Flying somewhere near Albany, NY.

I've been in the Bay area for the last couple of days for the Mozilla Developer Day, which was good. It was good to see a nice turnout of folks, some faces familiar, some not so much. Some needed to be put with irc nicks and some needed to be just covered with a paper bag (sorry, mosedale.) The updates were good and I think that it was just good to have people get together and see each other again. Personally, I haven't seen a lot of these faces in years, and I know that I was starting to feel the distance. I had some good conversations with people about various issues of concern and I think that we made a decent amount of progress as a result. As a whole I call the trip a success.

In order to get a cheaper flight out here I stayed until Sunday night. This leaves me with a couple of days in order to just screw around in the Bay area. One of leaf's friends was nice enough to to loan me his spare motorcycle, which gives me the chance to participate in a sport that I have not been able to really enjoy for nearly a decade. (Back between the ages of 16 and 18, that's how I got around. Cars are expensive to operate. Motorcycles, not so much.) So today I went out and rode the somewhat-cliche-but-still-fun Skyline Boulevard from Los Gatos up to Belmont or so and had a burger at Alice's Diner on the way. It's a gorgeous ride. Wait, here's a picture:

Skyline Boulevard

Of course, it's still February in San Francisco and it's not that warm, so I froze my butt off a bit. Well. My hands, anyway.

In continuing the orgy of transportation methods this same fellow also just got his pilot's license, just like me (I rode on caltrain two days ago so I think the circle is complete.) So before I took off on his bike we also went for a little tour of the Bay area. I got a number of pictures, some of which came out.

Look Ma! Alcatraz!

I've been looking through the pages at this site and here is what I have learned:

• They like pictures of penises. A lot. In fact, I dare say that they like them more than pictures of naked women.
• People are just not that creative. Most of the channel pictures are the same.
• If I see another picture of skinny-hot-lady-showing-a-thong next to fat-lady-also-showing-a-thong I think I'm gonna throw something at someone.
• People think that a fat retarded kid dancing is funny. Really funny based on how often this same image keeps coming up.
• Yes, your car is cool. Does it really need to be the topic? (or, I've driven an acura integra. They really aren't all that cool.)
• Mugshots do not a channel topic make.
• Quake screenshots are the next currency.
• If you put a condom over your network port, you will not be protected from viruses. Don't believe everything you see on the Internet.
• Old dude smoking a cigarette giving you the finger with both hands means he wants you to go away. Take the hint!
• There are lots of images in spanish, none of which I understand
• The pope is funny.
• Midgets can play basketball.
• Hey look - more boobies. *yawn*
• Michael Jackson and Gollum do look a lot alike.
• Bad teeth + camera == pure laughs.
• Goats can spice up any party.

This is from Gerv's summary of Mozilla events at FOSDEM:

    Alex gets the FOSDEM 2004 "cool tech" award, for his "JSSh"
    tool - an add-on for Mozilla which makes it listen for telnet
    connections on a given port. You can then telnet into a JS
    evaluation shell, with full DOM and privileged access, allowing
    you to interactively debug Mozilla's internals. There's also an
    emacs mode which provides additional help. It's _extremely_
    cool:

    http://www.croczilla.com/jssh

Freaky. But unbelievably cool. Or as graydon puts it:

    <graydon> tell me you cannot telnet into mozilla
    <graydon> please

We're currently in the middle of renovating the second floor of our condo in boston (which, just to muddle things is actually the third floor of the house and is an attic.) We're currently in the destruction phase of the project. This means removing the decades old wallboard that is nailed to the rafters. I'm not sure what it's made of. Something like shredded, compacted, cardboard, covered with at least three layers of wallpaper and paint (Shona claims there are more layers but I'm living in denial.) Whatever. Anyway, there's a lot of dust. You can pull it down with your hands, which is nice. There's also no insulation of any kind which is both a blessing and a curse. i.e. I've been paying to heat (sort of) the third floor which is only one inch away from the elements, but at least I don't have to pull the current stuff down. I don't think I could handle the itch.

From here it's just a question of getting the rubbish hauled away, of where there is a lot. Then get the windows replaced (maybe), electical, new plumbing for the new bathroom, get new walls in, probably flooring and we're done.

Check back with me in June on this particular project.

Also did a short instrument lesson this weekend. I kind of stumbled around a little bit with the one approach that we managed to do. We went out and did some power off and power on stalls under the hood, which weren't too bad. Did a couple of unusual attitudes including one which I swear to god, the plane was right over on its side. But at least I recovered well. Then we went out and did the NDB 20 approach into Fitchburg. I completely mis-read the approach plate, missing the location of the Initial Approach Fix (it was at an NDB/VOR intersection instead of at the NDB as I was expecting.) I did a little bit better on the second pass. It was fun, though, if a bit bumpy.

I've spent some of the last couple of days reading plugin documentation and puttering with the infastructure surrounding a decent plugin widget for Totem. I feel like I have a better understanding of how things need to come together, so I can get some real hacking done now.

I also did my required IFR cross-country last night. This must be a cross-country of at least 250 nautical miles that includes three different kinds of approaches. So I did a route from Bedford to Pittsfield, down to Hartford-Brainard and back up to Bedford. Did one NDB approach at Pittsfield, which I kind of fumbled, one decent VOR approach into Hartford-Brainard which went quite well and the final ILS approach into Bedford. The last approach went sort of OK. I did it without an attitude indicator and my instructor kept asking me to change the speed during the approach. It went OK, but not great. I kept the localizer centered, but failed to keep the glide slope centered. We'll have to work on changing speeds during an approach as well as partial panel approaches.

From here on out, I can use a safety pilot and practice local approaches. I still need to build a good 20 hours of hood time before I even meet the minimum standards in that regard so I've got some work to do.

For those of you who have been unable to stand the wait I finally got a copy of the security gaim errata out for Fedora.

It was a weekend of pretty intense flight training. I've picked up the pace of my instrument training because I did some math and realized that I wouldn't have enough time to have my rating until some time next fall, and I don't want it to take that long. I think it took about 11 months for me to get my private, and I don't really want a repeat performance.

Friday I went for a (relatively) long cross country up to maine and back in a warrior because I needed to build up a little time so I could get my rating to fly the arrow (more on that later.) Not much to report here except that the maine coast is quite beautiful. Also, airports with a little [R] next to the name of the field on the sectional need to be examined closely in the A/FD. For example, the airfield that I was looking at turned out to be an airbase, and they don't let just anyone land there. Namely me. I ended up landing at a cute little airport up in Maine called Wiscasset. I'll have to go back up there during the spring/summer. It looked like it was a short walk from some nice ocean front parks. And the FBO has the coolest name ever.

Saturday I had a couple of hours scheduled with my instructor and the weather was quite nice, although a bit bumpy up there. I got away with wearing only a sweatshirt on top of my usual compliment. It almost felt like spring. We went up and did the LOC RWY 16 approach at Beverly. It went OK except that I failed to time the approach so in reality I would have had no idea where the missed approach point was. That approach also has a missed that has an intersection hold which was challenging. My entry was OK on the hold, although I missed a twist once I was in the hold because approaching the hold you're actually flying in the opposite direction on the same radial as where the hold is located. In all honesty the thought of flipping the OBS did cross my mind, but I failed to execute.

From there we flew back and did the ILS RWY 29 approach back into bedford. Full stop.

Sunday I also had another three hours set up to do my final chunk of training in the Arrow. (At the place that I've been flying you need at least 125 hours total time before you can fly the Arrow solo.) We took off and went up to high altitude just to see what it was like. Doing stalls at ten thousand feed is a bit different than doing them at three thousand. The plane handles a bit differently. The controls aren't quite as responsive because there's less air. We did some power off, power on and turning stalls as well as steep turns. From there he showed me how you can convert altitude into speed in the arrow and just for fun we did the ILS RWY 2 approach into Keene. Keene is a neat little airport right near Mount Monadnock. It's right in a valley and it gives you good perspective into why departure procedures and staying on the glide slope and localizer are so important. My instructor says that in the summer it's fun to fly right around the top of the mountain because you can usually see and wave to the hikers at the top. That sounds like fun.

From there it was back to bedford and we did the ILS RWY 29 approach into there and stayed in the pattern and did cross-wind landings. I have to say that I was not pleased with my performance. I felt pretty clumsy at first - landing the Arrow is a bit harder since it sinks much faster than the little warriors that I'm used to. You have to carry power almost all the way through the approach and make sure that the nose stays down or you will bleed off speed pretty quickly. I was having a lot of problems keeping the center line in the relatively strong cross winds but I was doing better after a low approach and a few more turns around the pattern. I'm still not completely confident, though. I'll have to go out and do some practicing on one of these days that we have some stronger winds.

However, I have my complex rating now. This means I can fly a wider array of planes that are a bit faster than the trainers I've been in during most of my training.

Next up on tuesday is the required long IFR cross-country. Has to be at least 250 Nautical Miles. I'm not sure where I'm going to go yet.

Ken.

I triaged a lot of bugs today. I even got a little bit of hacking done on a Totem plugin for Mozilla. I've got shell code that compiles, but nothing of substance yet.

Having Mozilla / Thunderbird / Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox / Epiphany / Galeon / MYFIRSTBROWSER crashes with Fedora Core 1 when you happen to stumble across a page that contains Chinese or Japanese text? Yeah, so have most other people. Shaver got to experience the love that is fontconfig and true type and has a cute little script that will remedy what is probably the most common crash. Of course, I did do a Mozilla errata for FC1 that included a local fix for the symptom but people continue to download their own builds and are surprised when they see the problem again. I guess I can't keep all the people happy all the time. (I also appreciate shaver toning down my language. You know, for the kids.)

My old friend Dave Mason, whom I miss quite a bit, has some great pictures from his time with the Clark campaign. I've always enjoyed his pictures and his particular skill for getting good candid shots. (Dave, I think I'll be passing through North Carolina in the beginning of March assuming all goes well. I think we should hit Pepper's or something.)

The 2004 Mozilla Developer Day is going to take place at the Mozilla Foundation offices on February 27th. I'll be there. There will be donuts. Asa will also be there. And from what I hear, he won't be wearing any pants. So don't miss it.

I've finally written up some documentation on using XEmbed to build Mozilla plugins. In the past we've basically been limited to using Xt widgets to build plugins. Now, we can use a boring old GtkPlug to do so. In theory this should also make it possible to build out of process plugins, since XEmbed makes that a lot easier.

Anyway, this is just a start, but a good one. Maybe I'll stop getting all that email that includes the phrase "I've been reparenting my window into Mozilla and it's not working very well..."

Here's my list if features that should be included for Firefox 1.0:

• A mind-controlled UI: but it only works if you think in russian!
• Flashback mode: whenever you hear a helicopter overhead the browser will redirect all page loads to web.archive.org, circa 5 years ago.
• Stealth mode: using specially malformed headers, Firefox will load your web pages and web servers will be unable to log your vists.
• Mach 6 Technology: advanced compression algorithms will make the web faster than it's ever been before!
• Arctic compliant: you can land firefox on an ice flow in the middle of the north atlantic. Not sure why you would need this, but hey, we had some extra bandwith.

Sounds like Garrett had some fun. Once nice thing about being in a plane instead of a car when you're on ice is that you're still flying. So at least there's a chance to recover. I've landed on a couple of patchy runways, but nothing as serious as what it sounds like happened there. Sounds like he got off easy, though.

However, as to his severe weather comment, I suspect that wasn't the issue at all. It sounds like the problem was the runway, not the weather. It's unclear what the braking action report looked like. Also, what seems to a layman like a pretty scary landing can actually be a pretty good landing but because of crosswinds it can seem very strange. When landing in a crosswind a wing on my plane will regularly rise into the air. It's just what happens.

We had an enormous amount of fried food at our house yesterday along with Joe, Jacob and Phil. I think the mozzarella sticks were pretty good, even if they did end up leaking all over Joe's shirt.

Also an important safety tip for our viewers: Jacob is from here on out not allowed to have access to the tivo controller while there are many people trying to enjoy important sports activity on television.

<boc> What?  It was just a two point conversion.

Before the game I had another instrument lesson out at Bedford. This time I actually wrote up a flight plan, filed and picked up my clearance at the airport and had to wait for release. It's kind of fun to see the system working from the planning standpoint. It's reasonably simple. I don't really like the idea that you have to go back and forth and potentially negotiate for a specific route to where you want to go, but I can understand why they do it. It just makes it harder to plan fuel and time.

We flew up to Concord and did a couple of practice approaches there (the ILS 35 and VOR 12 approach.) I did pretty well on the ILS approach. No big problems there and would have probably landed fine. On the VOR approach I missed timing at a couple of points, but I probably would have been OK as well. I just need to remember to use my 5 Ts every time.

We flew down to Bedford and did the GPS 23 approach into there. That was the very first GPS approach that I've done and holycowisiteasy. The GPS gives you the azimuth information you need as well as giving you plenty of warning on the turns you have to make, the distance to the next waypoint and lots of other good information. I can understand why this is the last approach that we did together because everything else would have seemed impossible by comparison. All in all, a pretty easy appraoch.

For my next lesson, John suggested that I start thinking about the long cross-country that's required by the regulations. I'm not sure I'm ready for that, but it's good to know that my training is coming along as fast as it is. Scanning seems pretty solid now as does aircraft control. Not perfect of course, but good enough so I don't have to think about it all the time and can concentrate on communicating and actually flying the route I'm supposed to be flying.