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Draft number two of this post.
How big is data? Human minds often have trouble encompassing more than a few orders of magnitude at a time. When the amount of somethings goes from thousands to millions to billions, it's difficult to really keep the whole picture in your grasp. This is particularly true of the sizes of quantities of data, which vary by many orders of magnitude even within a single computing device.
I sat down one time a few years ago and tried to come up with an analogy for the difference between the largest and smallest useful units of data to the largest and smallest animals on the earth. Unfortunately, animals don't have nearly enough range of sizes to accomplish this. More recently, I realized I could use length as a proxy for data size and give a fairly good idea of how big things are.
The bottom of the scale is 8 kilobytes, or 8000 bytes. This picked for both historical and practical reasons. ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer, only had registers but didn't have anything like a "memory". However, its immediate successor did; the EDVAC had a memory of about 8k in the 1950s (it was a room-sized computer). The Apollo Guidance Computer (super-miniaturized computer built in the mid-1960s about the size of a small suitcase) had an erasable memory of 2000 15-bit words or about 4k. The level-1 cache of a single integer core of an AMD Interlagos processor is 16k. So across the 3, which covers, 50 years of computing hardware, 8k is a reasonable starting point for the smallest amount of data storage worth bothering with. In our length analogy, we'll make 8k equal to 1 inch, 2.5 cm, or about the width of a person's thumb at the first knuckle.
A high-density 3.5-inch floppy disk is 1.44 MB. The analagous length is 180 inches, or about the length of a mid-sized sedan.
A digital photo is usually 2 to 3 MB; the analogous length is about that of a bus or a truck.
A CD is 650 MB. The analogous length is about 81,000 inches, 6700 feet, or a mile and a quarter.
A DVD is 4.7 GB, analagous length is 588,000 inches, or 9.3 miles. It's about the length of Manhattan island; you can drive that in 10 minutes on a highway.
As of this writing, the middle size option of both the middle iPad Mini and iPhone is 32GB; this is also a fairly common size of SD card. The analagous length is 4 million inches, or 63 miles; about an hour's drive.
A reasonable hard drive in a new laptop is 250 GB. The analogous length is 31 million inches which is about 500 miles. That's the distance between Boston and Washington DC, or between London and Edinburgh; about what you can drive in a car in a very long day.
Around the biggest single hard drive that you can buy in a retail store today (as of early 2013) is 4 Terabytes. The analagous length is 500 million inches or 7900 miles, or about 1/3 of the circumference of the earth.
So the ratio of the sizes of the smallest useful amount of data and the largest reasonable single chunk of data is the same as the difference between the width of someone's thumb and 1/3 of the way around the earth. There you have it.
I'm a pack rat; this comes as no surprise to anyone who's ever been in my house or garage or office. I tend to collect things that I want to use later. Often the net effect is that I end up having to throw stuff out later, frequently enough if I want something I can fine the one I used to have and put it to work.
I'm like that with physical things and with data. I have data disks that I was using regularly almost 25 years ago. So this blog post by data preservationist Jason Scott about the end of floppies came as a bit of a rude shock. I'd been carrying lots of old floppies with stuff that I used to use, and it never occured to me that I wouldn't be able to just throw the disk in a machine and read it.
I read that post last fall, when it was more than a year old. That really scared me, so I've been sort of vaguely tryin to get set up to pull data off of disks since then. I had the setup ready about a month ago but since then I've been rather busy. Today my wife is in Knoxville and my plane is in Lexington and broken, so I had time to start seriously feeding floppies into the machine.
The results were actually pretty good. The 5 1/4 floppies actually did better; there were only a few that I couldn't get a full image from. The 3.5 disks didn't do as well, but I was able to get full images off of about 2/3 of them, and partial images off of several more. I have 10 or so that just don't want to read in the drive, so I may work harder on those, or I may not.
Most of what I'd like to preserve are game files, and I got at least one clean copy of all of those. The other thing is images. A lot of the photos that I took in graduate school were on floppies, because the camera that I used was a Sony Mavica that recorded onto floppies. I'm pleased that I pulled images from several of those disks, so I have images of stuff that I haven't seen in 10 years.
Feeding disks into the machine
read read read...
Here's me, much younger and thinner with more hair. This is on the
balcony of my last graduate school apartment. The laptop is the one
my group bought me. It's an original iBook. I lived in this
apartment August of 2000 to July of 2002.
I didn't realize I had any photos of this car. This is my 1986 Ford
Escort EXP that I drove from the fall of 1996 to the spring of 2002.
Fantastic road car. It died the day that I interviewed for my
(current) job. It's parked in front of a storage unit. I'm about to
leave for the big summer run of my graduate school experient in the
spring of 2000.
Apparently, even then I was prone to taking photos of the highway.
This is probably driving towards West Virginia.
These 11 cards (and the corresponding ones in the other crate) were
what made my graduate school experiment possible. These cards
implement a wire-OR of the results of 352 comparators and put the
result out the orange cable on the right. My biggest worry between
1998 and 2000 was making sure that this piece of equipment did its
job.
Here's me in the Hall B control room at Jefferson Lab sometime in the
summer of 2000. I find this photo terribly amusing; I'm doin stuff on
my laptop surrounded by larger and much more capable screens. So that
hasn't changed at least. :-)
As I wrote in the previous entry, I was pretty sure that the Apollo GPS in the plane actually worked, but before using that unit as guidance, I wanted to verify that and get some practice.
So I went out to the hangar and set things up so that I could run the
GPS without draining the battery. I put a DC power supply on the left
wing and wired it into the supply wiring.
You can see below that the positive lead is clamped on the supply side
of the starter solenoid and the ground clamp is clamped on a handy
engine mount bolt:
The first test--when I turn the avionics on, had the Apollo enunciator
been left in Nav mode?
Yes! Now, with it switched into GPS mode
The GPS actually works and drives the CDI! Yay!
Here are all the lights on the announciator panel, by the way (shown
by pushing the "push to test" button). What
they all are and what they do is a topic for another post.
Now to put the GPS in simulator mode and "fly" it around. Here's
the map screen leaving Knoxville to the west toward Rockwood.
and the nav screen
Here's "flying" an approach, which is a flight plan flying to the
initial point of the approach and then a sharp turn left.
The screen tech on the Apollo is apparently suseptible to screen-burn,
as you can see by the variations in brightness here.
One other thing I did while I was out at the hangar that day was to
put on "step here" stickers. The flap at the back of the wing won't
support a person's weight and stepping on it is hard, so it's marked
with "NO STEP" stickers:
The flap itself is smooth, however, until that day I hadn't been able
to get anything to stick to the actual upper wing surface which has
no-slip stuff on it (it's fairly bumpy and stickers don't like it).
Well I sanded two spots smooth enough that the STEP HERE stickers
would stick to those spots, so now the combination gets the point
across.
My plane has two GPSs. This is not the way I would have designed the panel going in. Typically the planes I've flown have been one aviation GPS unit (which typically has a radio in it) and a communication radio with land-based radio navigation. That gives a certain redundancy; GPS for its nice features and the navigation radio for its.
Up until 10-odd years ago, I suspect my plane had the usual radio-based navigation devices in it. At some point someone installed an Apollo GX-60. The GX60 is a communication radio (but not a NAV radio) and it's an IFR-rated GPS, including being able to do non-precision GPS IFR approaches. It was a very very nice piece of gear for 1999.
At some later point, someone else (I think the guy I bought it from) also put in a Garmin 430W. Like the Apollo, the Garmin is a com radio, it can do IFR en-route and non-precision IFR approaches. Unlke the Apollo, it can use radio navigation both for en-route (VOR) and precision approaches (ILS). The Garmin also has a slightly bigger and color screen, and is just generally more sophisticaed and has more features.
My general intention when buying the plane and when initially flying it was to use the Garmin as my primary guidance and have the Apollo for backup. The Garmin is the nicer GPS, plus several of the club airplanes that I've flown have had a 430 or its big brother the 530, so I'm very familiar with how that family of GPSs operate. The Apollo was new gear to me. My plan was to mostly fly with the Garmin and ignore the Apollo.
However--there's something wrong with the Garmin, it seems. Four times now, it's done a full reboot for no reason that I could discern. It didn't stay powered down at all, just went to the initial startup screen. It happened twice as I was doing my initial training; they tighened the connects, and thought that was it. Then it failed again tens of hours later. I thought perhaps it was one of the memory cards...but now it's failed with the other one.
After the third failure I realized that I really couldn't depend on the Garmin for primary guidance for IFR flying. When it resets the currrentl flight plan gets erased, so if your'e flying IFR if it resets you're suddenly in the clouds and your magenta line is gone. Fortunately, the Apollo can ALSO be used for IFR flight as primary guidance. When I was having the realization about the Garmin, unfortunately, there had been something wrong with the Apollo as well (or so I thought).
Traditional radio navigation instruments typically had guidance in one dimension; they would tell you how far you were from the center of a cerrtain line (typically extending out from the center of a radio beacon). The instrument that shows how far you are from the center of where you want to be and which direction is called a "Course Deviation Indicator" or CDI. GPSs have carried that tradition forward. Aircraft panel-mount GPS units typically have a CDI that tell you how far you are from the center of the intended track.
You can see my two GPSs and their corresponding CDIs in this photo:
The Garmin 430W GPS is on top on the right, marked with the green "A",
and the dotted line goes to its CDI in the upper left. The Apollo is
by the green "B" and its CDI is in the lower left.
Flying down to Florida (to drop off my Mooney instructor) and flying the plane back home, the CDI for the Apollo didn't work. Since I was using the Garmin, I didn't really care. However, once I realized I was going to have to start usin the Apollo for primary guidance, the CDI not working was a problem. Aside from being nice to have, the CDI is REQUIRED to work if you're using that GPS to fly approaches. So without the CDI for the Apollo working correctly, I was looking at having an airplane with no safe legal way to fly IFR.
So I spent a few days grumbling about this and trying to figure out what things to check that weren't working, and what wiring to look at. I was looking at the wiring in an installation manual for the Apollo, when I noticed something I hadn't thought of. The Garmin has its own CDI, made by Garmin. The Garmin product is advanced enough that it assumes that it's the primary guidance in the airplane. However, the Apollo is enough older that it probably doesn't. The CDI wiring for the Apollo goes through an annuciator/selector panel, so that you can have the same CDI reading navigation signals from a radio navigation device (but not at the same time; you have to select one). It occured to me in the middle of the night as I was stewing about this that it was JUST possible that somehow the selector switch had been set to "NAV" rather than "GPS", and so the CDI was fine but since there's no navigation radio in the airplane, the CDI appeared dead because IT HAD NO INPUT.
So the miracle of being an obsessive documentation photographer, I
pulled out my phone and looked at the photos I took of the panel on
the trip home and found this:
Yay! The CDI was broken because I didn't engage it! (Duh.)
So--I spent a good amount of time over the following two weeks, including some ground simulator time and actual flight time getting used to the Apollo GPS. I read the manual voraciously and I'm pretty comfortable with it now. There are definitely things about it that are better than the Garmin interface. But now that I'm confortable with it, I'm fully confident (and legal) in flying IFR with the Apollo GPS as my primary guidance and flying GPS approaches with it.
My wife and I were taking our first big trip in the airplane. We were flying from Illinois back home, but the last quarter of the trip had dodgy weather, so we stopped to check the weather in Lexington. The weather was still dodgy, so we stayed the night and got ready to leave the next morning. And when I went to do the run-up check, the right magneto was dead. Poopy (and other four-letter words).
So...we rented a car and drove home, and then I went up the next week
so that I could talk to the mechanic. It took a couple of days to get
scheduled. Here's a look down inside the engine at the back of the
magneto:
The black thing on the right is the magneto. The lead going to it is
the shielded wire that comes from the ignition switch. It looks to me
like it's almost twisted off, but apparently it's fine. You can see
hte bracket in the center of the picture that in a Mooney makes it
hard to get the magneto out easily. The bracket holds the propellor
speed governor in place; that's the thing sort of to the left.
They looked at it and did a bunch of diagnostics Tuesday and
yesterday. It turns out that the magneto cable is fine, the magneto
itself failed, so they're sending it off for overhaul. So the plane
is sitting in tiedown at Lexington. :-(
Waiting for the mechanic to fix it happens to every airplane owner; I was just hoping it would be later rather than sooner.
My wife and I took our first big trip in the airplane over the last couple of weeks. Yay! During the trip, the plane manifested two major problems. Boo!
I'll go into the plane problems some other time. Because of the delays, we ended up renting many more cars to get around than we expected to. Since I'm sitting a hotel room waiting for the airplane to be fixed, I might as well put phots of groovy instrument panels up.
The first car we rented was a Hundai Elantra. I seem to remember that I've rented these before, and this one was no exception. A nice driving, small, elegant car. I really really like the instrument panel. Partially "analog" gauges, partially digital bar meters. A nice mix; it's clear that they thought about it.
Here's the instrument cluster:
Top center has the gear indicator. To its left, temperature gauge as
a bar graph, fuel on the right. Tach and speedo are "analog"
needles. (I put analog in quotes because I'm sure they're being
processed by the car computer and output as a digital-to-analog signal
rather than being physically attached to anything in the car).
Here are some of the warning lights. Standard analog lights. This
shows the temperature gauge just as the car is started. I took a
photo with absolutely all of the engine lights, but my phone camera
has been flaking out recently and apparently I lost a bunch of those
photos.
And again, with the engine cold. The "ECO" light here puzzles me;
there's a corresponding button on the left of the panel to turn it on
and off. I'm not sure what it is for.
This panel was by far the best of the three cars that we drove. Renting the Hundai was on purpose; we wanted a car to get around the city. Flying home, weather was dodgy so we stopped at the big Lexington airport to check weather. It hadn't improved, so we rented a car and stayed the night. That car was a Honda Civic. It had weird space-age 3D things in the front of the main panel that didn't actually do anything. It was very weird.
The last one, which I'm still driving now, is odd. It's a Chrysler 200. It's as if the design hadn't been updated since about 1985. There are LEDs on the panel, but only a couple. There is an analog clock top center of the center stack. It's an odd car. It's nice to drive, but it's a very odd feature set.
This post is actually a draft. The real post will probably also be a separate page on the site. I'm putting it here to check to make sure the formatting is right and stuff.
How big is data? Human minds often have trouble encompassing more than a few orders of magnitude at a time. When the amount of somethings goes from thousands to millions to billions, it's difficult to really keep the whole picture in your grasp. This is particularly true of the sizes of quantities of data, which vary by many orders of magnitude even within a single computing device.
I sat down one time a few years ago and tried to come up with an analogy for the difference between the largest and smallest useful units of data to the largest and smallest animals on the earth. Unfortunately, animals don't have nearly enough range of sizes to accomplish this. More recently, I realized I could use length as a proxy for data size and give a fairly good idea of how big things are.
The bottom of the scale is 8 kilobytes, or 8000 bytes. This picked for both historical and practical reasons. ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer, only had registers but didn't have anything like a "memory". However, its immediate successor did; the EDVAC had a memory of about 8k in the 1950s (it was a room-sized computer). The Apollo Guidance Computer (super-miniaturized computer built in the mid-1960s about the size of a small suitcase) had an erasable memory of 2000 15-bit words or about 4k. The level-1 cache of a single integer core of an AMD Interlagos processor is 16k. So across the 3, which covers, 50 years of computing hardware, 8k is a reasonable starting point for the smallest amount of data storage worth bothering with. In our length analogy, we'll make 8k equal to 1 inch, 2.5 cm, or about the width of a person's thumb at the first knuckle.
A high-density 3.5-inch floppy disk is 1.44 MB. The analagous length is 180 inches, or about the length of a mid-sized sedan.
A digital photo is usually 2 to 3 MB; the analogous length is about that of a bus or a truck.
A CD is 650 MB. The analogous length is about 81,000 inches, 6700 feet, or just over a mile.
A DVD is 4.7 GB, analagous length is 588,000 inches, or 9.3 miles. It's about the length of Manhattan island.
A reasonable hard drive in a new laptop is 250 GB. The analogous length is 31 million inches which is about 500 miles. That's the distance between Boston and Washington DC, or between London and Edinburgh.
Around the biggest single hard drive that you can buy in a retail store today (as of early 2013) is 4 Terabytes. The analagous length is 500 million inches or 7900 miles, or about 1/3 of the circumference of the earth.
So the ratio of the sizes of the smallest useful amount of data and the largest reasonable single chunk of data is the same as the difference between the width of someone's thumb and 1/3 of the way around the earth. There you have it.
This post is just to show the baffling seals in my airplane's engine.
These were taken at the beginning of November when I was looking at
the airplane for the first time.
A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I took a first trip on the Mooney to visit the rocket museum at Huntsville, Alabama. I'm happy to say she thought the trip was reasonabe; she didn't hate flying in the Mooney. Yay!
It was both of our first time there; we were only there a couple of
hours, but it was neat trip. We saw some pretty cool artifacts.
Here's me beneath the business-end of a Saturn-5 rocket that's stacked outside the
museum.
It's immense. For some reasons the Saturn 5s I've seen inside on
their side (at Huntsville and at Cape Canaveral in Florida) dont' seem
as big as the one outside that's upright.
That's a massive showerhead!
Not really--it's an early fuel/oxidiser injector for an F-1 rocket
engine; 5 of those engines powered the Saturn-5 first stage.
We rented a car to drive from the local municipal airport to the
museum. It was a Lincoln SUV. Very nice, the panel was really slick
and had a nice digital turn-on sequence.
It drove nicely, and was very comfortable. However, I found the
environmental controls difficult to use. It took us 10 minutes to
figure out how to turn on the air conditioning.
Oh, and I never really thought of why it was called the Redstone
missle or the Redstone arsenal. Becky pointed out the dirt--and
that's probably why.
Buying the airplane involved a bunch of firsts for me. First time buying an airplane, of course, and first time making an offer on one. (I got luck that my first offer was accepted). And there will be lots of other firsts as I take it on trips, and do other stuff.
I took a lot of trips down to see the airplane while buying it. First I went to the sellers place to look at it. Then to where it was being inspected. Then during Thanksgiving week my wife and I drove down to see it up close and finish up some business.
The money moved in November, and the plane was finally ready to fly
again in January. So I had to go down to the plane by car, and fly
the plane back...but that involves another person if I'm not going to
leave a car there. So my friend Wayne (thanks!) rode down to Georgia
with me, dropped me off, and then drove my car back. This is him
driving away in my car--my car leaving somewhere without me is not
something I see very often.
I got dropped off on a Sunday and we didn't leave until Tuesday (we meant to leave Monday but that's another story). While I was down there I drove myself (and my instructor) back and forth to our hotel in a rental car. The agency at the small airport only had a couple of cars; of the ones they listed off, then one that I picked was a Mitsubishi Galant. It was a fine car; firmly middle-of-the-road in all respects. I wouldn't go out of my way to get one again, but I won't avoid one either. Here are some dashboard photos.
Everything off:
Key on warning light test:
started and ready to go
later, all warmed up (temp higher, rpm lower)
And at night. This may have been the morning I picked up the airplane
Not much of a post, but I like to put things down about cars when I still remember them. More stuff about airplanes soon. With luck I'll blog more this month.
I sent a message to the MAPA list; some people had some questions about the plane and some of the accessories.
My Mooney has "Johnson bar" manual gear. That is, the landing gear retraction and extension is actuated by the pilot. There's an aluminum block in the bottom of the instrument panel that the lever locks into to provide the gear down lock. It's important that the socket in that block is round and holds the handle securely. The socket wears over time and the fit gets sloppy. I decided to go ahead and have the block replaced when I had it inspected/annualed over the winter.
Here was the old block (probably the original from 1967):
And here's the brand new socket that's now in the panel:
Here's the hand tow bar from the side; it doesn't even stick out as
far as the end of the spinner:
(I have the cowling off and a heat lamp inside pointing at the oil
sump to heat the engine in the cold. That discussion will be in
another post.)
Also, the tow bar is low enough that the prop won't hit it if it got
left on for engine start.
Well, the plane is home. The football season is over. We had been going to fly and have a big visit to Missouri in mid-February, but we cancelled because of weather. We went to Huntsville, Alabama instead (that will be another post). My aunt and uncle visited, which we've been trying to schedule for the couple of years, and now things have settled back down to a dull roar as the spring semester continues.
I've flown the airplane on a few trips now, but nothing with serious long-term parking. I put a couple of things in place in February that are important for road tripping with the plane.
The first thing has to do with the unique Mooney nose gear. Most aircraft have nose gear that has a very wide swivel angle; that is, you can attach a tow bar to the front gear and pretty much pull it any way you want. Not so in the Mooney-it only goes about 15 degrees to either side. It's not a problem when you're hand-moving the airplane, but if you put a truck-style tug with a long boom and the driver doesn't know what they're doing, you can severely damage the nose gear of the plane.
I never want to have to try to recover money from some place that bent my airplane because they were careless, so before I park the airplane anywhere for any kind of period of time, I want to have some mechanism for preventing someone from attaching a tow bar. One way to do this is to lock my tow bar to the nose gear. I bought a 1/2 inch bolt and modified the end so that I can put a padlock through it to do this.
Here's my hand tow-bar on the nose gear. You can see the head of the
bolt sticking out of the tow bar on the right.
Here's the end of the bolt that I modified by dremeling two flat
surfaces and then drilling through.
And the lock through the hole in the end of the bolt.
I realize there isn't a lot of metal around the hole that the lock
goes through; it could be cut easily. It isn't truly secure, but
that's not the point. It prevents someone from carelessly towing the
airplane without knowing what they're doing without talking to me
first.
The other thing I wanted to have before parking the airplane outside
for any period of time is a cover. This is from
Bruce's Custom Covers
for aircraft.
It covers the windows, the luggage and personnel doors, and the
avionics covers at the back of the engine compartment. This is an
antique airplane with a steel tube fuselage; you want to keep as much
water out of it as possible. It also keeps the sun from baking the
interior (and the electronics and the uphostery, and the plastic
trim). I'm very happy with this product. It fits very very well.
The main color of the cover is made to match the overall color of the
airplane, and the trim corners match the other colors. Nice.
The cover comes with its own bag. (Also note the "NO STEP" stickers I
put on the flap--another thing of the to-do list for the airplane.)
And in its bag, the cover easily fits in the hat shelf in the plane.
Here are a few photos while I was flying the airplane home.
Not great photos; we were losing our light, but here's a couple of
photos of me with the airplane after the first cross-country flight.
I stopped on January 9th to avoid yucky weather in northern Georgia
and Tennessee. The general region I stopped in was dictated by the
weather and how far I could get and still be in daylight. However,
the fact that the international airport code of Athens, Georgia
("KAHN") might have played a very small part in my picking it as my
overnight spot.
It was a very pretty day flying between the cloud layers.
This is Wednesday the 10th, looking east over the Great Smoky
Mountains.
"Far over the Mistly Mountains cold, to dungeons deep and caverns old..."
One last pic; engine gauges in cruise.
So, as of Thursday, the airplane is home. My former boss, who's a friend and also fellow airplane enthusiast once pointed out that despite the much smaller amount of money involved, buying an airplane is ten times as complex as buying a house. This is my first, and boy was he right.
This blog entry chronicles the process since November 12/13 when the money moved and the plane was mine on paper, but was still in Georgia.
By the way, the big negotiating item was leaking fuel tanks. I decided (on my mechanic's recommendation) to put bladder tanks in.
First, we taxi out, and the brake pedals on the pilot's side are totally uneven, to the point they will distract me. We taxi back, and the mechanics mess with it, bleed the brakes. IT's not perfect, but much better. We fire it up again and taxi out.
We do three of four very successful patterns. WE figure out a few things, but one big (bad) think is that the Garmin 430 resets twice, once on the ground while taxiing, once immediately after takeoff. We taxi back again. The mechanics take cover panels off. We test the charging system, no problems there. We decide to debug in the morning.
Tuesday morning: they mess with connectors on the back of the radios, tighten one. Fiddle with lots of stuff, including cooling hoses. Reseat the radio/GPS in question. Without finding a specific cause, my instructor and I taxi out, do a few more patterns. Radio is fine. We fuel up and head out cross-country south. We stop at X35 for fuel. We then proceed to his secret airport in Florida, and park the airplane for the night.
(By the way, during the last taxi-out before departing the area, I realized one new piece of information. The place where the GPS/radio had reset during taxi was a very very rough part of the taxiway. I realized then that the connection between the two times the GPS reset was when there was lots of vibration. It had probably had a not-quite-solid connection that vibration momentarily broken, resetting it. Tightening connections and re-seating it probably fixed it. It's been perfect since.)
Wednesday morning: I slept badly, so we got going late. We did a couple more approaches, and I'm all signed off. I head north with the airplane and stop in Athens Georiga. Weather up untli then was good, but got yucky farther north, and I wanted to stay in daylight. So I stopped for the night.
Thursday morning, I headed out early-ish, and found a VFR window to set down back at the now-home airport. I taxied in, and then my wife picked me up and brought me back to my car, and so everyone was home.
Phew.
Getting my blog back up to speed has been on my to-do list for more than 3 years. As of tonight, it's done. All my blog entries from March of 2005 through the present are all here in one blog. The photos work, links work. Long live the blog, etc.
I started out using the blogger platform in 2005. It was (may still be) a great platform. I'd already established my own web site at craigsteffen.net, so I quickly figured out how to get blogger to generate entries and export them via auto-magic ftp to my own site. That arrangement worked fine until...I think it was late 2008.
I think it was that year that blogger announced that they were going to discontinue the external-ftp service. So I decided to set up a different blogging software. I looked over some of the packages available, and I decided that pivot was what I wanted to use. It stored its files as flat files on disk, but could be configured with menus and stuff.
I was able to pull most of my old blogger entries into pivot, sort of, but the images never quite worked right. And I discovered that I couldn't make pivot do categories of posts, which is one of the things that I really wanted to work. So after a short time, I decided that it would be easier to just write my own software rather than trying to get someone else's to do what I wanted.
So I've been working on a set of php and perl scripts in my free time for the past couple of years. The blog that you see here is the result. Up until the past few days, the last time I spent serious time working on it was a year and a half ago, the summer 2011. Starting in August of 2011, I've been working on a different bigger project, mentally I've been busier and had less left-over concentration to work on my blog scripts.
However, I've been working on it a lot in the past four days here at my parent-in-law's for the holidays. Thursday and Friday I posted 8 entries that I'd been meaning to put together for the past few weeks. Yesterday and today I've been working on hammering out the script that converted the original export file that blogger created for me in 2008. Today I finally ran that and it was able to pull all the 450-odd entries that I'd had in the old blogger blog. This evening, while watchin football, I ran the script that converted the pivot entries, and also the one that converted the blogger entries. The embedded photos were located in different directories, so I had to carefully combine the two sets of entries to get everythin to work right.
So there might be a few nits here or there, but as of now, I have all the entries from all three major phases my blog has gone through, all working and indexed using the main interface, the one I wrote. It's a bit clunky, but it works. There are the originall bloggger entries, the pivot entries, and the current flat file blog entries.
Happy Holidays, everyone! And happy blogging. :-D