March 2004

<zab> "cvs rtag -d $BRANCH $REPO" didn't seem to really remove
  the tag..
<shaver>         -B      Allows -F and -d to disturb branch tags.
  Use with extreme care.
<zab> ah
<shaver> nice that it gave you an error message, eh?
<shaver> *shot*
<zab> god
<zab> these tools
<shaver> say its name, zab
<zab> THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER?

Mark Shuttleworth
is offering some Bounties,
including some on Mozilla-related projects. Get hacking!

My friends and I have strong opinions when it comes to CVS:

<phik> we only have a few really core requirements that cvs doesn't give us
<phik> atomic commits with unique names are nice (hey, grab patch-315)
<blizzard> phik: yay, atomic commits!
<blizzard> phik: i.e. patch sets
<phik> yeah
<blizzard> phik: I guess I've had to live for so long without them
    I don't miss them
<blizzard> phik: which is more or less like saying "I've been shoveling
    pig shit for so long I don't even smell it anymore"
<shaver_SFO> it's very much like that
<shaver_SFO> if the pig shit were on fire
<shaver_SFO> and screaming curses at you
<zab> and kicking you in the nuts
<shaver_SFO> zab: with cloven hooves

Had an instrument lesson on Saturday. Quick cross-country up to
Laconia in New
Hampshire. Didn't learn too much, but it was good to get some
practice in. Came back and did the VOR 23 approach into Bedford
partial panel which was kind of fun. Ended up a bit high, but not
terribly so. It was a good confidence building lesson.

The Bruce
Sterling Rant-A-Thon.

Oh, when I was reading that I had to go and look up the word Lysenkoism. Strange
that I was reading something else earlier that led me to a
description of the phrase Sound
Science which I've heard used on various talking heads news
shows (I think from looking at this definition of doublespeak,
but I'm not sure.) Today seems to be the day of disinformation
and the dialectic. Very odd.

Start your rhetorical engines!

I've been trying to track down a copy of an album that is
apparently very rare. It's called Scenes
from a Blue Divide (Live) and More by Richard
Shindell. However, not being a guy who looks for rare CDs nor
really looks too far past the rock-n-roll section of your local
mega-cd-stores I have little idea where to start.

Also, why do I not own everything ever made my Sarah Harmer?

Some of the hackers on the moz project have been doing an excellent
job of trying to make firefox integrate well with a gnome
desktop. Finally today FireFox's menus took a big step forward
and they look – at least as I can tell – native. I don't think a
casual observer would notice:

Problems in the menus at this point mostly relate to how they are
organized as well as using the icons from the theme instead of the
application-specific themes. There are also some subtle grab
issues as well which might be harder to fix, but most people won't
notice them[*].

*: If you have a menu open and you mouse around a
page you will notice that hrefs will still highlight. This is
because there's no native window associated with the menu bar and
we're required to grab on something which means grabbing
the entire toplevel window associated with the window. Because
you are still delivering events to the toplevel window, mouseovers
still work on it. It's messy and requires pretty low level layout
changes that I've been unwilling to tackle.

Check it out.
Sun is rewriting the same three apps all over again. Oh,
but this time it's different because it's written in Java.
The site says you will be able to run it from your favorite
portal, too. I'm getting horny just thinking of it.

Seriously, though. If you wanted a cross-platform groupware
solution that included things like calendar, email and instant
messenger why not use one of the many Mozilla products? We've already
got a great mail client, the start of a good calendar, we've had
an instant messaging client in the past. We're years ahead in
this game. Why rewrite the world – again? Sounds like another
distraction for Sun on the road to bankrupcy.
If I were a shareholder, I would be pissed that they were wasting
money on that.

Berkshire Hathaway is a huge company. It also has one of the most bland web sites
I've ever seen in my life. However, there is good content there.
Of particular interest to me was the Owner's
Manual. It's worth reading. I would also like to buy a share of
stock in that company because they actually have a reasonable
P/E ratio. However, I would probably have to sell my house to do
so.

When I was in California, Mitchell turned me onto Space Ghost:
Coast to Coast. Netflix delivered unto me a DVD today and I can't
stop laughing. And I'm sure I'm annoying jacob on IRC, which is
only a side benefit. For example:

<blizzard> I shall name you BANJO

It just goes on from there.

I had scheduled an instrument lesson yesterday because we were
supposed to have good instument weather today. It's early march
and we were supposed to have temperatures in the low 60s with
clouds and light rain. Oh. And wind. Lots of wind.

By the time that my lesson came around (about 4pm or so) the
clouds had moved out of our local area and there was a good bit of
blue sky. I could still see well developed clouds to the south
east, so I figured we could schedule a flight down to Martha's Vinyard and
get into some pretty good clouds. I was not disappointed.

Checking the weather, reported clouds at the vinyard were 100 feet
(!), good visibility and light rain. It sounded like a perfect
first ILS approach in real instrument conditions. There was also
a SIGMET
for severe and moderate turbulence in the area. Given the winds
outside, I could believe it. My instructor said that when he was
with the student before me that they had been bumped around pretty
good. He had kept his seatbelts tight for a reason.

Anyway, I filed, preflighted, picked up my clearance and we took
off for the vinyard. It was pretty bumpy, but not
terrible. It was just good skill-building weather under the hood.
Once we got above 4000 or so the air smoothed right out, too,
which was nice. About 30 miles or so from the vinyard we started
to encounter the clouds which meant that I got to take my hood off
and really fly in the clouds for the very first time. It's
amazing how your training just kicks in when you're flying and you
can't see the ground. We saw some beautiful virga against
the nearly-full moon and flew amongst the cumulus clouds while
were were vectored for the ILS 24 approach
into the vinyard.

On the approach, things started to get pretty bumpy and I got my
first taste of what it's like to try to fly an approach in
moderate turbulence while trying to look at the instruments.
There was this picture in one of my text books of an instrument
panel that was blurry from turbulence and I can only say that that
is what it really looks like. I was kind of surprised. But I
managed to keep the plane right on the glide slope most of the way
down and right at the minimums the approach lights appeared
out of the gray. It was just amazing to see the airport
appear out of thin air. (By the way, you do not know the meaning
of the word focus until you have attempted something like
this. Your world becomes very small and contains only eight
little dials.)

We landed and went into the FBO for a bit and talked to the bored
people in the office who were watching some really bad movie
starring the Governor of California. Once I had peed and most of
the high had worn off we went back out, picked up our clearance
and took off for bedford again. It was well after nightfall at
this point and the air was really starting to smooth out. I got
to spend a little more time in the clouds before we got into clear
air and I had to go back under the hood.

Smooth uneventful ride back to Bedford, except that it went really
slow. Indicated airpseed at 4000 feet: 105kts. Ground speed on
the GPS: 62 kts. It was good practice with the GPS which still
has a lot of features I'm not completely familiar with.

We flew the GPS runway 29 approach into Bedford and it got really
bumpy again under 3000 feet. Once again, good practice flying an
approach under really bumpy conditions. Had to fight pretty hard
to keep both heading and altitude at least somewhat close to where
they were supposed to be. It was windy down at the ground, too.
Winds were reported at 10kts. But I know that they were
lying. It was much windier than that. Uneventful landing.
However, I had this very nice conversation when I got down on the
ground:

    <tower> Did you really fly that GPS 29 approach or did you
    cheat?
    <blizzard> No, I really flew that.
    <tower> That was one of the best approaches I've ever
    seen.  Good job.

Kind of nice to end an evening with an uncoerced compliment. I
haven't had that much fun during a lesson in a really long time.
Probably not since I soloed least year.