If you haven’t come across It Gets Better, then run don’t walk to the It Gets Better project site. Watch some of the over 10,000 videos contributed by people, from all walks of life, with a common theme: encouraging youth who are being bullied, and perhaps contemplating ending their lives, to believe that life gets better after high school — and that they too should stick around to see it happen. The project started in late 2010, and no longer has the new-project enthusiam. Still, the passion of the messages and the diversity of the messengers is moving.

Number 6 is a guest appearance by country singer LeAnn Rimes with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (GMCLA). I found this video after finding another, even more impressive, It Gets Better video by the GMCLA. That will appear later in the countdown. This is a beautifully sung performance of a wonderful song, and that alone is good. But what really tops it off is the heartfelt, at times tearful, introduction by Rimes — along with the supportive but sassy interjections by the chorus.

This performance is an example of the world of professional entertainment, bringing its polish to the It Gets Better series. Bravo to Rimes and to the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles!

Enjoy, and see you again in a few days. No, really.

This proposal is open for comments from the public now.  I made a comment, which I’ve included below. If you are interested in the subject, I encourage you to  chime in also. You don’t need to be a pilot, or a US citizen, to comment. Just go to Regulations.gov and look for Document ID FAA-2012-0350-0001. I encourage you to read about the proposal, and consult EAA’s guides for commenting (PDF).

For those who haven’t heard, here is some background. Pilots who fly for fun with US licenses, for example me, need to be medically fit enough to make the flight safely. For most general aviation pilots, that means getting a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) medical certificate. Those who fly for pay need a stricter Class 1 medical, those who fly for fun can get a Class 3 medical. I agree with those who make the case that the money the FAA spends on the Class 3 medical, and the restrictions it places on pilots exercising their freedom to fly, is out of proportion to the small safety benefit all that hassle provides. Not that many accidents result from unfit pilots. A medical exam once every two (for me) or five (for you whippersnappers) years doesn’t really catch all that much. And both anecdotes and my own experience say that the FAA medical office imposes creeping burdens on pilots by a) demanding more and more doctors statements, each costing someone money, and b) delaying the issuance of certificates, grounding pilots. I would be happy if the Class 3 medical were abolished altogether.

The aviation groups who know these things say that the FAA is not willing to contemplate abolishing the Class 3 medical. (Someone has tried, and just got turned down.) They think, however, that they might succeed in persuading the FAA to exempt certain pilots doing certain low-stakes recreational flights from having to hold the Class 3 Medical Certificate. Two of the groups, the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA), just submitted a request for this exemption. They think they have carefully crafted it to maximise its chances of getting approved by the FAA. For instance, it requests an exemption from a rule, instead of a change to a rule.

Here’s what I wrote.

I am a US citizen and private pilot, resident in Canada and flying recreationally in Canada and the USA. I hold a Private Pilots License and 3rd Class Medical certificate from each of Transport Canada, and the FAA. I have about 220 total hours of total pilot time.

I am exactly the kind of safety-oriented, recreational pilot who would benefit from this exemption. And I am suffering from the cost and burden of jumping through the hoops for an FAA 3rd Class medical certificate, costs and burdens which I argue do not greatly increase safety.

I am in my late 40s, and have had two chronic medical conditions for decades. I disclosed both when I applied for my FAA medical certificate six years ago. The FAA decided that one condition required annual physician reports, and the other didn’t. Then, last year, the FAA started to require annual reports on the other condition. Complying with these reports costs  hundreds of dollars, and considerable hassle, each year.

I request the FAA fully count the status quo burden of a creeping rise in special reporting requirements for 3rd Class Medical applicants, in evaluating this proposal.

Alas, the EasyEclipse project appears to be stagnating.   They haven’t updated their builds to the latest version of Eclipse and language-specific plug-ins. (They still use Eclipse 3.3, current is 3.7.)  Their Eclipse build is throwing errors in the Software Update feature, because the latest plugins are too new for their old Eclipse core. They aren’t responding to bug reports and forum posts. They aren’t even responding to my message sent in response to their plea for helpers to take over the project.

In the meantime, the Eclipse project’s distributions are now easier to use. You can download Eclipse builds for Mac OS.  They have builds targeted to various segments of developers. They have extensive documentation. They have a update manager within Eclipse, to make it easier to stay current.

So, the question is: is the core Eclipse project now easy enough to install that there’s no more need for a project like EasyEclipse?   Is Eclipse.org easy enough to eclipse EasyEclipse.org?  If not, can the core Eclipse project learn lessons from EasyEclipse and become easy enough?  Or is there a niche for the EasyEclipse long-term?  I recently downloaded a current Eclipse build, and fitted it out for Python and PHP programming.  My experience gives me opinions on these questions.

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I think it’s great for pilots to visit towers and ATC sites, and for controllers to fly along with pilots. During my primary flight training, my instructor, Raeleen Ranger, made a point of getting me up into the tower at CYPK, Pitt Meadows Airport.  It was interesting to see their gear, and invaluable to put a human face on the voices who tolerated my bumbling in, and on, the air. I admire the patience and supportiveness of the controllers at training airports, like Pitt Meadows and Boundary Bay, who give novice pilots a safe place to learn and make mistakes. I was particularly touched when, after I flew my first solo, a CYPK controller was one of the people who came down to congratulate me. (more…)

I’m a big fan of flying, in just about every form. I’m a licensed private pilot. I’ve done skydiving in the past.   I go nuts over airplanes and airshows. I have dreams where I’m able to simply leap in the air and swim (wait, so does everyone else). I enjoy scuba diving and swimming in part because they let me move in three dimensions. My beloved spouse, however, isn’t really excited by any of these pastimes. We have gone scuba diving together. But she finds my powered small aircraft to be noisy, cold, and boring. Flying has mostly been a “me” activity, without her participation. She in turn has her “me” activities that don’t involve me. (more…)

If you haven’t come across It Gets Better, then run don’t walk to the It Gets Better project site. Watch some of the over 10,000 videos contributed by people, from all walks of life, with a common theme: encouraging youth who are being bullied, and perhaps contemplating ending their lives, to believe that life gets better after high school — and that they too should stick around to see it happen. (more…)

Ads Factory, by Romanian developers The Factory,  is a commercial component for Joomla 1.5 which lets you add classified ads to your Joomla site. (My client had me working with version 1.x on Joomla 1.5, but I see there is also a version 2.1 of Ads Factory which is Joomla 1.6 native.) There are quite a few places where Ads Factory includes geographic information: each user record can record a latitude and longitude for that user; each ad can record a latitude and longitude for the advertised merchandise; and there is way to make a “radius search”, i.e. find all ads within a given distance of a user-specified location.

These latitude and longitude values are stored in database fields with name suffixes “X” and “Y”. The user’s latitude and longitude are stored in fields “GoogleX” and “GoogleY” of the Ads Factory user table. Similarly, but not completely consistently, the ad’s latitude and longitude are stored in fields “MapX” and “MapY” of the Ads Factory ads table. The confusion comes in understanding which field stores the latitude, and which stores the longitude.

Latitude is, of course, the signed number of degrees north of the equator of a point on the earth’s surface. It ranges from +90.0 (the North Pole) to 0.0 (the Equator) to -90.0 (the South Pole). Thus, it’s a vertical coordinate. Longitude is the signed number of degrees east of the 0° meridian (roughly Greenwich, England). It ranges from +180.0 to -180.0. My part of North America is 122-123° west of Greenwich, so we have longitudes of -123.0 to -122.0 or so. It’s a horizontal coordinate. This is a well-established convention in many mapping standards.

Tidy Cartesian mathematicians like me use the convention of (X,Y) coordinates, where X is the horizontal coordinate and Y is the vertical coordinate. This is a well-established convention in geometry and graphics (though there are some exceptions).

My first interpretation of Ads Factory field names like  “GoogleX” and “GoogleY” was to interpret them according to the Cartesian convention: X is horizontal, and so stores longitude, while Y is vertical, and so stores latitude. Thus (MapX, MapY) would be (longitude, latitude), the opposite of what one expects from mapping. Odd. I was surprised to find some parts of the code storing latitude in X (the horizontal coordinate!) and longitude in Y (the vertical!), which was surely a bug. I was horrified when it appeared that every part of this code had the same bug!

Then I understood the convention. Ads Factory’s developer appear to have used the (X, Y) convention to indicate just the order of the coordinates, but not their Cartesian meaning.  (MapX, MapY) means (latitude, longitude), as is conventional in mapping.  X is the vertical coordinate, Y is the horizontal coordinate, in the Ads Factory context. If you remember that X means “first”, not horizontal, and Y means “second”, not vertical, the Ads Factory field names are self-consistent, and the code uses them correctly.

I haven’t seen any Ads Factory documentation which explains this, so I hope this note will help some of you Ads Factory enhancers who are using these fields.

Postscript: what did my client ask me to do with Ads Factory for their site?  Modify the radius search to search around the user’s latitude and longitude, instead of a location the user enters. Also, to sort the keyword and category search results by distance from the user. Quite straightforward to do, though it requires customisations to the Ads Factory code that have to be re-done everytime one upgrades the Ads Factory component.

I first came across Derek when researching what people were learning about digital legacies: what happens to one’s online persona and works when one dies.  Derek apparently coined the term “digital executor”, the person who has the responsibility to take over all one’s blogs and accounts and presence on the net on one’s death. I think it is a brilliant term. (more…)

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Eclipse Web tools editors (2.0.1) requires plug-in "system.bundle"
Eclipse Data Tools (1.5.1) requires plug-in "system.bundle"

When I would start up EasyEclipse (version 1.3.1 for Mac OS X, with Python, C++, Java, PHP and more support added), it would tell me that I had some outdated components, and offer to update them for me.  But when I opened the menu item Help… Software Updates… Manage configuration, I would get the ominous error alert:

“The current configuration contains errors and this operation can have unpredictable results. Do you want to continue? [Cancel] [OK]”.

I wasn’t able to  find documentation about this problem specifically. (My purpose in writing this is to help others benefit from what I learned.)

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