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.

FsDeveloper down this weekend

Part of this weekend the FsDeveloper site will be down. That is because we are going to move it to another server and also improve the site in other aspects. For example a better Wiki integration and an easier navigation menu are on the todo list. So don’t panic when you can’t reach the site this weekend. 

Geoids, projections, datum, what?

At work I came across this nice article that explains some basics of GIS data projections, datums, geoids, etc. Although the target audiance of it is more the oil industry, I think it would also be good reading for people making FsX terrain scenery and wanting to know a little more about what could be involved when using GIS data. Because knowing that the data is in the right projection, etc is very important for the best result.

Little update from abroad

As you can see I do have internet access while on travel for my work at the moment. Yesterday we arrived on our destination and today we had a sort of free day to rest from the travelling and enjoy the surrounding landscape a bit. So together with my collegue we drove around in the car a bit, we have seen Paris and Montpelier. Mind you, we are not in France, but in the United States. From Salt Lake City we drove north in the direction of Bear Lake and it seemed that in Southern Idaho they also have a Paris, is it only slightly smaller than the well known Paris.

But I am not only writing this blog post to talk about my travelling. Just before I left, I was able to post a new version of ModelConverterX. This new alpha versions solves most of the problems reported before and should hopefully make the tool a little more useful. Of course there are still more then enough features on my todo list, but it should at least allow the conversion of some simple macro objects.

Although I have internet here, I will probably not be able to follow the forums as closely as I can do at home. So don’t expect me to reply as often as normal and I might also not reply to all emails. But at least I can still monitor things a little bit.