The last several lessons however are leading up to my first solo which is arguably the most important mile stone in a pilot’s training for any class of certificate. As such the concentration has been on me executing take off, traffic pattern and landing successfully and if I’m honest I’m really starting to struggle and get frustrated by it. I don’t know what the root cause is at the moment, part of it is trouble maintaining alignment with the center-line of the runway, which sounds easy and trivial (especially with a 32′ wide plane on a 60′ wide runway that is almost 3/4 of a mile long) but I can assure you it is not. So it kinda works out that I get overwhelemed, frustrated, and end up over-controlling the plane…

I can drive my car with two fingers, or a thumb simply hooked on the side of the steering wheel and maintain position within a hand-full of inches at 65MPH with ease. I can do the same in a boat, but put me on final towards a runway and I’m ham-fisting the aircraft, complete with sweaty palms and 180bpm heart-rate. Time, which is supposed to be a constant seems to accelerate and all the tasks I need to complete blur together… did I make the radio call for the turn to final, am I high, flaps, air-speed, throttle, descent rate… whereas I can drive a car at over a hundred miles per hour, in traffic, with barely more than a resting heart rate, doing 80MPH in this plane is a whole different story.

And I think that’s part of the frustration. I’m competent in activities that seem similar at least when measured by speed or requirements of precision, but this is still difficult. I am sure that time and practice will bring the confidence and calm that I’m used to feeling in other activities to this and I tihnk admitting this to myself is certainly going to help but at least for the time being… it’s frustrating and difficult.

And deep down inside, that’s part of why it is so great. Things worth doing shouldn’t be too easy.

A brief summary of my configuration:
Lenovo Thinkpad T500
Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 @ 2.53GHz
8GB 1066MHz DDR SDRAM
Intel 5100AGN Wireless
Intel GMA x4500 video (ATI graphics disabled for battery life issues)
WD 160G 5400RPM drive, with dm-crypt /home partition

To start with, I upgraded my 10.10 installation by letting update-manager -d do its thing. The process was mostly painless (a couple of customized config files needed manual intervention but that’s to be expected) and took a little over an hour to complete. Upon reboot the system was up and running without any issues which is a testament to the continued work of the Ubuntu developer community. It continues to astound me how trouble-free the various betas have been at least from the dist-upgrade front.

I’ve been using the new Unity interface for a day or two now and while I’m happy that I don’t hate it as much as I did in the alphas.

The Good:
It is fast and stable at the moment. I think compiz is a little more power-hungry on my laptop than metacity was, but not enough that it is setting my lap on fire. At least from an upgrade perspective I have not found anything that doesn’t work that used to (I maintain a local apt repository of various changes and customizations for my systems, nothing that I had working in 10.10 broke in 11.04 beta). The work on the indicators has been very good for the most part, the Network Manager applet is quite a bit better than the previous versions.

The Bad:
Compared to the new Gnome 3 interface Unity seems a little clunky, probably due to the netbook heratige of the design though I am glad that I still have the minimize buttons. The launcher/dock/whatever thing doesn’t always hide, so it sits there taking up space on screen for no good reason and you can’t move it from the left hand side which is not where I’d put it if I had the option. The Apple-like menu bar is a little irritating, but really only because I think it is highly derivative and I am sad that we couldn’t come up with something better from a design standpoint. I also find the dash to be annoying to use but I don’t really know why. Finally I’m not sure why the new date/time indicator had to lose the weather. I travel a lot and had many different locations defined in the previous applet and having an at-a-glance view of the weather was a nice feature to have.

Conclusion:
I was really worried that I’d either have to skip this release or continue using the Gnome 2 panel interface after looking at the first couple of alphas but overall am pretty happy. I will try Gnome 3 when (if?) it comes to Ubuntu and see how it stacks up. I think it’s a prettier and cleaner interface but only time will tell which I like more. The amount of work that the Ubuntu community put into this release is pretty amazing and the fact that it landed in as good of shape as it did is a really huge accomplishment.

Obligatory screenshot:
Ubuntu 11.04 Beta 1

Update, 18/April/2011 It would be really nice if they would fix this bug before shipping 11.04.

I enjoy international travel. I think that the more of this world that we can see the better off we are as people and the better we come to understand ourselves. This is certainly not my first time out of the country nor even off the continent but I admit this trip has a special place in my heart because I expect the sheer weight of the culture shock to be unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. I have been to the UK and Australia and as a native of a former British colony it really wasn’t all that different. Yes I had to drive on the other side of the car and road, yes the slang was different, and yes the money was funny colors and had pictures of the Monarchy on it but for all intents in purposes we all shared a common cultural liniage. Thursday evening (Japan Time) when I step out of the airplane I will be for the first time completely out of my element and I am excited beyond words to experience that for the first time.

Surfing Safely, from somewhere in the Universe,
Matt

As a primarily hobbiest developer I found the process to be fairly straightforward, though unfortunatly extremely Windows-centric. The primary debug workflow involves Eclipse and the BlackBerry device simulators, the latter being Windows-only. Trying to debug without the sim is a non-starter as the JavaScript engine will not throw any useful error messages while running live on a device. It is not wholly awful but I really do prefer avoiding Windows if I can reasonably manage it.

There are obvious Enterprise edges sticking out through the process though happily the new, fluffy, comsumer oriented image that RIM is putting on has really improved the developer start up process. Code signing keys no longer cost money, and getting them is basically a process of signing up in a web form and waiting a few days for the files to be delivered to your Inbox.

I ended up writing a small application that takes some of the backend data that powers my personal Status Board (similar to the Panic Status Board) and displays it on the phone along with some other useful data that I can get out of the RIM APIs.

I originally was just using jQuery to fetch the JSON from my status board but was somewhat unsatisfied by the performance of pulling the data over the macro network and loading it into the page every time the application loaded so I replaced that with an on-device cache and push update system that takes advantage of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server I have (RIM offers a free push service over BIS as well but I like the idea of using the BES’s encrypted transport) hosting my e-mail.

The push server side of the equation is somewhat poorly documented, mostly through snippits of Java and .NET code that other people have implemented and some PDFs from RIM describing the format. After some trial and error I was able to pull together a workable Python update script that fetches the JSON from my status board and pushes it to the handheld. This allows fast, bandwidth friendly, scheduled, asynchronous updates and improves the user experience quite a bit. I totally understand why RIM is pimping their push infrastructure as being a vital part of what they are calling “Super Apps”. Having the data come to the user versus making them constantly update it is kinda awesome.

I doubt this application will be useful for anyone else but in the odd case that it might be the code is available in my bzr repository, which you can view at: http://repo.ub3rgeek.net/branches/blackberry/files, the status-app directory contains the handheld application source and the push-server/status-push.py file contains the push application.

Over the next several years I endeavored to have more and more computers running for various reasons. Back before laptops became accessable for the average person I solved the portability problem by having computers all over the house so that wherever I went I had a terminal on the network that could access whatever it was I wanted. I think back in the day before AIM allowed multiple sessions I had 5 or 6 AIM names which I left logged in at each workstation. It sure made finding me, even at home, a fun logistical problem.

Sometime around 2003 I received surplus from a company that was moving an enclosed network equipment rack. Part of the problem of having something like this is the desire to stuff more and more computers into it until it is full to bursting.

Part of this desire is augmented by the fact that I tend to do various complex things with computers and sometimes you just need a number of them to get these jobs done. Thankfully computers have been getting better and better and you can cram a lot more things into them. Also since I started working with technology for a living I have started to get more and more interested in being a user while I’m at home as opposed to being a Systems Engineer 24×7. So I guess the answer to the question in this post’s title is this: I am both growing up and at the same time the faster better stronger computers are making it easier and easier to hide from the rest of the world my raging computer problem.

To help illustrate that a quick comparason: in 1998 my very first Linux server was a 486 DX4-100 with about 320MB of hard drive space, and a whopping 48MB of RAM. In 2011 my sole home server is a dual-core Athlon II X250 with 4TB (6TB raw) of disk and 2GB of RAM.

So, for your concideration, the last few years in pictures of my home network, ‘internal.ub3rgeek.net’:

2011

2010

Late 2007

Early 2007

2005

I managed to get away from the AOPA Summit only spending a few hundred dollars (resisting the urge to buy a Bose A20, somehow). I took in two extremely good and interesting panels, one on flying in and around Mexico and the other on FedEx Flight 705 by the co-pilot who was on board that day. It was a harrowing tale and I think I will always remember it. It is another affirmation that the idea of becoming a pilot is a dream that I cannot wait to finally fulfill.

It is always a good feeling getting away from home and spending time in different places. I don’t think that I shall ever lose the joy of traveling, but I am certainly going to try as hard as I can to wear myself out.

Now that I am back home the weather here has of course turned cold and I am having to fight the urge to just curl up and hide from it. I am hoping that the weather stays good enough so that I can continue my flight training.

I have logged 11 hours of dual received so far and nearly 50,000 miles aboard United in the last two years, over 25,000 this year, qualifying me for Elite status. All in all a good time.

Next year my two closest friends will be moving into his first house, and getting married respectively. If all goes well I will be visiting another friend in Japan and of course I will have to find time to fit in another trek to Australia to see my dear sister and brother-in-law, Pennsic, and whatever else comes across my plate.

Surfing Safety, traveling lightly.

I didn’t get to go to Oshkosh this year but I am making up for it by attending The AOPA Summit in Long Beach, CA in a couple weeks. In the mean time I am hoping the weather will cooperate and I will end up getting 2 or 3 more hours of flight time in before I leave. Some take-off and landing work would be excellent…

Take-off and landing is coming along, now that my instructor is more or less hands (and feet) off during flight I’ve had some confidence set-backs but I can feel it coming back the more practice I get in. Unfortunately weather and work have encroached on my lessons so I have not had as many as I would liked to have by now but I can feel a lot of the stuff coming together.

We started working on emergency procedures today and I can feel some of the aeronautical decision making stuff come together.

Having a couple-week break between lessons really showed, I felt some of the rusty-ness during take-off and climb-out of SDC (my home airport) but thankfully that started to clear up once I got en-route. I still have trouble with some of the landmarks, usually heading south for some reason but I’m usually pretty confident moving back towards the north.

Radio calls are proceeding pretty well, I’ve got a good feel for it even though now and then I forget bits (most often I forget the end) so I end up with stuff like “Penn Yan traffic, cherokee five five whisky is ten miles north of the field, penn yan traffic” and my instructor will ask “and what are we gonna do when we get there?” Oh yeah, land… heh.

All in all I’m still super-glad I decided to pursue this. The whole world of aviation is just amazing and being a part of it (as well as getting to use the big blue yonder that my tax dollars are paying for) is fantastic.

I really do understand why flight has for most of our history captivated us. I feel supremely lucky to be alive in a time where aviation is an accessible hobby.

So far the hardest part has been the time between landing and takeoff.

1.8 hours down… next lesson in 4 days…