’ve been providing aeronautical data for various programs – The Wayback Machine shows it existing in 2001, but I’m pretty sure I was running it before then. The site hasn’t changed much visually since then, since I concentrated on providing good data rather than prettying up the site. But I thought I was providing a good free service and it was worth it to people. I didn’t really push it hard, but I did politely ask for donations, through Paypal and at one time through the “Amazon Honor System” until Amazon killed that. And for a long time, I made about 1/4 to 1/2 as much through that as it cost me in hosting and data costs. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. I just looked at my Paypal history for the last 12 months, and I got two donations of $25 each, one of $3.32 and one of $1.13 (yeah, go figure). $54.45 in a year. That’s it. That doesn’t keep me in thumb drives.

Add on to that the fact that my source of world-wide data, the DAFIF file, hasn’t been updated since 2006 and it’s increasingly been a “US data plus some airport data from here and there”, and I’m worried about presenting this to the world as useful data for anything. I’ve always staunchly maintained that this is just to save you from a bit of data entry for flight planning and not a substitute for official data sources, but it’s just embarrassing to think somebody is going to be looking for navaids and waypoints in Europe, say, and not finding anything that’s still in use. At least airports don’t tend to move around much.

And because the data I have is getting stale, I keep hoping that people would provide feedback on the data I have, offering to provide data for their area or just letting me know if something is wrong. At one time I had a couple of people sending me their data sets which I incorporated into the database. (Although I did have one set of data for Australia where all the airports had the sign of their longitude reversed – I’m pretty sure I purged the last of that.) That was actually more important than the donations to me. It showed people were using the data, and cared when it was wrong.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m reconsidering if it’s worth doing this. I’ll still maintain the data for the CoPilot iOS app, that’s a separate database and thanks to Laurie Davis I get world wide data from Eurocontrol that that. But next time I get a data dump from the FAA (September 19th), I’m going to give some thought over whether to load it into both database, or just the CoPilot iOS one.

Am I the only person who thinks this way?

I have a hybrid car, which gives a constant read-out of your average fuel economy, as well as giving you little visual indicators while you’re driving of whether you’re driving it “right” (upshift/downshift indicators, and a big glowing ring around the tach which goes from green to blue if you rev higher or accelerate faster) and when you turn off the car, you get a bar graph showing how economically you drove it, as well as “achievements” and “levels” if you’ve been driving economically for a while.

But like all cars, your average fuel economy for the trip is going to be higher for a longer trip than a shorter one, because the first 5-10 minutes of the trip is warming up the engine and getting the cabin up to the right temperature, etc. So when I’m going for a short trip, like going out for lunch, and trying to choose between two destinations, I have this internal dialog where I first argue for the longer trip to keep the average fuel economy up, but then I have to forcibly remind myself that sure the average is higher, but so is the total fuel burn and it makes no sense to burn more gas just to get a better average.

Somebody told me a while ago that I have an “external locus of control”. I think I’m just a geek.

Fuck you, Officer McDowell, Parking Authority of Baltimore City “meter maid”

So last night I went out to dinner with JoAnne and her husband hPhil. They suggested an Irish pub down in the historic “Fells Point” area in the harbour area. There was a bit of traffic getting there, and lots more traffic in the area. But I lucked out with a parking space very close to the pub, in front of another pub. I quickly strode over to the pay kiosk and paid for two hours (although I found out later that I only really needed to pay for one hour because they don’t require payment after 8pm, but I was in too much of a hurry to look for any information about parking hours), and strode back to the car. I was probably away from the car a maximum of two minutes, and was never more than the width of the street away from the car. So imagine my surprise to find a so called “parking enforcement officer” (although I prefer to use the term “meter maid” because I don’t want to dignify this idiot with any sort of suggestion that she’s actually a trained officer) printing out a ticket. I showed her the paid ticket, and when she deigned to stop talking to whoever she’d been carrying on a running conversation on her cell phone to talk to me, all she could say was “once I’ve printed the ticket, there’s nothing I can do” and that the only way I could dispute it is if I checked off the “I want a trial” on the citation and came back in however many months it takes for it to go to trail. I pointed out that I was just over there at the payment kiosk if she’d bothered to look, and I’d left the car door ajar so it was obvious I was coming back. Even the people sitting at the tables in front of the pub verified that I’d just parked there, and that if she touched the hood of my car she could feel it was still hot. “I don’t have to look at things like that”. Well, fuck you. Is your job parking enforcement, or is it screwing the tourists and making sure they never want to come back.
The evidence

Another sleepless night

I was having trouble sleeping. I thought it was because I have a sort of “rubbed raw” feeling in my arm pit. I got the same thing last time – because I can’t lift the arm, my arm pit doesn’t dry out properly and so it rubs painfully. But then I realized there was a lot of light coming from my office. And so I went to have a look, and sure enough my Linux box had crashed, frozen on boot, and so therefore the screen saver wasn’t shutting down the monitors properly.

A few days ago I got a little overzealous in removing old kernels, and since then every time the update process has installed new stuff it’s given me a failure message about running lilo. (Yes, I still use lilo rather than grub because when I first installed this system you couldn’t use grub with a software raid and lvm2 – one of these days I’m going to have to reinstall just to correct that and a few other nagging problems)

I realized that if that was the cause of the problem, I was going to have to boot with a live or rescue CD and remount everything, chroot to it, and fix the lilo problems and run the lilo installer command. So the first thing I tried was downloading the “Ubuntu Rescue Remix”, burning a CD with it, and booting with it. I discovered the hard way that the “Rescue Remix” is a i686 kernel, which means I can’t chroot to my amd64 install and expect to run commands. Oops.

Next I started to download the latest Ubuntu CD. Chrome said I had 27 minutes remaining, so while I waited I dug out the previous Ubuntu CD, and booted with that. I had to “apt-get install lvm2” and “apt-get install mdadm”, but afterwards I was able to “mdadm –assemble” both software RAIDs, and mount the lvm2 partitions under /mnt. I chrooted to /mnt, and ran “lilo”. First problem was that the boot drive was specified using /dev/disk/by-id/…., which it didn’t like in the chroot environment, so I changed that to /dev/sda. Then it complained about the “Linux.old”, so I commented that out. With both of those changes made, lilo installed without any further errors, and when I rebooted everything came up fine.

I’m just manually restarting all my nightly backups which normally happen during the time the computer was down, and then I’m going to try to get an hour or two sleep.

Forth? Why Forth?

Had a dream last night, in which the programming language Forth played a big role. Which is a bit of a puzzlement because I’ve never learned to program in Forth. There was a time when Forth was tagged as the next big thing and every computer magazine had articles about it, but that was around the time when commercial software started advertising “written in C for speed” and an interpreted language like Forth didn’t have a chance. I believe Forth became the core of PostScript.

The first thing I remember from the dream is seeing two small computers with a wire connecting their ‘pin 1’s. Somebody asked the Forth guru why they were connected, and I said “I know that, it’s so their clocks are in sync” and I said something about events on rising edges. I have no idea what that’s about – I’ve never done anything that low level. Evidently my dream self has been taking electrical engineering courses.

Later I was talking to the guru in front of three real train tracks, and every time a train went by a single alphanumeric letter above the track lit up. I wonder if that is some dream reference to the famous Tech Model Railway Club, but I really only know about them from the Jargon File. I wonder if they used Forth?

Later the guru was showing me about ports to respond to external events and control things like lights and heat in a house. I distinctly remember a panel showing four room mates and an indicator of whether they were using Forth to control their thermostats or not.

Anyway, it seems odd to me to be dreaming about a programming language I’ve never used, and low level hardware stuff I’ve never done. Not sure if that’s a subconscious reflection of my recent surgery, or trying to do object oriented programming in Perl.