Starting late 2010 the PowerFLARM traffic awareness and collision avoidance product will be available. This will be the first FLARM product available in the USA. Flarm is well proven technology overseas and this is very interesting for glider-on-glider and glider-on-towplane collision avoidance in the USA.

The PowerFLARM dimensions are

• Width: 96 mm / 3.8 inch
• Height: 46 mm / 1.8 inch
• Depth: 94 mm / 3.7 inch

I think the renderings on the PowerFLARM web site makes the unit look slightly larger that it will really be. And as other have pointed out people may be assuming the that slot on the front of the PowerFLARM is an SD card slot when it is a microSD slot. I was giving a talk a few months ago on collision avoidance technology (transponders, ADS-B, Flarm, etc.) and wanted to show the actual size of a PowerFLARM device. There are no devices available quite yet so I made a foam core model and took that along to the talk. I just a shape cut out on the table saw and glued an image from the PowerFLARM web site to the front face.

Questions about size of the PowerFLARM have come up again on rec.aviation.soaring and in conversations with other pilots, so  I’ve taken the artwork I originally used for the foam core model and made it into a cutout folding paper model. Pilots interested in making one of these to see how large a PowerFLARM can just click on either of the images below to download a PDF file to print and make the paper model. The black model is for use with a photo printer for those who don’t mind wasting ink. The white one for others. The models are split across two pages and should print on US letter and A4 size paper. Be sure to check that the print settings are not scaling the print output. There are rulers printed on each page so you can check the output has not been scaled. Ideally print on heavyweight photo paper/cardstock.

I based the dimensions on the specifications on the PowerFLARM web site, I am not sure whether the depth included the front button or not, from some renderings on the web site it appears not to, so that is what I did here, but there may not be much difference either way. Thanks to Flarm for permission to use the PowerFLARM images.

The PowerFLARM unit for sale in the USA also includes a ADS-B 1090ES receiver and PCAS to detect Mode C and Mode S transponders.

The PCAS capability will provide visibility of a lot of GA traffic today and the 1090ES receiver provides great compatibility with future technology as ADS-B rolls out in the USA. To receive ADS-B traffic information properly the aircraft will also need to have an ADS-B transmitter, so the ground infrastructure knows it is there and can broadcast ADS-R and TIS-B information for the aircraft. That transmitter could be either a Mode S transponder with 1090ES data out or a UAT transmitter or transceiver.

For areas like around Reno, NV and the San Francisco Bay Area where I fly there is a high density of airline and fast-jet traffic traffic and having a transponder is critically important for visibility to ATC radar and airline and fast-jet TCAS systems. In those areas the PowerFLARM looks an ideal product to combine with a Mode S transponder like the Trig TT21, which can also provide 1090ES data-out capability, and that combined with with ADS-B data-in in the PowerFLARM will provide full ADS-B traffic information capabilities.

I am no longer on FaceBook and I do not want to receive any invites. I’ve was getting frequet  email spam from FaceBook reminding me to accept friend invitations  – repeat emails for invites where  I’ve already accepted those people as friends many months ago. I wonder if this is just happening to me? The email preferences panel crashed when I tried to save changes, and I should not need to be controlling this by setting preferences. Sigh.

I have been putting off upgrading this blog from WordPress 2.1 but I wanted to play with the WordPress for iPhone application so had to bite the bullet and upgrade to get XML-RPC support that the iPhone application needed.

My blog hosts at DreamHost [not anymore DreamHost sucks!] and I should have been able to use their nice “one click install” to upgrade my WordPress installation but I had moved directories and messed around with the WordPress install and had broken the ability to automatically upgrade. The DeamHost Web Panel One Click Account Backup made it easy to grab a pre-upgrade snapshot of everything including the MySQL database content. It packages all that as a tarball that I could download and save to a local system.

Anyhow since I used a modified theme and had played with other things I needed to do a full manual upgrade of WordPress so I followed the WordPress “extended” upgrade instructions. Once I logged into the WordPress Admin panel it let me know that it wanted to update the database and that ran fine.

So upgrading WordPress itself was painless however getting WordPress for iPhone running was not. When trying to set up the blog on the iPhone application I got the infamous “We could not find the XML-RPC service for your blog” error message.

Anyhow I looked around at what others have done and tried the following.

I checked in the WordPress Admin Settings>Writing panel and check that XML-RPC was enabled. But apparently this is not always enough and sometimes the box is checked but XML-RPC is disabled. So I disabled XML-RPC and then renenabled it. That did not solve the problem.

I found my solution here. I checked the header.php file in my current themes folder and made sure there was a correct tag–there was. Then following the rest of the instructions I used the WordPress Admin Appearance>Themes panel to set the current theme to something simple. I just chose the WordPress Default 1.5 theme. Then I configured my blog in the WordPress for iPhone application. Hurray! This time it worked. Then I went back to the Admin panel and changed the theme back to my custom theme.

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So I want to play more, and the Admin panel in WordPress 2.8 is much nicer than 2.1

I am disappointed that the WordPress 2.8 still does not support custom words in the spelling dictionary. This is the most painful thing I find with WordPress. Oh and you would guess that the WordPress built in dictionary would know how to spell “WordPress”. Bzzzt WRONG!

I was thinking of buying an external disk tray to mount the drive in while copying data off the internal drive and but then read the reviews at Maximum CPU and MacInTouch for the Newer Technology Voyager Q hard drive dock and deviced to go that route. I brought mine from MacSales/Other World Computing. At around $95 it is more expensive than a simple external tray, but it is also much more useful in jockying disk drives between systems. I connected it to my MacBook Pro over Firewire 800 and it worked great, including booting off the Firewire 800 to test the disk worked fine.

A small Phillips screwdriver and Torx T6 driver was all else I needed. I found the video below that shows how to do the physical drive replacement. I’ve had my MacBook Pro apart before so no mystery there but this is a great video.

The whole backup of the 200 GB disk using Carbon Copy Cloner took about two and a half hours over Firewire 800 to the Voyager Q. Physically swapping the disk took about 15 minutes. Piece of cake.

Oh I really hope they are screwed.

At least the SD card slot does support most popular SD size media as Apple clarifies here.

The MacBooks Pros have too little I/O connectivity. Yes I know Firewire 800 is great, but I thought these were Macs for professionals, not PC laptops. Now the 13″ and 15″ models have a single FireWire 800 port and two USB 2.0 ports and an SD card slot and that is it. And yes I know you just can’t count ports to measure really usable I/O performance but the sheer physical connectivity alone of the older MacBook Pros was very useful.  FireWire 800 is great but many high-end users need e-SATA based RAID connected via an ExpressCard e-SATA adapter or for various other wireless connectivity or other uses. The 17″ MacBook Pro has an ExpressCard slot and is a great laptop but it is also a bit too big for many users. Adding an SD card slot and keeping the ExpressCard/34 slot would have been great – or they could have even bundled an SD card reader if they needed the marketing claim for SD card support.

I live and die based on my one year old 2.5GHz 17″ MacBook Pro with 3 x USB 2.0, FireWire 400, and FireWire 800 and an ExpressCard/32 slot. A great laptop. And it usually has a SanDisk Multi Card Reader  in the ExpressCard/34 slot. That reads more types of media (if anybody cares about Sony MemoryStick Pro)  than the SD card slot built into the new MacBook Pros and much more importantly when I remove it I have an ExpressCard slot for other uses.

I am curious if Apple implemented a really fast SD card slot or if it works via USB 2.0 (like the SanDisk ExpressCard/34 adapter I use). Still that would not make up for losing an ExpressCard/33 slot.

Oh well with the matte screen only available as an option on the MacBook Pro 17″ many photography and video professionals and serious amateurs will see that as the only portable computer from Apple they can use. I thought at some time a matte screen for the 15″ MacBook Pro would appear.  I take that as more consumer apathy or ignorance about color and color management than Apple making bad decisions.

Anyhow  I pasted Schemp-Hirth’s artists renderings for the Arcus and Duo Discus XL over each other and you can see the large version PDF if you click on the image above.  This of course depends on the accuracy of the artist renderings Schemp-Hirth uses in marketing materials.

The shit storm that Sun is about to be dealt from stockholders and their lawyers is going to be interesting to watch.

IBM is clearly best positioned to leverage Sun’s technology and customer base. Sun’s got some things worth having, but many of those things also turn into boat anchors quickly. For me the highlights include Solaris, ZFS, MySQL, core Java, and one or two discrete products, but not much more. Sure you get access to additional customers but competitors like HP will also be pretty aggressive about going after those customers.

While Solaris is a dying franchise, I expect it still has lots of life left, so an acquirer has to work out how to leverage that ongoing business and how long to keep that platform alive while migrating the user base to Linux. IBM or HP have to do the same with AIX and HP/UX and other operating systems so maybe that’s not so hard for them to do.

In an IBM acquisition MySQL would join DB/2 and Informix and other databases in IBM’s portfolio. It would be a harder acquisition for HP or other acquirers. If anybody can leverage MySQL and try to pull together different open source MySQL related development projects its IBM. And I especially expect IBM Global Services to be able to capture MySQL related revenue better than Sun services ever could.

ZFS is impressive as file systems go, but Sun does not obtain revenue from users of the open source code base, and is more and more effectively forced to give away ZFS software for free. The Linux open source community will pick off more and more ZFS capabilities over time. ZFS is also not well intergraded with MySQL, and while doing so could offer some interesting capabilities, doing so this would be a distraction for the MySQL team who have enough problems shipping their base product into a maturing but still fast growing market of diverse needs and expectations.

Companies like BEA with WebLogic, IBM with WebSphere and the Eclipse IDE, and even Oracle (who now owns BEA) have extracted serious value and strategic mindshare from Sun’s Java franchise.  Sun has seen some revenue amongst all this expense. But examples like Java Mobile, are under threat by Apple and their iPhone (why should Apple help commoditize applications on their platform?). And I certainly do not believe any “give Java away for free and customers will buy the hardware” dreaming. I’d hope an IBM or similar acquirer would be pragmatic about cherry picking what parts of Java to keep in-house and open sourcing the rest. I suspect IBM is pretty much there already with a business model around WebSphere, they could float off most of the Java stuff and work to make it succeed in a more open development environment. Making Java successful as a community developed technology is an important anti-Microsoft .Net strategy required for the ongoing WebSphere etc. business.

The thing that sticks out with Sun Microsystems is the litany of failed and mismanaged acquisitions over many years. Somebody must have done a business school study on this. At times it is almost as if after Sun does an acquisition different internal groups all get to gave their own shots at destroying the acquisition, especially if the aquired company was perceived to compte with some existing Sun product or futureware.  I mean how can a company screw up so many acquisitions? It can’t be by accident can it?

So here are some Sun acquisitions that I have looked at more closely than others, or just know people who went through the acquisition.

NetDynamics — Sun acquired NetDynamics and early Java app server company . Even if the software needed major re-architecting Sun should have leveraged the early NetDynamics momentum. They seemed to just let it drop. And by way of disclosure one of my sillier career decisions was turning down Zack Rinat on joining Spider Technologies, that became NetDynamics.

Cobalt Networks — Sun obviously overpaid for Cobalt but then the political anti-bodies inside Sun took over and shut down Cobalt’s highly successful but relatively low end reseller channel. Forcing them through Sun’s reseller program, which casued many smaller Cobalt resellers to drop out and killed much of the Cobalt revenue.

Terraspring – Another company acquired as a part of the Sun N1 systems management “strategy”, except it was hard to see much strategy, or tactics for that matter. And Sun ends up with a product they are giving away. I looked at Terraspring while at VMware, not seriously, more to understand the lay of the provisioning and management landscape. I was underwhelmed. Terraspring appeared to have little technology or traction and was going to get steam-rolled by new generation virtualization enabled approaches. And I never understood Sun doing so many acquisitions with potentially overlapping management technology including Cobalt, CenterRun, Terraspring, etc.

CenterRun –  It seemed one month the word on the street was that the investors wanted to shake up CenterRun’s product strategy and then a month or so later they managed to pull off selling it to Sun. I’ve got to hand it to Sequoia Capital on pulling that one off.

Afara Websystems — Durign this aquisition Sun locked in some core staff but treated most of the staff like they were definitely not wanted at Sun. McNeally pissed many of them off in a “Welcome to Sun” address that  apparently went very badly, with people literally calling recruiters straight after McNeally’s presentation. Some of the Afara folks went on to contribute to the SPARC products but the acquisition was badly handled.

MySQL — At $1B for MySQL, Sun overpaid greatly, including $800M in that hard to come by cash stuff, and that should have been obvious. The MySQL team seems pulled in different directions and maybe they are struggling within the Sun culture. The departure of Monty Widenius must have been a blow internally; it certainly was a public black eye. The evolving mixture of third party storage engines and other open source MySQL related projects, while a fascinating example of open source development, raises concerns that Sun’s leadership of the MySQL market is going to get fairly nebulous. Sun needs a strategy to try to pull this together if they want to continue to grow their ability to make money out of MySQL. Otherwise these other projects, and people around them are going to cherry pick interesting sweet spots of the market.  Like Drizzle related activates for Web infrastructure. See some discussion on that ecosystem recently in Jeremy Zawodny’s The Real or Official MySQL? Does Not Matter! (except it does matter if you are Sun trying to make money on that $1B MySQL aquisition).

Some acquisitions, notably Kealia worked much better, maybe because of the cachet of Andy Bechtolsheim and his ability to drive a product to market from within Sun, even if it did take longer to get those systems to maket than initially seemed to be claimed (and those boxes were pretty darn nice servers).

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Sun you shoudl have sold to IBM,  but hang in there a few more years and Rackspace might acquire you, and can mount your logo on their mantel piece right next to that SGI logo.

I repeated this talk with slightly updated slides, at a Bay Area Soaring Associates (BASA) meeting on March 26th. Here are the PDF slides from the BASA talk

The talk does not set out to try to explain badges in whole, or be a cookbook for doing badge flights — instead I try to explain things that pilots seem to have trouble with such as observation zones, 1% rule, IGC flight recorders etc. This was prompted by the utter frustration I see people having either trying to understand the rules or having badge applications rejected.

Thanks to Judy Ruprecht the SSA badge and records administrator for some great advice and clarifications on things.

Here is a set of web handy web links

There are three “must read” FAI Badge documents -

• FAI Sporting Code Section 3 — Gliding
• FAI Sporting Code Annex C — Official Observer & Pilot Guide
• The IGC approval document for your particular flight recorder at the IGC GNSS Flight Recorder portal

Reading the approval document for your flight recorder is important as different flight recorders may have different requirements, for example whether they need to be sealed to the glider, whether the official observer needs to enter a security code etc.

Other resources are

• Soaring Society of America (SSA)  “Soaring Achievement” > “Badge Info” for forms, FAQ and other information
• IGC GNSS Flight Recorder portal for technical specifications, file formats, download and verification software and approval documents
• Just Soar  provides National Flight Database (NFD) derived airspace information for the United States. The default USA airspace data that come with SeeYou, Winpilot and other products are woefully out of date. The Just Soar data is what the SSA uses to check for airspace compliance on badge and record flights – it makes sense to use exactly the same data in your PDA, flight computer and in SeeYou for flight planning and post-flight analysis. Just Soar has also recently added TFR data.
• US Naval Observatory for Sunset times

Popular IGC approved flight recorder manufactures

• Cambridge Aero for Model 302, 302A and information on older Model 10, 20, 25
• EW Avionics for microRecorder and older Model D
• Garrecht Avionics for Volkslogger
• LX Navigation  for Colibri and LX series
• NK Soaring for ClearNav (IGC approval in process) and repair of older Cambridge flight recorder

Flight recorder calibration services popular with local soaring pilots

• Cambridge Aero for Model 302 and 302A
• Carl Herold, CH Engineering, Reno and Ely Nevada, cell phone (775) 230-0527 calibrates many types
• Craggy Aero calibrates many types
• NK Soaring for Cambridge Model 10,  20, 25 and the ClearNav once it is IGC approved

Popular soaring software

• Naviter for SeeYou, SeeYou Mobile and ConnectMe
• Glide Navigator II
• Winpilot
• XCSoar