2 Airliner Crashes - No Fatalities

I think its pretty crazy that in the past year we've had two airliner crashes where the aircraft had actually taken off and then lost its ability to fly and forced the pilot to land --with all lives spared. Personally, I never had a lot of faith in dead-stick and water landings, but it does look like the good folks at Boeing and Airbus are getting better crash ratings for their airplanes.

• British Airways 38
• US Airways 1549

The Carousel

My job often requires me to take the complexities of ERP technology (large software solutions that run significant portions of many business) and translate them into meaningful value for customers. Recently, Rachael and I started watching a show on AMC called Mad Men. Its about a NYC marketing firm in the early 1960's. The lead character (Don Draper) is a marketing genius and does a great job connecting companies with their customers. I felt particularly inspired by the following scene where Kodak is shopping marketing firms to help them sell their slide projector "wheel" and Don gives his firm's pitch (remember, it's 1960).

Plug for my favorite Database

EnterpriseDB is one of the primary organizations driving behind the open source database PostgreSQL (aka postgres). I really like the PostgreSQL database because it provides a lot of the advanced features found in Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, for minimal $. PostgreSQL has a powerful play in when it comes to standardization, high transaction volumes, and scalability.

From a more industrial/standards adhering perspective PostgreSQL is a much more solid platform. On a low-level techie front, it does a great job at ANSI SQL 92/99 compliance (meaning queries can work across database vendors who comply), large data-set handling, row-level locking, and transactional support.

General user adoption and support was initially slow, likely due in part to the lack of a Windows installer. It wasn't until 2004/2005 that you could easily run PostgreSQL on Windows. Now that you can adoption looks like its climbing. When I was doing work on the vTigerCRM project, several of us made a significant investment in adding PostgreSQL support.

IBM just made a $10M investment in EnterpriseDB. Its encouraging to see this since Sun will likely abandon any if not all support they had for PostgreSQL since their acquisition of MySQL AB back in January.

Given some big-name backing, it will be interesting to see where EnterpriseDB can take this. PostgreSQL has interface portability to be a drop-in replacement for some Oracle installations; but I think that the maturity of tool sets and the database industry around PostgreSQL support has a long way to go before it will cause Oracle to lose any sleep.

Glass Maps

I flew a high performance aircraft tonight Cessna 182T G1000--it was the first time I've flown a glass (monitors instead of round gauges) aircraft outside of the A320 full-motion sim landing I once made. The glass cockpit is actually composed of two monitors, a PFD (primary flight display) and the MFD (mapping flight display). It's actually a lot easier than I would have expected --much more like a computer simulator/precision. Over the next few months I hope to get certified for complex glass operations.

...until then, I had my Curve track the entire flight, you can view the map here.

Dawn of the jet age...

Over the past few months I've been monitoring the development of the Cirrus Jet. I'm excited about what it means for personal transportation; but also recognize that the price-point is still a bit higher for most of us (myself very much included).

The range should be around 1,000nm which still puts a stop in front of most cities from Saint Paul. New York and Dallas would be in range, but Miami, San Francisco, and Seattle would require a pit-stop.

The avionics are stunningly simple. It made me sit back and wonder what has taken us so long with the wall of gauges that we currently fly with.
You can watch a simulation video using X-Plane (by far my preferred flight simulator) by clicking here Cirrus Jet Video.

VMware Workstation NAT

The other evening I connected a redirected port up to a virtual machine for a coworker to download a 10GB file. What should have been a 10-minute task turned into a two hour effort. What I learned in the course of that two hours (minus one for a cable-modem configuration issue) was that VMware Workstation NAT (typically mapped to VMnet8) has a very very slow throughput.

Using HTTP via port redirect in VMware I saw roughly 235Kb/sec throughput (Lenovo T61p, 2.6GHz/4GB). Once I released the virtual machine from the NAT'ed VLAN and onto the bridged interface, throughput was roughly 4,000Kb/sec. Thats 17x faster! --or should I say slower...

Suffice it to say that the stunning performance impact by VMware NAT shouldn't be taken lightly. 235Kb/sec is not exactly fast for anything and should be kept in mind if you're looking to offer NAT'ed services via port forwarding from your virtual machine.

Bug or Assumption

If today is February 29, 2008, and I ask you what day is a year from now what will you say?

My response would be March 1, 2009 ('08 is a leap year if you didn't catch it). I was playing around with the DATEADD method in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 today and realized that it considers Feb 28, 2009 to be the 1-year date from Feb 29, 2009. At first I thought it was a bug, but now I realize its more of an assumption. Here's the query I used:

SELECT
DATEADD(year, 1, convert(datetime, '20080131')) as "Std conv",
DATEADD(year, 1, convert(datetime, '20080228')) as "Chk Feb 28",
DATEADD(year, 1, convert(datetime, '20080229')) as "Feb 29 to 28";

Is there a generally accepted assumption that Feb 28 is the 1-year mark from Feb 29 when going leap year to non-leap year?