midtoad's blog

Why no news?

I've been finding it oh-so convenient to make blog postings using my account over at blogger.com, particularly since I can make mobile postings by e-mail. So unless I need to do something special with photos or special formatting, you'll probably see most of my news over there. Check it out at midtoad.blogspot.com

Using a PDA in a glider

I'm now setting up a Palm TX to act as a flight computer for sailplane flying, using a Wintec WBT-201 Bluetooth GPS for positional data, and logging, and SoarPilot as the navigational software.

SoarPilot can act as a final glide computer, telling whether you can make it to goal or not, and if so, at what speed you should fly. But even en-route, it can also tell you what speed to fly between thermals, while taking into account your glider's performance polar curve, and the expected strength of the thermals (McCready ring setting). SoarPilot also has a moving-map display that will show you where you are in relation to your waypoints, and to designated airspace that you may need to avoid. You can define a task and it will help guide you around the course. If you load in terrain elevation data, it will even tell you what your ground clearance is.

The only hitch in using this software, and my hardware, is the energy consumption. With Bluetooth turned on, my Palm will run down its batteries in under 5 hours. So I picked up a sealed 2.2 Ah lead-acid battery (about the thickness of a VCR tape, though not as tall), and attached a dual cigarette-lighter plug to it that I bought at Canadian Tire. From there, I'll power my Palm with a car charger, and I'll power the GPS with a car USB cable.

In order to manage some of the data I needed, I got a copy of SoaringDotNet. I used its airspace editor (and a copy of Transport Canada's Designated Airspace Handbook) to define the airspace I'll need to avoid.

I've got everything loaded up now on the Palm. Now it's time to go for a flight and test it all out (I've already been testing it while driving around in my car).

Here are some files that may be useful:

* airspace data for the Columbia Valley and SW Alberta: suadata.sua
* waypoints for the same area: waypoints.cup
* flight polars for many gliders: polars_spl.pdb
* 3D terrain data for all southern Alberta & BC: SoaringPilot_terrain_db.pdb
* all the main Rockies peak names, in Google Earth format (from peakfinder.com): RockiesPeaks.kmz

Mac Mini webserver

The more I use Mac OS X on my MacBook, the less I find I have the energy for dealing with all the problems and hassles of Windows and Linux. Not to say that there aren't issues with OS X, but I do find fewer. And so, for quite a while now I've been wanting to dump Mandriva Linux (and the old, noisy PC it's running on), and replace it with a small, quiet Mac Mini running OS X. Over the course of the past 24 hours, that's just what I did. You're reading this page being served up by the new server.

Since I have set up a number of web servers using Linux, I anticipated that doing the same thing in OS X would be easier, and it largely was, with one exception due to my own stupidity. More on that later. I consulted a number of articles on how to use the Mini as a server. Here are a couple:

• Nerdvittles ISP in a box (there's a ton of other useful stuff for Mac owners at this site besides the mentioned tutorial)
• Using a Mac Mini as a personal server (i.e. on your own home network)

I installed Python, Moin-Moin, MySQL, CherrPy, Frog blog, and a variety of utility programs.

Then I copied over the contents of my entire existing webserver, and tweaked the settings, since Apache stores web files in a different location in OS X than it does in in Linux.

Oh yeah, the hard part. I was unable to access my Rigid Wings wiki from outside the home network. I struggled with this for quite a while (it was too long after midnight), then realized it was due to the fact that in the moin.py config file I'd specified that the wiki should only pay attention to the localhost interface. Since I didn't just want people on localhost to be able to see the wiki, I need to change the setting to ''.

No news is good news

No blog postings here for a while doesn't indicate that I've fallen off the side of the earth. Rather, I've been busy on another site I manage, bikecalgary.org. If you're a cyclist, head on over and take a look!

Canada's banks are helping criminal phishing scammers

I wrote a short article about this on another page on my website. That page also includes a score-card for Canada's top banks. All of them fail, except one. This means that all of them are financing scammers. The one exception (as of Nov. 17th, 2006) is the Laurentian Bank of Canada. Congratulations Laurentian Bank! You're the only one that has hired a webmaster that isn't lazy or incompetent.

By the way, the scorecard and article are here.

Mountain biking from Canmore to Banff, and back

Today I went for a little ride on the Cannondale hard-tail, which I picked up at Bow Cycle on the way out of town. I started out in downtown Canmore, and rode to Banff on the wild west side of the Bow River, then back again on the highway side. I found a little adventure along the way.

File copying problems with USB drives

I've discovered a problem with copying files between two USB drives connected to a PC (or Mac). Simply put, you can't copy large quantities of files from one external USB drive to another. This is extremely frustrating!

Fixing Windows with Linux

Recently my wife's notebook crashed (flaky power supply?), and would not start again. Nothing would get it going, not even the Windows XP CD. Finally I tried booting the notebook via a Knoppix linux CD... and had it running soon after!

Google Code Jam 2006 used for political purposes

Google is holding an event called Google Code Jam 2006. It's an opportunity for programmers from around the world to show off their skills. Well, from almost all the world. While Google says that people have registered in huge numbers not only from the U.S., but from India, China, Canada, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Poland, Pakistan, Iran, Australia, the U.K., Germany, Singapore, Japan, Hungary, the fine print in their contest rules says that Cash and prizes, including t-shirts, will not be provided to residents of Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan or Syria.

This exclusion sounds mean and petty on the part of Google. However, as Google is a U.S.-registered company, it's subject to U.S. laws, so don't blame Google. The U.S. government has enacted a number of laws to punish the governments of countries whose policies it does not agree with, and Google is only complying with those laws. What this contest shows however, is that such laws only serve to punish individual citizens in those countries, and ultimately hurt the U.S. since its laws are used by those same governments as examples of why they need to be supported against the actions of The Great Satan.

The U.S. government would be far more effective, IMHO, if they turned 180 degrees and took every opportunity to help individual citizens in foreign countries.

Thinking about backups

I'm thinking a lot about backups this week, ever since one of my external drives was corrupted after I shut off the power on my unresponsive Mac. And in looking around on the internet for information on this topic, I'm noticing a trend.