Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I’m in Whitby at my Dad’s place today. Because of customs, we flew to Buttonville. But then when I told the FBO guy “oh we’re not staying – as soon as we clear customs we’re heading to Oshawa” he just laughed. Evidently I carefully flight planned the trip to Buttonville, but hadn’t even looked at NOTAMs for Oshawa.
Oshawa is closed for three weeks, because they’re repaving both runways. God only knows why they couldn’t stagger them. Hey, oshawapilot, why didn’t you mention this?
I just moved my blog from http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/ to https://blog.xcski.com/. I set up a “Redirect permanent” on the old location, so that anybody or anything using the old location will get automatically redirected to the new location. And for a lot of places that used to hit my blog at the old site (like rss feeders) seem to have handled the transition painlessly. For instance, NetNewsWireLite, which I use on my laptop, updated the subscription information and doesn’t appear to hit the old URL at all any more. Same with the LiveJouranl syndication.
But for some reason, a lot of them haven’t handled it correctly. For one thing, my spam load is down to almost nothing. Ok, that’s a good thing. But I also notice that some RSS feeders, like various “Planet” web sites, see a redirection from http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/feed to https://blog.xcski.com/feed, and feel like they can ignore the fact that the hostname part of the URL is different, and try to fetch the redirection at http://xcski.com/feed, which of course isn’t a valid URL. It can’t be that they have an old DNS cache entry for blog.xcski.com – it didn’t exist until a few days ago. It must be that they’re trying to be too clever, or not clever enough.
I’ve decided to go for it.
I’m currently paying about $30 a month for a Virtual Private Server at linode.com. For that $30 a month I get the equivalent of 150Mb of RAM, 4Gb of disk, and a static IP that isn’t on any black lists. I’m guaranteed at least the equivalent of a 150MHz, but up to the maximum of the actual CPU on the machine, which is dual 3.2GHz Xeons.
The applications I run on there, particularly the Waypoint Database Generator, are severely limited by the memory limitations. I don’t come close to using all the bandwidth, and I’m not usually CPU bound. But as soon as that generator starts the memory swapping, it would use up all my io_tokens, and then the application would get i/o bound. The situation was totally untenable until somebody on linode started running a MySQL server and allowed me to use it. But I don’t like relying on this service that might go away at any time.
I’ve discovered that for about a hundred dollars a month, I can put a 1U server on a local colocation service. By going the colocation route, I can put in as much memory and disk space as I want. I still get the other advantages of the linode, such as a static IP and better bandwidth to the rest of the internet. The extra disk and memory means that I can run my own database server without getting swap and i/o bound. It also means I can move some of the disk hungry stuff like my Gallery server and this blog to it.
Yeah, it’s more expensive, but what I’m planning to do is set up the system with Xen. Then I can divide the box up into multiple virtual machines and sell shares. I’m hoping I can sell one share to start, and maybe another later on.
I’ve been perusing eBay, and it appears that $300 or so should get me a machine with 2x1GHz processors, 1Gb of RAM, and no hard drive. Another $125 or so for a 250Gb drive for the machine and another 250Gb drive to keep at home as a spare. Since the colocation site is here in town, I don’t need the ultra-reliability of the latest servers, RAID arrays, redundant power supplies, etc.
Ok, so I have to buy this machine, build it, and start setting up Xen. Then get my applications working on it. I’m also going to move this blog to “blog.xcski.com” and the gallery to “gallery.xcski.com” to facilitate moving them to the colo.
I just noticed that after today’s flight, I’m on the last page of my log book. Soon I’m going to have to file this one away and start a new one. I’m going to miss this old guy. It’s been with me since my first flight on 27 June 1995, in N38290. The club just sold N38290 – it left for its one-way trip to the new owner on Monday. That flight was 0.7 hours – I’ve now done 440.4 hours, and by the time the book is filled, will probably be up around 450-455 hours. What a long strange and wonderful trip it’s been.
In other news, I went to an “aviation garage sale” today. A member of the local EAA chapter is shutting down his aviation business because he needs the garage space to build his Rans S-9. (I have to confess that when he was talking about other people’s S-9 projects, at first I thought he was calling them “asinine”.) I came away with a warm flight jacket, two t-shirts (my third “Bad Attitude” shirt, since the previous two wore out, and a Snowbirds shirt), and a deHavilland Beaver wall clock, all for $53.
I’ve written before about my doing practice approaches with a safety pilot in order to be current for IFR operations. Well, there is another way to restore your currency, and that’s to perform an Instrument Proficiency Check with an instrument instructor (CFI-I). The main difference between doing 6 approaches with a safety pilot versus doing an IPC with a CFI-I is that you can only do the 6 approaches with a safety pilot if you’re still current (ie. you’ve done 6 approaches, holding and tracking courses in the last 6 months), and you can do the IPC up to 6 months after your currency expires. Also, the IPC has a list of tasks to be done, but doesn’t specify how many approaches you have to do, so if you’re sharp and complete your tasks quickly and without any bobbles, you can do it pretty quickly.
Our club’s Dakota got a new Garmin 530 GPS and a new engine this winter. Over the summer, the club arranged a ground school on how to use the GPS, instructed by a CFI-I who is a member of the other club on the field who put Garmin 530s in all their planes. He seemed like a very good and patient instructor, and knew the 530 pretty well, so when the engine break-in was finished on the Dakota I decided to kill two birds with one stone and have him give me some air instruction on the 530.
I was still within currency, so at first Jim said we’d just do the 6 approaches. But we went out and did a couple of GPS approaches – RNAV (GPS) RWY 28 and RNAV (GPS) RWY 25. One of them we did the full approach, including the missed approach hold. I can’t believe how easy it is to fly approaches with this thing. Even the hold was easy – it told me what hold entry to do, it showed me the hold legs on the map, it timed everything and showed me the distance. After the second approach, Jim said that as long as I didn’t blow the next approach, he’d be willing to sign me off for an IPC if I didn’t want to do a full 6 approaches. He called for an ILS to a full stop.
Then, before I got established on the localizer, he went and slapped covers over the DG (Directional Gyro) and AI (Atitude Indicator). Oh oh. It was hard trying to use the “TRK” reading on the 530 to stabilize on the course, but it wasn’t good. I went full deflection, but Jim let me continue because we were still outside the FAF (Final Approach Fix) in VMC. I brought it back, and soon settled the sword fight down to keep both needles within a dot or two of centered. I think for partial panel like that, it’s probably easier to use the HSI on my hand-held. But for normal approaches, I like the panel mount GPS.
Man, I wish they’d put one of those Garmin 530s in the Lance. The Lance’s carrying capacity and roominess make it my favourite plane, but I’ve got to say with its smooth peformance, beautiful paint job, and great panel, the Dakota is a very close second.