Category: Technology

I received my rudder pedals last night, in the hopes to learn to fly the helicopters in X-Plane.  I find that flying rotorcraft is far more difficult than flying fixed wing aircraft.  Here is why anyone would be insane to get into a helicopter with me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-3Dp6AGB64[/youtube]

This is actually me flying in the simulator.  My goal was to maintain a steady hover while rising above the runway, transition to forward movement, and land on the other side of the runway.  The first part didn’t work out so well.  Once I transition to forward flight, I can keep my crap together.  I still need to work on precise landings, but I’m beginning to be able to put down without crashing.

Hey, at least I did better than this guy, but I’ve done a few tries that had similar results.

Thanks to Instapundit for this great article by P.J. O’Rourke:

Forty years ago the pimply kid down the block, using $3,500 in saved-up soda-jerking money, procured might and main beyond the wildest dreams of Genghis Khan, whose hordes went forth to pillage mounted upon less oomph than is in a modern leaf blower.

It is an excellent story on American’s relationship with the automobile, which is now turning into the worst story of America’s relationship with its dysfunctional government.

… when you might be the one who didn’t have fish for dinner.   The two products I absolutely must have is this joystick, and these rudder pedals.

When I was a kid, I always enjoyed flight simulators, going back years.  I’d spend hours trying to perfect how to fly the various planes, but there’s only so much you can do with an 8086 with CGA (later a 386 with EGA) graphics.  Once I hit college I didn’t have time to keep up with my interest in aviation.  But last week I got myself a copy of X-Plane 9.

I have to say, home flight simulators have come a long way since I last messed around with Flight Simulator 4.0.  At cruise altitude, it almost looks like you’re looking down from a real plane.  I spent most of the weekend flying around to various places.  I can still line up with a runway and land without crashing, though I wouldn’t characterize my landings as always beautiful.  I did a flight from Newark Liberty International, following the VORs across Pennsylvania to land at Pittsburgh.  Then flew a Cirrus Vision from Roanoke, Virginia to Westfield Massachusetts.  Total flying time, a little more than two hours.  Then for no apparent reason, I loaded up a Piper Saratoga II, and flew it from Essex County Airport in New Jersey, to Martha’s Vineyard, at night, in low visibility.  Had to pass over the runway once, but managed to land the second time without putting the plane into the drink.

The great thing about flight simulators is, you can fly while drinking bourbon.  The FAA frowns on that in a real plane.  Truth be told, I think flying while drinking is probably less dangerous then driving, since you have a lot of time to figure things out, and once you get past takeoff and landing, the computer does most of the real flying anyway.  Your job, at that point, is just to navigate.

Another new thing in these newfangled modern flight sims is they have helicopters.  I found out I can’t fly a helicopter to save my life.  I can kind of take off, and get moving forward, but I can’t hover, and I crash.  The balance between cyclic control, collective control, yaw, and compensating for wind seems to elude me.

All this could possibly get me interested in real aviation, as I once wanted to get a pilot’s license, but I don’t know if I really need another expensive hobby.  And when it comes to expense, flying puts guns to shame.

A few folks were complaining this morning that they couldn’t get on the VPN at work.  I checked the phone lines, and they seemed to be out too.  I figured it was a telco issue.  Got Bitter up, because we were going to head to L.L. Bean because I am in great need of pants (I can’t be stealing Robb‘s gig now can I?).  I figured I’d stop by work on the way there.

Once I got there, I realized we had a power issue.  Nothing in my data center was on.  Called up the facilities guy, and got him out there, along with the landlord.  We had to get the subzero freezers out to outlets with power.  All the lab plugs were dead, and the subzeros keep things at -40C for a reason.  Normally they were powered off the UPS.  What happened?

UPS is totally dead.  Nothing on the screen.  Circuit breakers all tripped.  These aren’t small breakers, like you have in a residence.  It’s 200 amp 480 volt three phase power.  Takes a good bit of force to close them.  I try to reset one, and I hear a loud arcing sound.  Uh oh.  Called up the UPS company.  Meanwhile, we went and flipped all the breakers over to bypass the UPS and get everything on PECO.  I brought up part of my systems until I could figure out what was up with the UPS.  Went to L.L. Bean in the mean time.

Get back to work, and the UPS guy says it blew a transformer.  It’ll take some skill and time to repair.  Figuring we’ll be on PECO for a while, I brought up the rest of the room.  I’m hoping all the lab equipment is OK.  Those freezers were off for a while.  We also have incubators for cell lines, but those are water jacketed incubators and hold their heat very well.  Hopefully everything will be fine on Monday.  At least all my systems were fine.

Finally got the server tested out under a full blown Instalanche, which beats any load testing you can do.   I’ve received a few links from Instapundit since I got the new server, but never at a peak traffic moment.  This morning I noticed my server was running a bit slow, and sure enough, there was a lot of traffic coming in from Glenn.   My current settings were a bit too generous, and caused a lot of swapping, which is lethal to LAMP server under high load.   Scaling my max clients back a bit solved that problem, and we seem to be holding up to the worst that Prof. Reynolds can throw at me.   Not bad for a 300 dollar server!

This analyst doesn’t seem to think that YouTube’s business model is sustainable:

So what does this mean? It seems safe to assume that YouTube’s traffic will continue to grow, with no clear ceiling in sight. Since the majority of Google’s costs for the service are pure variable costs of bandwidth and storage, and since they’ve already reached the point at which no greater economies of scale remain, the costs of the business will continue to grow on a linear basis. Unfortunately, far more user-generated content than professional content makes its way onto the site, which means that while costs grow linearly, non-monetizable content is growing geometrically as compared against the monetizable content that YouTube really wants and needs to survive. This means less and less of YouTube’s library will be revenue-contributing, while the costs of delivering that library will continue to grow.

What are Google’s options?

Google could take a lesson from its neighbor, Hulu, and focus only on proprietary content with existing consumer loyalty and real monetization prospects. With its massive audience, this is a viable option, and a direction in which YouTube has already taken some baby steps. Axing user-generated content would seem to be anathema given the site’s roots, but it may be the surest way of putting the business into the black.

Alternatively, YouTube could implement a subscription structure for the site, either monetizing certain members-only content, or requiring users to create a paid account in order to contribute content. With so many marketers looking at YouTube as part of their viral strategy, this too could be a viable option.

I’ll be honest, I would pay for YouTube if they went to a subscription model provided the price wasn’t outrageous.  I would pay 40 or 50 dollars for a year’s subscription if it allowed me to embed video on my blog for all to see.  It’s a shame it doesn’t appear that the business model works, becuase YouTube is damned useful.

I’d say that this is the worst idea I’ve seen come out of the Obama Administration and Congress, but the list is so long by this point:

The Rockefeller-Snowe measure would create the Office of the National Cybersecurity Adviser, whose leader would report directly to the president and would coordinate defense efforts across government agencies. It would require the National Institute of Standards and Technology to establish “measurable and auditable cybersecurity standards” that would apply to private companies as well as the government. It also would require licensing and certification of cybersecurity professionals.

The proposal would also mandate an ongoing, quadrennial review of the nation’s cyberdefenses. “It’s not a problem that will ever be completely solved,” Rockefeller said. “You have to keep making higher walls.”

And the government knows less about making those walls than many in the industry do, and yet Obama is going to demand that I be certified with a license from the federal government?  I’ll agree to that when Obama, and the politicians who are looking at passing this nonsense can explain to me how to harden a LAMP server with even a quarter of the understanding of the process.

Yes, there are a lot of folks out there running IT systems who don’t know what they are doing, and a lot of them work for Uncle Sam.  There is no aspect of life in this nation that progressives like Obama don’t want to control.

Hat Tip to Volokh.

There’s been a lot of money floating around out there, particularly from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to come up with ways to fight Malaria.  A laser mosquito killing device is genius, both because it’s novel, and because it’s quite likely someone got a malaria related grant to be able to play with lasers.   I’ll tell you though, we could really use this in the summer when our Thursday air gun silhouette matches get going full swing.