Day 5: DevCon 1st day

 So today was the first day of the DevCon, my main purpose of this travelling. On this blog I can not talk about all the actual stuff being discussed there, as we are under NDA for that. But I certainly did meet a lot of interesting people. I am sure I will forget to mention somebody here, so sorry if I forgot you.

For example I met Bob Bernstein and Bill Womack, two people I know for years already from different internet fora for scenery designers. It was really nice to talk with them in person. I also met different users of the FSDeveloper website, luckily most recognised me from my avatar photo. I also met with Russell, the author of FSX Planner and we had some very interesting talk about his tool and scenery development in general.

And of course I should not forget to mention all the people from the ACES team I talked with during they day. Being able to talk so easily with them about things that we (as the community) think are important is a great benefit of an event like this.

I also gave my presentation today, or maybe I should say presentations as I had two different subjects to talk on. The first part of my presentation was about the FSDeveloper community and how we try to support other addon developers with the forum, wiki, etc. The second part of the presentation dealt with the OpenFlight conversions I have worked on in the past. Or maybe that is even more an example, my talk was more about the possibilities for conversion in general.

Day 4: Museum of Flight

Today I went to the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field in Seattle. I have seen quite some aviation musea by now (for example Duxford in the UK, Aviodrome in the Netherlands), but this one also has a very good collection. And also the volunteers working there are very friendly and have great stories to tell you about the aircraft.

Besides all the “usual” pieces that you will find in almost every aviation museum (like a DC-3, Piper Cub, etc) there were also a lot of pieces that made the visit very interesting. For example there was a section about the US air mail history (very interesting for an European like me). And also in the sections about the First and Second World War I spend quite some time. They had a really good mix between talking about the aircraft and about the pilots flying them in those sections. In the Second World War section especially the part about the war in the Pacific interested me, as that part usually gets less attention in Europe.

All those old aircraft with their beautifull piston engines interest me a lot, but in the museum they also had some very interesting modern pieces like a SR-71 and a Concorde. Although I have been in the Concorde at Duxford before, it surprised me again how narrow that cabin actually is. Another interesting piece was the old Air Force One 707, with most of the interior still in place as well.

And being in Seattle (and on Boeing Field) there was a section about the history of Boeing as well of course. That section was in the origional “Red Barn” where the Boeing Company started a long time ago. It was very interesting to see the kind of tools they used back then to make an aircraft. Especially when you compare it to the things I saw yesterday at the assembly line of the 777.

This afternoon I arrived at the Hilton hotel in Bellevue where the actual DevCon and FanConf conferences will be held. The DevCon will be starting tomorrow and I will also have to give my presentation on the first day. So I guess I will do a last dry-run in my hotel room tonight. I must say I am really looking forward to meet all those people I know from the internet in real tomorrow.

Day 3: Boeing Factory

 Today I visited the Future of Flight Center and took the Boeing Tour. The center itself has a nice display that explains the history of the Boeing civil aircraft and also shows you something about the materials used, the engines, etc. This all is mixed up with a lot of videos and other interactive displays, they sure know well how to present things. And if they had a change to write down that their aircraft are better than Airbus, they certainly did so on the information panels. The only negative thing for me was that, being an aeronautical engineer, there was not so much new for me to learn there.

 After that I took the Boeing Tour, where you get to visit the assembly lines of the 777 and 787. Maybe visit is a bit of a big word, as you are standing on a balcony with a good overview only. Once again the information provided was not very deep (I mean the length of the aircraft I can also lookup myself on the internet), but probably the more technical things I am interesting in would scare away most other visitors. But just seeing how these aircraft are made is very impression, that alone is worth the visit I would say.

After that I decided to try to go to downtown Seattle, to see if there was anything worth seeing there. But unfortunately I never really got there. Once I got near the city center, I tried to find a place to park the car. That did not really work out as I expected (busy traffic, probably some lack of preparation on my side), in the end I got lost and was quite far from the city center again. At that moment I had lost my interest to try again to find a parking place, so I decided to go back to the hotel. I guess I can better use this afternoon to work on the presentation for the AvSim FanConf after all.

Day 2: North Cascades National Park

So the daylight saving time ended today in the US. That was a little bit of a surprise to me, as it already ended last week in Europe. This explains why there was only 8 hours time difference with the Netherlands when I arrived yesterday. At least this meant the day was a bit longer than I expected.

I decided to drive a bit around to enjoy the landscape, so I drove in the direction of the North Cascades National Park. Once I reached the park I walked around at various places, to enjoy the forest, river, etc. I must say the nature is very nice there. What also surprised me was how little people you find walking along those trial as well. Most people I came across where walking with their dogs, but just people walking a bit around seems not so common here.

Right now I will try to find some dinner and hopefully I can work a bit on my presentation for the AvSim FanConf afterwards. Unfortunately I was a bit busy the last weeks, so that presenation is not fully ready. But I still have a week to finish it, so I am not stressed up yet. 

Day 1: Travelling

Here I am, sitting in Seattle with a jetlag behind my laptop. Today I flew from Amsterdam to Seattle with Northwest Airlines, so that I can attend the DevConf and FanConf events next week. But the first few days I will use to see a bit of the surrounding. I will try to post on this blog regularly while I am here, but only if I have experienced somthing interesting of course. 

FSDeveloper live again

After a day of hard working we have finished the move of the FSDeveloper website to the new server. Take a look at this post by Nick for a little more background info.

Once the DNS change has taken effect you should get the new site now. There are some minor things that still need fixing, for example not all downloads have been added back again. But we will continue working on that tomorrow. If you find any other problems, just let us know of course. 

FsDeveloper down again today

Today the FsDeveloper site will be down again for most of the day, this is because today we will do a second (and hopefully last) attemp to move the site to the new server and get all the new features we have been working on live for the end user as well. I expect the site to go down around 12:00 (CET) and then appear live again somewhere in the evening.

Preparing for another trip to the US

Some of you already know, but next week I will be travelling to the US again. This time it is not for work and I will be going to Seattle. That is because I am going to the AvSim FanConf and the DevConf this year. I am really looking forward to this and if some of you will also be there I am looking forward to have a talk with you.

Because I also have to prepare some presentations for these events, I did not have some much time last week to check the forums and reply to posts. Also this week I think the preparations might take quite a bit of my spare time. I hope you understand that. 

Panoramic photos

When on vacation I always like to make panoramic images, because that gives a much nicer view of the landscape. And also because my camera, a Canon Powershot A70, has a nice setting for that. Until now I mainly used the software supplied with the camera to stitch the separate images together. Although the software works fine in most cases, I was looking for a replacement lately as I am using Linux more and more now for my non-FS related work. In the end I found some nice tools that seem to give an even better end result than the software supplied with the camera. So if you like to stitch panoramic images together as well you might want to take a look at Autopano and the Hugin. Autopano helps in finding the overlapping points in the photos, while Hugin is a nice GUI to make your final panoramic image.

FsDeveloper update not fully completed

This weekend Nick and I have been working on moving the FsDeveloper site to a new server. We have been able to do some preparations. But once we really wanted to move the site, we found out there was a technical problem with the server we were moving to. So unfortunately we could not finish the move. We have now put the site back online, but that is still on the old server, so within a few weeks we will have to put it offline again to try to move again.