Category: Revelation

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.

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.

Finally, something worked right!

The last thing I’m going to be moving from my linode VPS to my colo box is my Navaid.com waypoint generators. I’ve started doing some work on that – originally I was going to export the MySQL database from the linode, and massage them and import them into PostgreSQL on the colo box. But when I first started doing that, I found no end of trouble – the version of MySQL in Debian Sarge doesn’t have the “compatibility” mode in the dump command, plus I discovered that when I’d originally moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL I’d converted all the boolean fields to tinyint(1) or something, and I’d like to change that. Plus there were fields that were set to “not null default 0” which should really have allowed nulls and the like. Basic clean-up stuff, but time consuming. So I’d decided to bring the database over as MySQL, and maybe bring up the site in MySQL and write a conversion script later on so I could convert to PostgreSQL later.

Thursday evening while experimenting with some of the scripts navaid scripts on the colo site, I discovered some bad values. Investigation proved that the FAA had changed the data format for the “APT” airport record in the last load, and I hadn’t adapted my load script.

So Friday evening I went back to the “real” navaid site and fixed the load script, and ran the two scripts to reload the data. I started the run about 8pm. But it was going *really* slow. So while I was waiting, I copied the changes over to the same scripts on the colo site and ran them there. The two scripts took less than a hour to run, which pleased me immensely, and I was able to verify on that site that the damage was fixed. But the scripts on the real site were still running. I waited and finally went to bed. When I got up this morning, the first script was still running. As a matter of fact, it finally finished and went on to the second script at about 2pm. It’s slowly grinding through the second one.

But I didn’t want my “real” site to be down for this length of time. So I hit on an idea – I enabled remote connections to the MySQL database on my colo box, and made a test version of the generation script on the real site with a slightly different “DBI->connect” line as the only change. And it worked, and it worked amazingly quickly. So I changed the whole site over, and restarted Apache, and so now the web services are running on the “real” site, but the database they are hitting is on the colo box. This will make the ultimate migration easier, and it means that navaid.com’s users are already getting a bit of a speed advantage from this move.

The only hitch, and it’s a small one, is there is a script that runs once a night to expire old saved sessions. It uses subqueries, which the MySQL on my colo box doesn’t support. I’m going to have to re-write that as a script that uses a left inner join to find the ones to delete, and then deletes them one at a time. The reason why this worked on my VPS box and not on my colo box is that on the VPS, I’m connecting to a MySQL server provided by the ISP, not my own. So while Debian Sarge installs MySQL 4.0.24, the server I’m connecting to is newer than that.