Here are a couple nice articles on a system that I’ve spent the last five years of my life helping to develop. Go team!
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/runway-girl/2011/08/exclusive-lufthansa-passengers.html
A few weeks back I sent you folks an e-mail requesting a little help with my account. Strike that. A few weeks ago I sent you several e-mails and direct twitter messages both to Notch and other company members requesting some help with my account. I’m not going to go into what the problem was here (why the hell should I if you couldn’t be bothered to respond the first time around?) but the short version is you migrated servers and shortly thereafter my user account no longer worked on your web site. My account was not hacked. I tried password recovery and both my user name and e-mail were not recognized by your system. I basically no longer exist at your company.
Not only did I send you multiple e-mails, I also sent you the exact details and ID of the paypal transaction when I purchased the game (back in Alpha days, by the way). Never mind having my problem fixed – you people can’t even be bothered to send some sort of response indicating that you’ve gotten my message. Hell, an automated form response would have been appreciated. It appears that you’re all too busy being disinterested.
This really is a shame since I loved playing your game so much. I even wrestled with the thought of just paying for it again to resolve the issue on my own. The thing that stopped me from doing so is 1) why would I do that when lost accounts are apparently a regular event at your company (I’m seeing a lot of people on your Facebook page who have the exact same problem that I do), and 2) if I have another problem in the future I guess I can expect the same incredible customer service that you have demonstrated thus far.
Now I can certainly appreciate the fact that you guys are basically a small start up operation with maybe three or four dudes sharing a small office space but you have now crossed the 1 million mark in sales. You’ve achieved something that very few people in your position can claim. You need to put some serious thought into how you’re going to deal with these kinds of issues in the future or I promise you your success will be short lived indeed.
Here, I’ll make it that much easier for you. You no longer need to concern yourself with my issue. I quit. There; one less problem you need bother with.
Best Regards,
Josh Gayou
Some good press on a system on which I’ve been a team lead for the past few years now:
http://atwonline.com/it-distribution/news/lufthansa-relaunches-flynet-flight-internet-service-1130
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/runway-girl/2010/11/video-lufthansa-re-launches-in.html
http://www.thestar.com/travel/article/899089–lufthansa-launches-in-flight-internet-access
As mentioned in the articles, this is a first of its class service offering broadband connection speeds over the entire Earth (including over oceans). It gives me quite a warm and fuzzy to have played a large role in developing an industry game changer. Life is good.
In early August of 2010 I went out to Atlanta to do an install of Panasonic’s eXConnect system on a Business Jet. It was a crazy few days but we had a lot of fun doing it.
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- Setup for EMI testing.
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- My work area.
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- Conference Room.
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- View atop the plane at the antenna mount.
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- Boeing 737-700
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- Lounge area.
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- View towards the tail from the main cabin.
The Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich is pioneering a modular robot swarm with soft AI. The article goes into the usual cliches of claiming that they think for themselves and you can see the typical genius comments after the story about Skynet and how we’re barreling towards a Battlestar Gallactica future (???). Still, there are very interesting implications for moving extremely large cargo if you were to scale the system up.
I just recently got on the Blue Ray bandwagon and had a PS3 sent out to my house. Of course Sony doesn’t sell the unit with an HDMI cable (which you’ll need if you want to see anything in high definition), so I ran out to Best Buy to get one.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I’ve seen perfectly serviceable HDMI cables on Amazon.com for about $6. Remember that.
I don’t like to blow a bunch of time in these stores actually searching for what I need, so I just walked up to an employee and gave him the generally recognized signal that I needed something (a lost and clueless look). I told him what I needed and he walked me over to a display with cables everywhere.
The first thing I noticed was that the cheapest cable they carried was $30. Before I even had the chance to reach for it to read over it, the guy walked right by that and pointed at another group of cables. These were $87.
“So you’re probably going to want one of these”, he said,
Confused, I said, “Whatever for?”
“Well”, he began, “these cables over here are 60 Hz cables, where as these ones are 120 Hz. Most HD TVs these days operate at 600, so if you get the more expensive 120 cable you’ll see a lot less flicker. Also, you won’t have any attenuation issues with the expensive one.”
I just started laughing at him. It was probably rude and I could tell he was annoyed but God help me, I couldn’t stop myself.
“Signal attenuation?” I asked. “Over six feet of cable? Are you kidding me?”
He didn’t really have an answer for this so he just sort of shrugged his shoulders and shook his head as if to say, “Hey, man. I didn’t invent Science. I just report it.”
I wasn’t done. “Okay, let me ask you this. Both cables are made to the same specification, right? They both have the same number of contacts, the same gauge wire and the same shielding inside, yes?” He’s nodding through this whole line of thought.
“Well, is there any special circuitry in them that causes one to refresh at 60 Hz and the other to refresh at 120?” No, no circuitry.
“Then how do you support the claim that one cable is operating at one clock speed and the other is different?” He was clearly pissed at this point and just wanted me to go away. I got the $30 cable and left.
The guy was obviously clueless as to the differences between either cable and was clearly loading me down with a weak form of techno-babble in order to get me to spend more money.
When I got home, I decided I wanted to know more about the specification because I had felt that I was made dumber by the conversation I’d just had. So here is the real story.
Under the HDMI 1.3 spec, you have two categories of cable: 1 and 2. Category 1 is tested to operate reliably at 74.5 MHz and Category 2 is tested to operate reliably at 340 MHz. This has nothing to do with a 60 or 120 Hz refresh rate (which is what I assumed the Best Buy salesman was feeding me based on his discussion of screen flicker) and everything to do with the speed at which you can pump data over the line. Also, they are typically not the same gauge wire as had been explained to me at the store. The Category 2 cable’s wires are just slightly thicker.
On paper, Category 2 is typically what you should use with 1080P resolution if you’re dealing with a fair cable run (15 meters or so) due to cable quality, materials, wire gauge, cross talk, shielding and attenuation concerns. However, at a measly 6 feet (roughly 2 meters), the Category 1 cable will work just fine with no noticeable loss of quality even though it is not rated to do so.
This was proven out when I connected the player to the TV and fired up my brand new copy of Avatar. I watched the entire movie front to back and suffered not the slightest impact on performance.
The moral of the story: regardless of you technical knowledge or expertise, don’t let some wannabe tech schmuck in a store scare you into buying things that you don’t need. Common sense dictates that $80 for a simple 6 foot length of shielded cable with 19 pin connectors is completely idiotic. It’s simple copper wiring, not exotic material harvested from the planet Venus. Educate yourself and do not be intimidated by some guy in a Geek Squad shirt throwing buzzword terms at you. Reality Check: these guys work at Best Buy. Their shirts could say Nobel Prize Winner but the fact remains. They’re just a quick step removed from Camera Salesman at Target.
The Public Servant is a blog written by Geoffrey Greer. The focus of the blog is to identify the ways in which we as a society are failing ourselves and our children by running them through an ineffective and totalitarian education system. In his writings, he focuses on defining solutions for the problems he discusses rather than just attacking a perceived nebulous and corrupt over-entity. It is an excellent piece of work and I hope that you will give it a look.
I literally hear this all the time: Windoze, Winblows, Mickeysoft, etc, etc, etc. Day in and day out we are inundated with this. I get an extra special helping of it at my job, where all of our systems are developed on a Linux platform. How many times can an engineer profess the total superiority of a POSIX system over Windows? One more time, apparently.
My issue isn’t that someone might find one operating system to be superior to another (or an application, IDE, SDK, or whathaveyou). My main issue is with the religious zeal they exhibit when making these claims. These people seriously get emotionally invested in this stuff!
This assumes, of course, that the person actually has one or more concrete reasons for his or her position, be they functional or sociological (one of the big arguments I hear against Microsoft seems to be that they’re trying to make money from their products *gasp*). In addition to this group, there is also a large mob of folks out there who parrot the aforementioned sentiment without really understanding the “why” of it. They figure that Linux users are SMART and therefore want to be associated with that group or culture.
The biggest and most limiting factor of all this is that people are devoting way too much time into arguing the virtues of simple tools. Just think about this for a minute: I can spend days at a time working away on a computer, churning out code or writing documents or any of the other unlimited tasks I could think up. When I’m done, I turn off the power to the PC. Where has the work gone? What can you actually point to that shows what the pay off for all that effort is?
The point that I’m making is that no matter what you do on a PC or how you do it, all you’ve succeeded at doing at the end of the day is pushing around ones and zeroes. You’re rearranging data that describes abstract concepts. Becoming emotionally invested in a collection of ones and zeroes that aids you, the user, in manipulating a further collection of ones and zeroes is irrational on its face.
A portion of this (I expect) may be coming from a certain degree of fear or laziness. Given what we know of human nature, ask yourself the following: Provided programming languages A and B, where A is known but less suited to a given task and B is unknown but built specifically for the same task, what language is the average programmer likely to use?
If you are looking to fill a position or staff your team, keep your eyes wide open for the person who has no reservations about switching over to language B. For all of us who are supposedly technology professionals, an alarmingly large number of us are unfortunately afraid of unfamiliar technologies. As professionals, we need to recognize this attitude for the crutch that it is and take the appropriate steps to eradicate it in ourselves whenever or however it manifests itself.
SteamEngine is a side project that I’ve been working on literally for years. I don’t attack it with any sort of regularity or discipline; it’s really only when the m0od takes me. I always seem to get things about 75% done before I tear it down and start again. What’s that quote? “Perfect is the enemy of Done.”
Here’s the link to the blog if you’re interested:
This program builds upon the original concept of my Flight Simulator. The Flight Simulator is relatively simple: it has a static selection of flight parameters that are chosen to mimic the function of an IRU. Taking this a step further, I put together a flight script tool that would allow me to define an unlimited number of labels and transmit them to any of our systems.
Flight Script Program
The thing that I love the most about this program is that it still has the ability to simulate a complete aircraft flight from an origin to destination. This was tricky to do given that I had no control over the labels that would be defined in a given script. To get around this, I completely redesigned my ARINC library such that the information necessary to encode and decode labels would be embedded into the label object itself (i.e. meta data). I then added an extra layer of abstraction for labels and gave them a parameter type.
A parameter type is some core parameter that the software knows how to update. Core parameters are those that are the most easily associated with real world physical characteristics on an aircraft. Examples of these types are ground speed, altitude, heading, etc.
So let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a core parameter type for GROUND_SPEED and that there are three different ARINC 429 labels that express this parameter (using different encoding, resolution, and so on). This is easily handled by my library. As the consumer of the library, the main application only needs to make a call to the library to set ground speed to a given value (200 knots, for example). The library will recognize this as a core parameter and assign the value to any of the underlying ARINC labels that are tied to ground speed. Because the ARINC label object class is data aware, it will know how to take that value and encode it properly as a 32 bit word.
All of this means that any new label can be added at any given time without the need to modify the software.
Other features include the standard visualization through Google Earth, manual editing of label data (up to the binary level), etc.