I finally signed up for a Flickr account (http://flickr.com/photos/zovirl), and I was impressed with their interface. It is very clean and simple, so it is really easy to get started. The people running Flickr seem genuinely cool. As a quick example, the 3rd link on their help page is to an offsite list of tips for beginners. Offsite links on an “official” page are a good sign of a company that really wants to work with their user community, in my opinion.
It took me entirely too long to figure this today. Perhaps Google will pick this up and save someone else the effort.
I had a file in Subversion which should have been executable but wasn’t. I tried changing the file permissions and checking in the file, but Subversion refused to do anything since the file hadn’t changed. I poked around with Google but didn’t find anything helpful.
Finally the nice folks over in #svn on irc.freenode.net told me the command is svn propset svn:executable "*" filename. Sister commands include propdel and proplist.
Flying in flight simulator just doesn’t seem right without sectional charts. I looked around for somewhere to get them, but didn’t find anything great. Paper charts are available but they are expensive if you want a wide area of coverage. There are some other digital charts, like the ones uploaded to the AVSIM file library by Matt Fox, but they aren’t available in one package. So I started with the excellent collection available at aviationtoolbox.org and made my own set.
This package includes sectional charts covering the entire US including Alaska and Hawaii. Also included are all the Terminal Area Charts, which show more detail around large airports. These are the same charts that pilots use for VFR flights. Hopefully they will make your flight simulator experience a little more realistic and enjoyable.
I suggest downloading a browser plugin like FSBrowser or FSX-ionals to view the charts in-flight. (An exciting project to keep an eye on is FSM MovingMap. Matt Fox’s maps work with this moving map software. Unfortunately, the maps in this package don’t because FSM MovingMap does not yet support the projection they use and I didn’t bother to convert the geocoding information.)
I’m putting these up under a Creative Commons license. Check out the readme for details. The download is about 500 Mb, so I’m using BitTorrent to distribute it. The hosting is being done through LegalTorrents, which offers free BitTorrent hosting for content under a Creative Commons license.
Download sectional charts (You need to have a BitTorrent client to download this.)
I just realized I’ve been sitting on version 0.4 of dotcat for, oh, 6 months. Well, no longer, here it is. The big change from the previous version is that it (hopefully) does a better job of picking which nodes to keep.
Download dotcat 0.4