For the past few months, I've been working with a friend on a website offering simple online multiplayer games.

We've got 3 games so far, but many more are coming soon!

Action happens here:
http://www.youlii.com

The entire site is in Silverlight 2, so if you don't have it installed, I recommend that you do :)

We created a twitter account to let everyone know of what's going on with Youlii at twitter.com/youlii

As a reminder, mine is twitter.com/mlaban!

Let me know if you have any feedback on the website and games.

This is a really sad day...

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=21981

It appears that the entire team of developers at ACES in charge of Flight Simulator has been let go...

What are we going to do now? Use X-Plane? No thanks, I like pretty flight sims... and Flight Gear... well, same, I like pretty flight sims...

Perhaps now would be the time to ramp it up on Infinite Runway?

I wish the best of luck to all my buddies at ACES...

I've been using my Aspire One for a few months now, and I'm still happy with it... I've always had one issue with it. Wireless kept dropping, the connection would sometimes get slow, or worse, the Atheros card would just simply disappear from the Device Manager.

After some digging online, I found that I was not alone... Lots of people had the same issue, and no matter what driver or bios update they used, they kept on having having this problem.

I decided it was enough, and bought a replacement wireless card (an Intel PRO/Wireless 3945AGM).
Opening the laptop was quite easy with the help of handy this guide.

I now have a reliable wireless connection! Yay! And boooo to Acer/Atheros for not releasing proper drivers.

If you also are experiencing issues with the wireless connection of your Aspire One, try to change the wireless card, it's worth the effort!

[Tags: AspireOne, Acer, Wifi, Replacing, Mod]

This summer, I've spent a fair amount of time sitting on a bench in Palo Alto Airport, just looking at airplanes take off and landing...

I took a ton of pictures... most of which would probably be denied from entering the Airliners.net database... so I'm creating my own :)

Below is a slideshow of the best pictures of this summer... I hope you'll enjoy it!

... and I'm happy!

Thank you America!

So i've been in my apartment for 6 months now... And I was expecting Comcast to end their "6 months promo" price for my internet access... They didn't forget to update the rate...
However, they did forget to tell me when I subscribed how much I'd be paying...

If you go on the website, and click on "High Speed Internet" they will take you to a page that makes you believe that you will pay the 6 months promo rate of 33 dollars, after which the rate will to go 42.95.
That's what I remembered I would be paying eventually when I subscribed 6 months ago. However, this is completely misleading.
In reality, the intro price and the $42 roll to rate are only available to people who already have Comcast Cable with their high speed internet. (Both TV and Internet). The actual price that you are paying if you don't have cable is $58.
They fail to mention this clearly anywhere... and, there is NO WHERE on the website where you can find the rate without Cable. NO WHERE. Even if you go through registration, they will only mention the $33 rate, and never mention the $58 rate.

There is no way to actually find out online how much you will eventually pay past those 6 first months...

So I called Comcast to complain and ask for that $42 rate I was entitled to. The first person I got was rude and told me that it was written in clear and publicly available... in the "terms and conditions page".
Well, when she says in clear, and publicly available, she means it says "call for additional rules on restrictions".
In fact, if you call, they will tell you the actual price (I still have to verify that though...), and that this promo is only available with a TV Bundle... but you can't find it anywhere online... It's still "public" however... Jackasses!
I confronted her to the extreme absurdity of this practice, but all she could reply was that the rules were here, and that calling to get the info still meant that the information was public... gees...
So according to her, the website is not lying... it's, as some Republicans would say about McCain's lies, "stretching the truth" or "not passing the 100% truth test". (Who comes up with this shit by the way?)

I so hate people...

I finally called again to get another dude and tried to make him and his supervisor admit that this is borderline scam, and that this was a completely unfair business practice... He agreed to credit half an hour of Citabria ($50) to my account.

I'll try to call again sometime and ask for just High Speed Internet only and see how the "representative" behaves, and if there is anyway to extract the actual post 6 months rate...

At the end of the call, something funny happened... the manager told me he would tell his hierarchy that the website was misleading about that particular issue. Clicking on HighSpeedInternet only, and not a bundle page, should present the $58 rate and not a cable bundle rate of 42 bucks.
This made me laugh, and I couldn't resist telling him how idealistic he was... Like this misleading part was not completely intentional, come on dude :) What company do you think you work for?

Hell yeah!

It's a great machine! The fan problem I had at the begining is now gone. I found a little utility on AspireOneUser.com that slows the fan a bit. It's still running but barely audible, which is exactly what I wanted :)

The only remaining complaint I have with this laptop now is apparently a widespread problem with the WLAN card that fails randomly upon waking up from stand by...
Rebooting fixes the problem, but that's lame... I hope they'll fix the problem soon...

Oh and also, they lowered the price to $350! What are you waiting for?

... the Aspire One, no question about it!

Let me explain why... The ultra mobile PC market has widely changed in a few months since Asus came out with the Eee PC. Other manufacturers have come up with their own versions.
Last week, I stumbled upon the Acer Aspire One with Windows XP. Read some reviews and figured out it could be a good choice. But I eventually settled for a EeePC 900 since it has an SDD, which I thought would be quieter and faster.
Well, I was dead wrong.

After coming home with the 900, I got frustrated the first second I started using it... It was the slowest machine I had ever used... Any action on the machine would take an incredible amount of time, while the computer was apparently not doing anything...
For example, opening Firefox 3, and clicking on the address bar would make the entire app stall for 10/15 seconds... Seriously...
It could barely play hulu videos and I was experiencing slowdowns when viewing the shows...

Needless to say, I took this POS back to the store!

I exchanged it for the Aspire One, and oh man! What a difference! The Acer is fast, snappy, doesn't lag... a real pleasure to use!
The two downsides to this laptop so far are the fan noise and the screen that is a tad too bright even at lower dim settings...

For the fan noise... these laptop manufacturers seriously need to USE their machines more than two seconds before they ship them... The second I turn on the laptop, the fan is on... why? the CPU is at 20/30c why the fan???
Besides, why is it that these guys can't build quiet fans? Is that really impossible to do?

Anyways, for $399, I'm not going to complain! It's as fast as my old Fujitsu P1510D and for a almost 4 times less money (as it was 2 years ago)!

I accidentally smashed my camera when I was in Quebec last week... so I had to get a replacement. I chose a Panasonic DMC-TZ5.
It's a pretty good camera, so far, the only negative points I have against it are the lack of an optical view finder which makes it hard to spot moving airplanes...
Second point is the fact that while connected via USB, the screen is on full blast, which drains the battery like crazy... Seriously... people...

The reason I chose this camera is because it has a wide angle lens (28mm) and a powerful 10x zoom! And also, it can take HD videos at 30fps...

Anyway, I coulnd't really test it on the ground, so I scheduled a flight in a 7ECA. Bruno had an aerobatic practice session at Tracy and needed a ride...

I flew to Oakland just after the marine layer melted, picked him up and then we flew to Tracy.

On our way there, we overheard a poor guy on the radio coming from Livermore, who wanted to fly to Half Moon Bay via Bravo... and apparently, he got overwhelmed and decided to fly back to Livermore...
SFO class bravo can sure be overwhelming...
If he ever reads this though, he could have done this easily by flying lower and only talking to Palo Alto or San Carlos towers. but technically, it is possible to fly from Livermore to Half Moon Bay by staying clear of Bravo and any Class Delta airspaces.

Anyway, Tracy was hot... and we had a good time watching and filming Bruno, Mike fly around :-)

Once I got back to Palo Alto, I took some pictures of planes landing with the new camera. Even without the viewfinder, the pics are quite amazing, and the 720p@30fps videos look great!

Here's one I took of the same citabria I flew, coming back from a flight later that day...

Youtube has the "HD" version on their site, just click on the video to see it.

And finally, some pictures I took yesterday. I love this camera :)

This is going to be a big rant at what I consider one of the biggest rip offs I've ever faced...
Airline Companies are just thieves. I don't understand how they can get away with stealing money from people...

Here's the story...

Julie and I booked a flight with Air France, way ahead of time in November for this coming March. We thought we would get better fares since it's popular knowledge that early bookers get the best fares... Well, it seems that Airline companies are now taking advantage of this to rip people off and bump the prices up whenever it pleases them...

The fare we got via Air France at that time was a total of 2800+ dollars. 1400 per ticket... We didn't have a choice, we were under presure... what if we don't book now? It might get even more expensive or even worse, the flights could become unavailable if completely booked... So we booked... we wanted specific days, and the best fares were barely better, around a couple hundreds cheaper if we offset the trip by one or two days...

I kept monitoring the prices, and realized that one month and a half later, the fare had melted by a couple hundred dollars... which would have make us save around 400 dollars... not worth it, the cancellation fees would hit hard and we would barely make any money out of it...

So I continued monitoring... and finally figured out the trick to get the cheapest fare with Air France... The way they allow you to choose the fare you want is by first selecting the departing flight, and then the returning flight... The trick was to figure out that the departing price has a HUGE impact on the returning price...

Here's an example:

Departure March 21 March 22 March 23 March 24
Price  800 700 300 300

Select the March 21 Departing Flight, here are the available return flights...
Return March 30 March 31 April 1 April 2
Price 700 700 800 600

Now select the first cheapest date, March 23rd, here are the available return flights...

Return March 30 March 31 April 1 April 2
Price 3200 3200 300 300

This brings me to say: WTF!!!!

Needless to say we changed the flight... which I thought would be easy... well, the part about booking the new flight is easy... of course, money goes their way...

Then, I needed to cancel the other one, which I unfortunately booked with Expedia... for an Air France flight... I called Expedia to cancel the flight. This took a few minutes.

One week later, Air France was starting to take their sweet time refunding the money they took from me in a second...

So I called Expedia again. They said, "blabla, we sent the refund request blablabla". I called Air France, they told me "blabla, we haven't received anything... blablabla... call us back... even then, it'll take a month to give you the refund... blablabla".

WTF is wrong with the world!? Why aren't the consumer organizations doing anything about this absolute rip off? We are talking about $2400 here! I can do lots of stuff with that money!

By the way, yes, I said 2400 hundred dollars... because there is a $200 cancelling fee I mean THEFT fee for cancelling a ticket whose price they purposely inflated in advance to push you to cancel it at a later time!

And there is absolutely nothing that I can do... it's so unfair... life sucks!

I would file a complaint... but why bother... These damn phone operators are trained to be heartless... And I'm not wise or old enough to make make them cry and transfer me to their supervisor...

So to sum it up:

- They had my money for 4 months
- They took interest on MY money
- They lowered the fares making feeling like a complete dumbass for not cancelling the first tickets
- They STOLE $400 from me for NO REASON because I cancelled 2 months in advance on a flight that they will have NO PROBLEM filling anyway. Ass holes!
- They NEVER gave me the interest they made on MY money
- They took their sweet time to actually refund the money, taking advantage of every single second of interest they could get...
- And, they have a 90% chance of being on strike for same random lazy-ass reason... ( they are french after all... learning how to strike is a 2nd grade class there )

Can anybody remind my why I chose Air France? I don't remember... Oh yeah... a direct flight... from San Francisco to rip-off town! 

This story makes me remember something very insightful a friend of mine told me not so long ago:
"The world will never go right as long as the main purpose of every single human is to screw the other ones over"

Next time I hear an airline crying about some BS or even better, filing for chapter eleven, I won't feel sorry for them, they only got what they deserve, and it's called Karma!

</rant>

Today being thanksgiving day, I had some spare time to play around some of the new things Microsoft brought to the world this year...

I read about popfly during the summer and I always wanted to develop something using it... this is now done :)

The idea is:
-> Upload my GPS position from my phone to my website
-> Have a Popfly block retreive the data and feed it to a Virtual Earth block
-> Create a mash up of those two blocks and embed it on my website.

I think the result is pretty sweet:

Two comments though...
Too bad the mashups are written in Javascript... I'd rather write them in C#...
Debugging the blocks is kind of a pain but with a bit of time, and a lot of console output, it's manageable...

Last note, the position is not ultra accurate. I did this on purpose ;) The decimal part of the coordinates is rounded :)

Call me a fan boy if you wish... but yes, I picked up a 4GB Zune yesterday at Frys in Sunnyvale, California.

Here's my totally unbiased opinion :-) Bear in mind I've been a shameful owner of an IPod Nano for a little less than a year... This post will contain scattered comparisons with the IPod as the Zune 2 is a response from Microsoft to the Apple player...

Here we go.

Ever since it was announced, I wanted to get the Zune2 for two reasons.

• I had never been a big fan of either the ipod of itunes... Being an ipod owner was creating an internal disagreament in my brain... this had to be fixed :-)
• Zune Marketplace has this new "All you can listen" subscription. $15 and you have unlimited acces to the entire zune collection for up to 3 computers/zunes as long as you keep your subscription alive.

I've got to say, after using it for a bit, I'm quite impressed!

The device

It very light, nicely built and seems pretty robust. Screen is made of glass and not some scratchy piece of plastic.
The QVGA display is simply amazing! 320x240 on such a small screen is just plain greatness! The videos are sharp, CD-Covers look awesome and the UI is very nicely antialiased.

One of the things I genuinely could not stand with the IPod nano was the over sensitive and over hyped turn wheel thingy... It just never freaking did what I wanted and was always going one item to far in either direction.
The Zune also has a touch pad, which is a tad too sensitive as well... But on the contrary to the ipod wheel, the ZunePad works with horizontal and vertical motion, which makes much more sense to me since the UI is UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT based. No need to figure out which way to scroll to go up or down.

Two good points I give to the Zune:

• The pad actually has UP/DOWN 'BUTTON'. Unlike the ipod which maps "UP" to previous menu and down to play. Duh! Who came up with this?
• The ZunePad is raised above the surface of the device, which makes it easy to switch songs without looking at the device (in a pocket for example.)

That second point was a source of constant bitching for me with the old nano... I could never find that damn left/right button as the wheel was blended with the surface of the device, and I ended up pressing randomly all over the player... And I'm sorry Apple fans, whatever you say, this is lame!

Zune Application

I was a little scared when I downloaded the app... I was expecting a confusing, bloated application... but it was the entire contrary!
This has got to be one of the best designed apps I've ever used. Clean design, nice colors, intuitive UI element locations, clear help, no confusing options with unnamed icons ala itunes, menu transitions are beautiful, all smoothed out with fade in/out effects...

I have been using itunes for about a year now, and I never really liked it for many little reasons (impossibility to remove duplicates (without third party tool), DRM'ed music that I could not copy on my WM6 device, cold gray UI, first click in the UI when coming from another application had no effect...) The sync was confusing as hell, sometimes it just wouldn't have synced my stuff automatically even though the device had been connected for a night...

I have used the Zune application for about a day now, and no major things bugged me so far. The Wifi sync worked great, podcast downloaded with no problem...
I especially like the fullscreen mode of the app. Kinda looks like a nice screen background.

Zune Marketplace

This is one of the main reasons I mentioned above as to why I made the Switch.
The Zune Marketplace offers an unlimited subscription for $15 a month. You can access any music, download or direct streaming, as long as you are current with your subscription.
I have downloaded about 20 albums so far, for which itunes would have charged me $240... 20 Albums, for only $15…
This was really something I had been waiting on for a long time!

Creating the account was easy, and downloading music was even easier, just go in Marketplace in Zune and click on download for anything you like! So sync it with the Zune device, either right click and select Sync, or drag and drop the album on the Zune icon.
It feels like using one of those P2P applications, only difference is this is legal!
I setup the account for my work computer and here at home.

I also did my first Podcast subscription to Diggnation. Watched the latest episode, pretty sweet feature. Let’s hope the auto update/sync feature works well.

Final Thoughts

I do not regret my early buyer, slightly fanboy'ish decision. The device is great, no complaints so far and I am more than happy with the unlimited ZunePass. The Zune application is beyond what I would have expected!

Pandora, and Zune Marketplace will be my perfect combo from now on. Pandora for discovering music in a radio broadcast style, and Marketplace to get the music I like!

Last sunday, Ismael invited me for a ride in a Cirrus SR22 G2... I was so excited to finally get a chance to fly in such an airplane! I flew with him in a C172-G1000 last year and I really enjoyed it... but this time... it was really taking it to the next level! That airplane is just awesome, lots of power, not so noisy, really confortable, and packed with cool avionics.

Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to seat in the front, but hoppefully, next time...
Wink wink Ismael ;-)

I forgot my real camera for this flight, but I my friend, the HTC TyTN2 stepped up and allowed GPS Tracking and Photo/Video taking at the same time! Here is a slideshow of the pictures I took during the flight.

I also wanted to talk about Everytrail.
About 8 months ago, Ismael introduced me to Joost, the owner of Everytrail. Everytrail is a website where people can share their GPS tracks and automatically geotag their pictures on a map!

I used it to create the map below, containing the flight track and the pictures at the exact locations they were taken.

If you don't know about this website you might want to give it a visit!

Bay tour - Cirrus SR22 at EveryTrail
Map created by EveryTrail: GPS, Photos & Geotagging!

Last week end at the Flying Club, one of the instructors had this amazing little toy... A small remote controlled helicopter that was able to hover, and fly around in a room. It was so awesome, and so cheap ($25-$30), I had to buy my own!

After the flight, Julie and I headed directly to Fry's to purchase one of those helicopters. They had a small one for just under $25, a bargain!

Once the initial disapointment, mainly due to my total inability to make this damn thing fly, I started to really enjoy it... It can fly around in a room, hover for a bit... It takes a little while to get used to how it responds to your inputs, but once you get it, it's quite easy :)

The good thing is that since it's so light, you can literally smash it into anything, it'll not break! Unlike those real $100+ helicopters...

The remoting part is done via IR, which makes it a little difficult to work in plain daylight... Also, the protocol is based on discreet inputs, so whenever the helicopter receives a signal, it continues with whatever it last received... which means that if you play outside at night, and that the aircraft gets out of range... it'll keep going... heading straight to that rooftop... Not that it ever happened to me ;-)... I'm just saying :)

So overall, great little toy for a few minutes of fun... Nice to feel like a kid again :)

Spending about 0.57% of my time every year up in the air flying, I always thought I had less chances of being on the ground when the next earthquake would have happened in the Silicon Valley... Well, there was an earthquake yesterday, and unfortunately, it happened in the 99.43 remaining percent... That's too bad...

I was getting out of the bathroom, when I heard a rumbling... Our bathroom is right above a garage that has an automatic door... and that rumbling sound plus the vibration seemed familiar at first... I figured, hey, the neighbours are coming home... but then, a second later, the rumbling and vibration increased to a point that was becoming very frightening... the point where it got me thinking that either the garage door was seriously failing, or… well, no, it couldn’t be… a second elapsed… vibration increased so much that I completely ruled out the garage door option… I yelled to Julie who was in the kitchen "Tremblement de terre!!!", stormed out of the bedroom and out of the apartment!!!
I don't remember what went through my brain for these few seconds... I have a vague recollection of myself jumping over the bed at the speed of light and grabbing my shoes while telling Julie to get the hell out of here!
I think the trembling stopped when we were running down the stairs... I have no idea how long it lasted though...

We stayed a few minutes outside... before coming back in, checking out on the USGS website the magnitude... 5.6 on the Richer Scale, that's quite high...

I had thought of that since I came here, but I never thought I would have been as shocked as I felt... This is a really scary experience...

I had some trouble sleeping the night after that... Couldn't keep the sensation of the ground moving underneath me out of my mind....

I spoke with Kitti, a friend of mine working in Japan... He told me he didn't even remember the biggest one he felt, and that he didn't really care anymore when earthquakes happened...

I'm glad it was not stronger than that... and I sincerely hope that there will never be a next time, or if it happens, I'll be a few thousand feet above the ground enjoying a nice airplane ride with Julie!

I finally replaced my old HTC Wizard with a brand new HTC TyTN2. Nice device, fast connection, nice form factor, and GPS!
I talked about my GPS Tracker a little while ago in this blog. It’s an application that uses a GPS connected to a Windows Mobile PDA to log the positions in three dimensions and export it to a Google Earth KML file.
Before I got the TyTNII, I was using an external Bluetooth GPS (GPSlim 236) which is kind of an inconvenience as there was always two devices to keep charged and I had to carry both of them at the same time.
The TyTN II, coming with a GPS, gave me a new idea… An application that would log my every single movement on earth and that would send the data on my website.
Well, not all the data, I’m not an convict on probation with a tracking device on my ankle ;)
I would just send four items: the top speed of the day, the maximum and minimum altitude and the total distance. Doesn’t tell much, but I find it fun to know :)

I updated the code to enable permanent tracking, and the basic functionality was done yesterday night. I ran a few tests while going out for groceries, and everything worked fine. One problem though, when it was in my pocket, it didn’t work, even outside! Which didn’t make sense since it was working even inside my apartment.

Anyway, what better way is there to find out if the program really works, than go out for a little flight?
To make sure, I headed to Palo Alto airport for a test flight in a Citabria. I carefully started the old and the new phone with their tracking programs, and took off. Today was really crowded at Palo Alto. I thought with the not so good weather that people would have stayed home, but apparently, they did not…
A few of touch and goes later, I returned back to the parking… to find out that the tracker on the TyTNII had not logged one single thing!!!

Oh well, I had fun flying… too bad this didn’t work…
I eventually figured out that the problem was when the device was on stand by… it used to work on the Wizard, even when on stand by, the tracker was still logging…
For a while, I thought that the internal GPS was turned off when on stand by, but further tests revealed that it was indeed still on (Queried the device power state to make sure).
I figured it might be because the UI is stalled when the device is on stand by, and since I was relying on a Windows Timer, the events were probably not dispatched.

After moving the data reading and track writing to a thread, everything worked as expected!
It’s been running for the past hours and aside from the heavy battery drainage, nothing to complain about.
So, here are the features:

- Automatic Daily Tracking
- Automatic Start/Stop of tracking when moving / stopping
- Automatic upload of the file to a web service on White-clouds.org :-P
- Export to Google Earth KML file
- Email sent for every Google Earth export
- GPS Signal Quality Icon
- Battery Level Icon

Features to add:
- Establish schemes to save battery
o Figure out the location where nothing even happens and reduce the polling frequency. (Home, work…)
o Reduce poll frequency when the GPS position hasn’t changed for the past 5 minutes or so.
o Increase poll frequency when the GPS starts moving again…

That’ll be for another day…

Meanwhile, to make up for the cloudy pictures of today, here's a slideshow from last week's flight.

For the past few years, I've been listening to a french internet radio called Frequence3. But as time passed, I got fed up with the idiotic show hosts and their over-airing of the same songs (you know, just to make sure you really like it...)

Last week, a friend pointed me to Pandora. It's an flash based online radio where you can rate the songs that play. You create your own channels based on singers you like and then it plays songs by similar artists, genre, harmonics etc. The more you listen to it and rate the songs, the more it'll know about you and play only the songs you will most likely appreciate!

I've been listening for a week now and I almost never skip any songs now. I think I've found my new radio ! So long Frequence3! I will not have to put up with your crappy verbose show hosts ever again... :)

I know, we already went to Los Angeles last year, but we wanted to spend more time there to check out some of the stuff we didn't have the time to see.

Also, this time, it was not all touristy stuff. We got together with Steeve aka Siwu (Intern at Google in New York) and Solomon (Another Epitech alumni who happens to work in LA). It was lots of fun to see these guys again. We went for a short visit of Venice Beach, then the Griffith Park and Observatory.

On the second day, Julie and I also visited Long Beach, saw the Queen Mary, and drove around the south peninsula to Redondo Beach, Venice... We ended up having sushi in a restaurant in Hollywood with Steeve, Solomon and one of their friends.

On our last Day, we met with a local pilot I saw last year, Remy. This time, we could actually go for a ride, so we flew from Santa Monica to Camarillo for lunch. Very cool, despite the hazy weather. (Remy, my bay tour offer still stands, let me know next time you come in the Bay Area ;))

Now, some facts/ramblings about this trip:

• Renting a car and driving down to LA is sure cheaper than flying... but man, getting out of the Bay Area on a busy week end sucks big time... And the drive is kinda long... 13~15h round trip.
• Parking in LA... It's horrible. Oh sure, you won't drive around a long time before you'll find a spot... but gees, what a rippoff! Each time it was between 8 and 12 bucks... and sometimes for non covered/non secured parking lots... wtf!?
  The two worst were the hotel, $12 bucks a nite for the car (are you kidding me?) and the parking in Hollywood, flat rate, $8 for as long as you want...
  For the whole week end, approximately $60~$70 of parking taxes...
• I got my first parking ticket... for parking somewhere after sunset... well 20 minutes after sunset... grrr just cause we were lost in a park, thanks!
• Los Angeles is dirty, noisy, gloomy...
• We rented a 2007 Dodge Charger for this week end. Nice car, but its turn radius sucks...
• Internet over GPRS on my laptop is the best thing ever
• Sepulveda Boulevard spotting location stills rocks, watching airplanes landing at LAX from there is so coooool!
• Long Beach is nice, at least the area we visited (Shoreline Village)
• I saw Ryan's brother's house, the one where Marissa shot him! (check out the gallery!)
• When I see some people's houses south of Los Angeles... I wonder where they got all this money...
• If you think Malibu is a nice place to visit, well, it's not. It's pretty boring...
• Windows Live Search for Windows Mobile is one of the best tools I've ever had to use! Live traffic is priceless!
• I'm glad I live in the Bay Area and not in LA... it's so stressful over there...

Here's the photo gallery for the trip:

2007-05-28 - Los Angeles, California

This week end was busy!

On saturday, I went to Tracy (KTCY) with Bruno to meet with mike and spent the afternoon flying around :)

And on Sunday, Julie and I drove down to Carmel by the sea, a few miles south of Monterey. I could have flown down there... but we decided to drive... next time we'll defintely fly because one thing is for sure: we'll definitely go back!

It was beautiful! Translucid water, white sand beaches, beautiful neighborhoods...
On the way to Carmel, we drove on the 17 Mile Drive, a road that goes through Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach. Though it was quite chilly everytime we stopped for pictures (strong winds coming from the sea) the view was just beautiful!

We stopped for lunch in Pebble beach, in a restaurant near the Lodge. We sat outside, on a terrasse overlooking a small golf practice area. Very peculiar! It looked like a paradise...

Click below for the entire set of pictures:

2007-05-20 - Carmel - Pebble Beach - 17 Mile Drive

Julie has had a mac for 4 months now... and I've been helping her a few times to use it... she's coming from the Windows world and needed this for school... that's why she turned to the wrong side ;-)
Nevertheless, I tried approaching this with an open mind, and just go with the flow... and quite frankly, a few things were very annoying... here's a list that comes to mind...

- First welcome screen wouldn’t let me choose the type of WEP encryption my network was... the only way to change it was to go to the network settings afterwards... That's okay if they don't detect it by default, but at least, give us a wep type choice dammit! It's the welcome screen, everything should be easily configurable from there...

- Sometimes, when a program crashes (Illustrator most of the time) the system goes crazy (slow, cooling fan is spinning at 40000 rpms...) and there’s no (user friendly) way to kill the app... Well, there is, but it doesn't even kill it. (Right click on the icon, force quit...)
My Mac Fanboy friend from work suggested opening a shell and looking up the process number in top... but dude!! I thought  macs were supposed to be easier and simpler? is that easy???? Force quit, should do it's job of killing the app, whatever state it is in...

- IChat behaves like an idiot... if you click on it by mistake when you have no account setup, there is no way to get out of the registration process besides clicking next next next and registering anyway... What's up with that?! (No close button, nothing...)

- Laptop mouse pad only has one button, yet, a lot of the useful features require a left  button, and I don't intuitively think that pressing some apple or other button while I click the mouse is going to show a context menu...

- In finxed, there is no rename option in the context menu… You have to click twice on the file… That’s not very friendly…

- Stuck CD... I was installing windows with bootcamp, and maybe because of a busted CD, the install failed... And when I restarted it was still trying to boot windows, I couldn't find a way to eject the CD from the slot in... I had to browse the internet, to find out that you needed to press the mouse button while powering up the machine to eject the CD... Oh yeah, I guessed that alright…
Mac dudes? I never thought an obvious eject button was an annoyance... same thing for a (obvious) On/Off button on my IPod... Being kewl and remove buttons is alright when it's useless buttons... but an eject button that works at anytime, even when OSX is not booted up? Please...

- Applications are not in full screen... Oh my god, this must be one of the most annoying thing I've seen on the mac... Why, oh whyyyy would you want to do this??? I know it's changeable (in some apps), but man, that is so annoying to not be isolated within the bounds of your application... You inadvertently click on another window in the back, and bam!, you in another application and the whole top menu changed… It's makes everything so messy and confusing...

- Why can't I resize a window with with any other corner than the right hand one?

- Connecting to a samba/netbios share… There is no automatic network discovery, no easy way to type an address in an address bar… you have to use the Connect to thing, and type smb://<some ip or name>… what’s that!? That’s not easy… and user friendly… at all!

- and more I forgot...

I know you Mac Fanboys will say:
"Huuu well but, oh yeah!? well windows has tons of problems and you are just used to them so you don't care anymore..."

Well, then I'm sorry, but I always hear the stupid pot-smoker fanboy on the commercials saying that macs are so much easier and so much better than PC's...  If it was true, then this post wouldn't exist and I would just be saying "well, yeah, but windows is prettier!" just because of the lack of things to rant about mac... but I'm not... After these few months of using it a bit, I’m still not convinced that it does things so much better and easier than Windows…

What's new...

• I'm still waiting for FSX SP1... I'm really impatient to see what the FS team has improved in FS!
• Still having a lot of fun in the Citabria... But I realized that this tailwheel fun made me lose currencies on the Cessna 152 and PA28-181... That's really a shame... Oh well, I'll take a flight with Cory to fix this hehe...
• Preparing for my US License... I think I'll pass the check ride on a Cessna 152... Less stuff to take care of than in the Pipers...
• Not a lot of work with FSP lately... I was sick for the past couple of weeks, and not really in the mood for coding... I've worked on a few other coding projects though...
• Still watching the latest season of 24... which is becoming lamer and lamer every episode I watch... I guess I'm getting tired of all the exploding SD Cards, crazy presidents, impossible tech-hacks to fill for the lack of imagination of the writters...
• Still hooked up on Prison Break, which might be the best Action TV-Show I've ever seen!
• Just turned 26... And according to Julie, it's time to think about these anti-wrinckles creame... lovely! =)
• After almost 7 years of flying, I finally decided to start an electronic log book... I'm using an Excel file based of a template I've found on the Internet. It's really nice to count the hours easily now and cross reference stuff here and there =)
  Though, I have to say that I really hate the way we report hours on log books in France. It's hour/minutes based... which is a REAL PAIN to add!!
  In the US, it's fractions of hours... (1.2 Hour = 01:12, 2.5 Hours = 2:30...) So it's much easier to add up!
  Up until a few months ago, I was still converting from decimal to stupid hours and minutes but I've stopped... My log book is now all in decimals...
• Weather is still great in CA, I've started biking again. There is a nice trail next to my place that goes all the way up to San Jose airport. It's fun to bike there... Let's see if I can keep this up...
• Last week, I went boating with a friend from work. It was the first time I ever went on a boat like this! After boating, we spent the evening at this friend's house, having diner.
  The entire day was quite a glimpse into the american life, trucks, boats, barbecue in a nice house, in a Wisteria Lane-like neighbourhood, kids wearing their baseball outfits... It was like being in one of these american movie/tv show... :-)
  Some pics here
• I'm following the French elections from afar... I gotta say I'm quite glad to be away from all the fuss... and I hope that <censored> will not win =)

Happy Landings!

I've been in the US for more than a year now. When I got here last year, the weather was really bad, it was raining all the time... But this year, it's really different and it couldn't be better! We're having temperatures in the mid 20's celsuis, even 27 on sunday!

This good weather is perfect for flying and for some beach discovery trips :) So far, we've been to Capitola Beach, Pomponio State Beach, La Selva Beach... It's really fun to go to the beach in February/March :) Let's hope this weather continues!

(Click here for the beach trips pictures of Pomponio and Capitola and here for some other of Sausalito and Muir Beach.)

I just made an appointment to the doctor... I think I got over excited with the weather and probably caught something at GDC while walking to the restaurant thursday night... I was soo cold... The temperature difference between Santa Clara and San Francisco can be really surprising sometimes...

On the aviation side, I'm really hooked up on tailwheel aircrafts now! I fly the citabrias almost every week ends! Two weeks ago, I went on a little flight along the coast in the citabria, it was really wonderful!
I did some thinking recently, and I think I'll get my US license. Keeping a current license in France is quite annoying as it makes it really difficult to add ratings and such... For example, I can't fly at night, so I wanted to do the required time to be able to fly after sunset... I did a couple of flights, and then called the FSDO to know how I could add this to my license... and they said I was supposed to add this to my french license first... which means, go there, fly 5 take offs/landings full stop, and then stamp my license, and I would be all set... this is just stupid... so I'll retake the written test and a checkride here to get my local license here... it should be easier then! :)
Going through this all over again is quite annoying, but it can't be that bad... I made it once, I can probably make it again... Let's hope I didn't get too many bad flying habits during these 200+ hours I've been above the ground !

Happy Landings!

I found out today on digg that all the Sysinternals Tools can now be downloaded in one single package.

That's good news; it always took me too much time to download them one by one... until I made a package for myself... which it was never up to date anyway...

For those who don't know what is sysinternals, it's a company Microsoft recently acquired that develops system utilities to help solve lots of problems. My two favorites are Process Explorer and Filemon.

Download it here

I recently changed my cell phone from a pre-paid account to a contract. I couldn't do it before because credit wise, I was nobody... so I had to pay a $500 deposit to get in a contract... And without a contract, there is no data plan, or if you try to use data on your phone, you are charged a ridiculous amount of money for every single bit sent/received... So now that I've been here for a year and that my credit report is starting to look like something, I've been able to get a decent contract, with an unlimited data plan.

The unlimited part is something I had been wanting for ever! I didn't have this in France, I was limited to some 20MB a month... ridiculous... anyways, now that I can download as much as I want, I decided I would take a look at some of the mapping applications for cellphones.

I found two, Windows Live Search for Mobiles and Google Maps Mobile. Both perform the exact same functions and are very fast and extremely cool! I'd like to mention that both are native PocketPC applications and not some ugly slow java app...
I especially like the fact that you can type any random store and tell it to use my current GPS position, and it'll find the nearest store and give me directions... It's not real time guidance but still, it's very cool and with the tracking, you can almost use it as an actual GPS, but on satellite imagery downloaded on the fly.

So on my way back from the airport this evening, I plugged the GPS in and just let it download the maps as I was driving, very cool! Oh and also, it shows you real time traffic information!

I just realized by looking at my blog history thingy on the left that I've been blogging for a little more than three years, so about 12% of my life...

What else lately?

On the flying side, I got my tailwheel endorsement three weeks ago. I'm addicted now :) I thought it would be crazy hard, kinda like the swirly Extra 300S in FSX,  but not at all, at least not on the Citabria 7ECA I fly on.
I didn't fly this week end. Weather was supposed to suck, but it didn't... so to compensate for the lack of flying, I went to the airport and watched aircrafts land and take off... Yes, I need my fix... :-)

GDC is coming up, we can already feel it here :) Is anyone coming? ZMan? Any flight sim dev? Some people from Epitech maybe?
Drop me a line if you are going, we can probably meet there...

I love this Discovery Channel show called MythBusters! The idea is to take popular myths and verify if they are plausible or completely not true. (Click here for some examples)

This sometimes ends up in blowing stuff up and hearing them laugh after the experiment ended in a big boom is soo funny. 
This doesn't seem to be funny to Julie... I don't know why... They have all this equipment like infrared cameras, laser temperature sensors, they use all the ways possible to prove of dirprove these myths :)

Read all about the show on the wikipedia page & view some sample videos on their website.

What I know is that it remembers me of my teenage years... I remember a couple of experiments I did with my 2 brothers...

1 - The Projector Lense
We had this friend of us who had an old projector thing that teachers used to show transparent sheets of paper on a white board. He gave it to us, of course, we dismanteled it and found this HUGE kind of square flat plastic lense about 20 centimeters wide. We soon discovered that if you put this under sun rays, and focalise the rays on the same point, it can burn very quickly!

2 - The Telephone Card Over voltage
In junior high school, my class took a trip to England and to capture the beauty of this bloody country, my mother bought me a disposable camera. The instructions on the camera said that when the film was full, we had to take the whole camera to a store. What a waste of toy power to me! What about the flash? I knew there was some kind of electronic thingy in there to make it work... Even though the box said, do not dismantle, to hell with that, I wanted to see what was inside :)
So I dismantled one and found out there was this little board with a few components including a big capacitor and the actual flash light. I remember the flash having this high voltage print on the side, something like 300 volts... All this out of a double A battery, that's cool!
Ever tried touching the pins of such a capacitor when it's fully charged?? Well, I did, and it hurts hehe :)
So anyways, when I got back from England, me and my brothers thought it my be a cool experiment to try to power up a little telephone card chip with the capacitor, just to see what happens ;-) We connected to wires to the capacitor, got hit by the high voltage a few times on the way, and then we took the wires and connected them to two random pins on the chip... the result? TCHIIIT!!! An electric sound, few sparkles and in a millisecond, the chip was dark and smelly :) Sweeeet!

So all this to say that these Mythbusters guys, when they laugh hard after an experiment succeeded or failed in such a cool way, it reminds my of some of the things I used to do when I was a kid, but on a much smaller scale.

Last week, Julie and I went to the Grand Canyon / Vegas. We had a lot of fun on the strip, visited the Hoover Dam and saw the Grand Canyon at sunrise.

We even won 30 bucks at the roulette ! That paid for the taxi ;-)

Another cool thing we did was to go see Seinfeld Live at the Caesars Palace! He was only in town for 2 days, and we managed to get two seats for the last day! I really had great time :-) It was brand new material, only one of the jokes was from the previous show.

 See the photos of the trip here

I've added two things to the blog today:

• A comment spam protection thing. You'll have to calculate something before you post a comment ;-)
• A Donation Page, in case anybody wants to donate a few bucks to support the Flight Simulator Project.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

Quick note to self that I should read next thankgiving:

Matt, do not believe what people say about Black Friday and all the awesome deals you'll get. Here's why:

• You drove 60 miles to some outlet mall to find out more than a thousand people had the very same idea
• You got stuck in traffic for 2 hours
• You didn't sleep at all this night
• Once there, you forgot that a night of November in Northern California is very cold... and you were freezing!
• Since you were freezing, you had to buy a sweater that you didn't really need, just to not be freezing anymore...
• All the good stores were full of people... I mean REALLY FULL...
• There were lanes to even enter some of the popular stores...
• All the good stuff was already gone by the time you got there
• All the crappy stores were empty
• You gave up on the interesting stuff you found when you saw the 50min+ line...
• You came home with just a bunch of socks and a sweater. yeah!
• You wasted 4 hours of your life in the cold
• When you got home, since it was almost five, you decided to go to Best Buy, which was plain stupid.
• You thought no one would be stupid enough to wake up that early to get some deals.
• You were WRONG!
• You got there at 4:45am and found out that the line was extending around more than two building blocks...
• You decided to try your luck at Fry's...
• It was the same!
• The store was full of people with all kinds of stuff in their carts and none of the good stuff was left...
• You got home at 6h00 completely exhausted
• The deals weren't even that interesting
• Remember this quote from a friend: "I'll be able to tell my kids I waited in line for 1 hour to get 15 percent off a shirt... well, maybe I won't tell them..."

To summarize, please read this message next thanksgiving night and don't do that mistake again. Some people are way dumber than you, and they are probably already standing in line for the deals you will never get anyways. So forget it!

:-)

From the developer website at NVIDIA.com:

As you may know, our tools team is hard at work on FX Composer 2, our next-generation integrated development environment for shader authoring. As we finalize its features, we want to get your feedback about how you use FX Composer, and what we can add to ensure that it is the best possible product for you.

Developers who complete the entire survey (with meaningful responses) will be entered into a raffle for a brand-new GeForce 8800 GTX. Incomplete surveys or fictitious responses will automatically disqualify you from the raffle. Only legitimate developers are eligible for this survey.

Click the link and tell us everything! You might win the most powerful video card ever built!

Last week, Microsoft added a cool new feature to their Local.Live.com mapping website. It's a 3D application just like google earth, but that is integrated in IE as an ActiveX component. I like this concept.

Also, they have modeled some US cities with 3D buildings, with textures on the sides of the buildings! I don't know how they did that, but that's really impressive!

Apparently, there is already an SDK for the mapping application. Let's hope they add some sort of support ofr KML files, that would be really awesome!

I thought that writting my own blog engine would protect me from comment spam...
Guess what, it doesn't...
It certainly protects from automated scripts targeting community server and such... but I didn't think someone would figure out a way to automatically understand how my system worked...
The only way I can think this could happen is that it's a physical person that posted these urls that don't even exist... Or perhaps they looked for a "post" button... I don't know...

The comments were left on two of my most read posts.

The Flight Simulator Project
Flight Simulator Project FAQ 

I guess I'm going to have to add some sort of image thing to prevent that. I'll figure something out soon.

I guess that all there is to say is:

You spammers SUCK!

 I finally uploaded the missing pictures of my trip to Japan.

 You can find them all here!

Well, I wanted to say a public goodbye to my GPS... I forgot it in a C152 last week... and of course, none of the pilots flying after me had the decency to leave it at the front desk... I called to check it someone left it in the lost and found... but no luck and I couldn't get the phone numbers of the pilots who flew after me on that plane... Damn thiefs !!!

EDIT: I found the GPS today. Turns out it was in the Lost and Found. The woman at the front desk yesterday didn't check the bottom of the drawer! :-)

I'm now browsing the market for a new GPS device... because let's face it, I can't live with it and the Garmin96C is far from having as good a precision as the GPSlim236 I lost...

I found a couple of good devices but no real progress since last february when I bought my previous unit... I'll probably have to order one online as all the computer stores in the south bay only sell the worst bluetooth units ever...Not to mention that they are ridiculously overpriced...

Anyways, tomorrow will be an interesting day, I'll be flying to Castle Air Force Base again but this time I won't be alone, we'll be a squadron of 3 planes ! How cool is that!?

I won't be logging the flight track only with the Garmin. I'll probably borrow Julie's Bluetooth GPS for the day. I bought her a GPS too before we moved here as she has this tendency to get lost pretty much anywhere ;-)

Time to recharge the camera batteries!

Happy Landings!

I woke up at 6 yesterday... The sun was already starting to rise over the horizon at this time. We left the hotel at 8:30am and took the subway to the NVIDIA Office in Tokyo. The subway was a fun experience. Lots of young people with suits and ties.

We tried buying tickets but we had a hard time finding the tickets we needed. Not much of the things over here are translated in English, and you can't really guess the meaning of the Japanese characters :)

At lunch we ate in a restaurant near NVIDIA. I ate fried shrimps with beef. We had a difficult time explaining what we wanted to the waitress.
I find it really strange when they start talking to us like we understand what they are saying :) It's like they are speaking to a wall :) The only reply we can give them is: "uh?" or "We don't speak japanese, sorry, only english". We always managed to get something good though so I guess we don't really need to know Japanese to eat good food ;-)

We left work around 7 or 8, I don’t remember. I was really tired from the jetlag. After we dropped our stuff at the hotel, we walked in the streets near our huge hotel/tower. That was an amazing experience. Very different from what I’ve experienced anywhere before. Lots of noise, lights, flashing stuff, and so many people everywhere.

We stopped in a restaurant somewhere in a tower. We were asked to put our shoes in a box with a key in the entrance. The ordering system was surprising. We had some sort of Tablet PC on the table and we could order by pressing buttons. Problem is, none of the button captions were in English… The waitress explained us the basic stuff and we tried. Service was quick, as you would expect for raw meat. We had to cook our own stuff on a grill on the table. The beef was really tender, I really enjoyed it.

When came the moment to ask for the check, we had to guess what button would be  asking for it… I guessed the red, in the bottom since it was a red one to confirm orders before, but it was the one on the right!

Interesting experience!

Click here to view yesterday’s pictures and a video I made in Shibuya.

I'm posting this message from the 28th floor of the Cerrulean Tower Hotel in Tokyo!

We arrived yesterday evening, the flight was very long due to strong headwinds of about 300km/h on the way here...

777's economy class has very limited spacing between the seats so the entire trip was not very confortable for me. The hotel room makes up for it though ;-)

Tokyo is crazy! It's so dense compared to the US. It looks like every bit of space available is used for something. Restaurants in towers, play fields on top of the buildings, passages under the buildings, elevated train stations, and crazy highway that go up to 50+ meters over the city (check kml file)...

The japanese people are exactly as I expected them: fashion victims, neat, polite. The girl stereotype is quite different from the US stereotype. Here it seems that the default clothing is a skirt or shorts, with some kind of boots and high socks. No wonder Kitti wanted to come here hehe ;-)

We went for some sushi yesterday. They were delicious, soft, and melting in the mouth. There's only one type of nigiri I didn't quite like... I couldn't even bite the fish thingy on top. It was so elastiky!

Anyways, here is the KML track from the airport to the hotel. (Bus + Taxi),and the first pictures of the trip.

Last week, I flew to Tahoe with Bruno. It was his long IFR cross country, and I was a passenger in the back... I took lots of great pictures!

This last week, Julie and I went to San Francisco to see the Blue Angels and the Red Bull Air Race... Unfortunately, and thanks to the sucky public transportation in San Francisco, we arrived late and missed the air race... We still could watch the Blue Angels, and that was Awesone!!

Click here for the pics of the flight to South Lake Tahoe, and here for some other random pictures I took recently.

Happy Landings!

Tomorrow, I'll fly to Tokyo. I'm going over there for work, it should be fun! I'll take pics and hopefully find an internet connection in the hotel to upload the pics.

I'll have a chance to experience the japan crazyness that Kitti likes so much!

Of course, I'll try to stop by some place full of electronic gadgets to see if I can bring anything crazy-kewl back :-)
I won't have a lot of time for sightseeing but I should have at least one free morning, so we'll see!

Well, I'm getting used to watching TV shows here... Back in France, I used to get watch them by other means ;-)
If there's one thing that I don't like too much about watching the TV shows live, it's the commercial breaks.
They happen in the middle of the show and you're like: "Wait... what does this eagle diving on this surfboard on top of a car has to do with the story???"
It basically takes a few seconds to understand that it's a commercial for some car and not the show anymore...
Other than that, it's still very cool to watch the shows live!

Well, the good thing about that I can take these break to explain what just happened in the show to Julie who is struggling to read the subtitles :-)

It's funny that they still show Seinfeld episodes here. I watched the one in the chinese restaurant... So hilarious!

We have a cozy home now here. Eric, Julie and I went to IKEA on sunday to get some stuff for the living room, it looks a little more furnished than before. Kudo's to Julie for building most of the IKEA furniture while we were playing with the new TV :-P

I'm glad because I got a couple of big tables for our room, so now I have a big desk to put all kinds of computer crap on...

We also found a car for Julie... It's nicer than mine... I should be upset...
Oh well, my car is nice, so that's fine :)
Three downsides of my car though...

• The paint needs some work
• It has this tendency not to go straight :)
• It has anti theft bolts for the wheels for which I don't even have the key...
  (note to self: try not to drive over a nail)

--

Now that everything is in place, I'll get back to business and blow the dust off Flight Simulator Project :-)

With all the visa and school troubles behind, I'm back to Santa Clara in the new appartment that Julie and I just started furnishing!

I did my internship presentation last tuesday in paris, it went well, the jury liked what I did apparently.

Julie and I took off the day after at 12pm. The flight went alright. The only problem was in Paris, the Subway/Train ride to the airport was really a pain... We had 3 heavy lugage and it took us two hours and 15 minutes to go from Ville d'Avray to Charles de Gaulle airport!

During these two weeks back home, I took the TGV to Lyon to visit my parents. I hadn't seen them since I left France in February. It was great to see them again!

Of course, I played with my GPS again. Here's the track of the TGV ride from Paris to Lyon.
I monitored the speed of the train. It went up to 300km/h only for a few minutes, the rest of the trip was below that... but still pretty fast! I'll try to find the time to generate a better kml with speed and altitude information so that we can see more stuff.

Today I went biking in my new neighborhood, I notices there were good bike trails in the area so I gave them a try. I saw to hares... these things sure run fast... Gps again... here's the track... The receiver was in my back pack so the track is a little messy...

I have a busy week end coming... Lots of stuff to do, and perhaps a little flying if I have the time :-)

Happy Landings!

I'm back to France for a couple of weeks and here's what I'm seeing out the window... Great weather !

It's a good thing I'm heading off to CA by the end of month... I already miss the nice weather :-P

Alright, back to work !

That's it, my last night in this apartment... I'm, going to spend my whole day tomorrow moving all the stuff I put in boxes today.

I can't believe how my stuff grew over the past 6 months here. I mean I came only with a backpack and a suitcase, and now I'm going to have to rent a truck tomorrow to move all my furniture, computers, clothes, kitchen stuff...

Well, all of it is not mine, a lot of it is leftovers from my room mate... He really over-bought when he came here... Some of the stuff I packed, I would have never bought... ever ! :-)
Say if you staying for 6 months, and didn't plan to buy a TV, would you buy a couch ? I wouldn't...

Anyways, it's not the time to be bitching... I'm glad I'll be leaving this complex for a better one, hopefully...
I think the only thing that I'll miss from here is the swimming pool. Okay, it was terrible when the weather was hot... I didn't like too much swimming in the hair, and usual pool debris :-/ And what was going on with these people bathing completely dressed up ?! No, what I liked is that it was deeper than most of the pools in the area, and that when the weather was perfect like today, not too hot nor too cold, I had the pool all for myself !

There's something I'll never understand about houses in California... I don't know if it's the same in all states, but all the apartments that I saw all had this ridiculously thick carpet... What's up with that ?! We are in a part of the world where it's relatively hot, why do you need a warm heavy carpet ?
When I was a kid, I wanted carpet in my room, my mum always told me it would not be a good thing... now I understand why... It's dirty as hell !
I'm pretty sure that if I vaccum the entire apartment now, and look in the dirt bag thing of the vaccum cleaner, I can find enough cookie-crums to re-construct about a thousand cookies !

That's what I don't like about carpets... it's morning, you are reading digg, eating cookies, and you drop a few crums on the floor... it's carpet... it's too late you can't pick them up, they are already too deep...
On the contrary, with tiles, it's no big deal, you just use a broom, or just toss the crums under the bed or something... okay, maybe not the last part...

So if anyone knows... why carpets ?

Alright, time to go to bed... :)

Alright.. this is my last week of internship here at NVIDIA... The great news is that it's not over.
In the middle of the internship, I got an offer for a full time position that I could just not turn down... So if everything goes as planned, Ill be back here by the end of September.

I'll move to a new place with a co-worker/roommate. Still in Santa Clara so that's great !

- - -

This week end, I went flying with Bruno for a little training on the C152, some manoeuvers over the San Pablo Bay. The class B transition was just beautiful ! Low overcast clouds over San Francisco of course, and for the first time I didn't even see the golden gate bridge ! It was burried under the clouds ! Just too cool...

Take a look at this picture of the Sutro Tower from above the clouds...

The other day, I was chatting with a friend and he was asking me how was San Francisco... Actually, during the past 6 months here, I only went there 5 or 6 times... In fact, I flew above San Francisco way more times than I drove there... Which is quite amusing :-)

- - -

People say you can't do much in the US without a car... that's right... And I've found out, here, a lot of people are proud of their cars, putting stickers, special license plate frames and such... So I had to do it... okay, my car is far from being ubber shiny, but I'm proud to represent my people :-) Click on the picture on the left to find out how !

- - -

These six months have been intensive on the aviation side... I have flown a lot, and more importantly, learned a LOT... compared to the poor ratio I had when I was studying in paris, that's a big change !

I've uploaded a dump of random pictures I had in my pics directory.

You can find the pictures here (they include pics of the Mount Hamilton for those who care ;-))

Next is formation flying... That was something I rarely had the occasion of doing in France for some reason...

I found a good pal, Bruno, an french nvidian as well. He introduced me to Lou Fields, a navy veteran who I could listen to for hours... I flew to Oakland in July to get a course with him on formation flying and a quick introduction flight... It was something I enjoyed so much...

I have some pictures of these flights here.

Oh FYI, I'll be back in France for a little more than two weeks from the 10th to the 27th of september.

Happy Landings !

If there's one thing that the Garmin 96c sucks at, it's receiving on a high wing airplane... 
I've been checked out on a Cessna 152 and I noticed that the GPS reception was poor... Like no satellite reception when the unit was on my laps... Even worse last week when I flew IFR with a friend of mine in the back seat of a 172... The GPS was worthless... I guess unless I get one of these ridiculously expensive antennas, it won't get any better...

About 4 months ago a coded a little application for my pocket PC that used my bluetooth GPS. It was based on a sample from the Pocket PC SDK and even though it was doing its job, outputing Google Earth Tracks, it was still kind of rough on the edges... I took a photograph during the IFR flight so you can have a look at the poor design :) (the one on the right)

This week end, I flew with that friend again, but this time I was at the controls... pretty good flight... of course, my fellow GPS was recording our tracks... At the end of the flight my friends, Bruno, expressed interest in using this tracking software...

I'm trying to book flight tickets for September... but I'm facing fares madness...
Let’s take a simple example, which is the oddest of all... Direct flight from Paris to San Francisco on Air France: $4400... of course, it’s coach, not business... kinda steep don’t you think ?

Alright, Julie got a round trip for a little more than 500 bucks last month... so why is this one way ticket so expensive...
To try and figure it out, I tried changing my request to a round trip, with a return flight sometimes later, say December for Christmas and stuff.
Guess what, it went down to $700 !

Where’s the logic in that ???
They probably mixed up the idea of money with something else, but I can’t figure out what it is...

Try playing with Air France’s or any company’s website... changing start and end dates... there’s just no way to get the best flight unless you spend a month checking each possible combination... and even then, those you already tested would have changed price about a million times in between...

I Googled a bit to see if anyone had written something about it...
I found an article from Keith Devlin entitled “The crazy math of airline ticket pricing”.

Here are a few quotes I like about the article :

• “it’s like chasing the end of a rainbow...”
• “it could take the fastest computer longer than the lifetime of the universe to find the solution”
• “You can get a sense of just how complicated the real situation is when you consider that with airlines offering thousands of different fares, with different sets of rules governing the different legs on each trip, if two people take a round trip together, with three flights in each direction, there can be as many as 1,000^12, or around 10^36, fare combinations. If you printed out a ticket for each possible fare, the pile would stretch all the way to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, four light years way.”

Alright, I give up... next time I’ll just search for half an hour and book the cheapest I can find in this time frame... no point in wasting time...

I'm in the middle of writing my internship report... It's due August 25th... Taking into account the time it'll take for me to send it to France... I'd rather be finished by this week end...

Anyways... when I started writing it, I remembered a post on digg.com about how serif fonts were apparently the magical key to good grades in papers...

A quick search on the site lead me to this page where the writer makes a comparative analysis of the average grades he got based on the font he used.

Turns out, sans serifs fonts like Arial, Trebuchet MS or Verdana are probably not the best picks :)
They would not look academically enough...

On the other end, Georgia appears to be the bad-grades-free font...

This is the reason why my report is now being written in Georgia font... just like this very piece of the post...
Don't I appear smarter now that I'm writing with Georgia ??

We'll see in a couple of months ;-)

Alright, it’s been a week since I’ve been back from my road trip with Julie from Santa Clara to San Diego… It’s time I write a few lines about what how it went :)

Saturday:
Since we didn’t want to drive all the way back from San Diego to here, we decided that we would rent a one way vehicle and fly back.

The car we rented was a Chrysler Pacifica. I had not planned to rent such a big vehicle, but once at the rental office, when I told them I wanted a car with cruise control, they said that they only had that for one way rentals…


So we went for it. I paid a little extra for that but at least we had a nice car !
We started the trip at 11 am, and headed to Santa Cruz, then Monterey, and straight to the Highway 1, that follows the Pacific Coastline. It was just great ! The road is kind of long, but the view was awesome. We where lucky and had great weather with just a few clouds here and there but they added to the dramatic point of view we had over the Pacific Ocean !

We stopped in the afternoon in a town called Lucia where we ate a delicious sandwich. This restaurant in the middle of nowhere had free wifi ;-)

After this one hour pause, Julie took turn and drove all the way to San Luis Obispo. The rest of the road was pretty common there. We didn’t want to spend too much time here and drove straight to Santa Barbara. We arrived at 7pm and parked in next to the pier.

I found a nice trick to find interesting points to see in the cities we visited. Each time, I took a look at my GPS screen, zoomed out, showed all the details, and we went wherever it was full of little dots (points of interests, restaurants…) It always worked !

We went for a little promenade and ate in a fish restaurant on the pier.

We then drove to Camarillo where I had booked a hotel via Expedia.com. We couldn’t find anything cheap in Santa Barbara so we went to an offset city :-)

The hotel was alright, expect for the morons in the morning that reminded me of why I hate just anyone that owns a motorcycle… They don’t freaking care about anything but their selves!
There were these ridiculous bikes parked right in front of our room, and they decided for some reason that it was a great idea to let the engine warm for 15 freaking minutes! And not a silent engine like on modern cars, nooo it had to make noise! When they left, I was about to go out and let them know my appreciation for their kind… Freaking idiots!

Sunday:
Anyway, we left there at about 9 something… and drove to Santa Monica, next to Los Angeles, following the 101 and then the famous highway 405. Traffic was pretty dense for a Sunday morning. We parked next to the Santa Monica pier and took a walk on the pier and the beach… The beach had some of those Baywatch (Alerte a Malibu) typical yellow cars and lifeguards.

Anyways, we wanted to see some rich people houses, but we didn’t want to buy one of those overly priced stars maps so we entered Beverly Hills in the GPS and looked for a small street we could follow. This lead us to some beautiful houses! We were driving slowly, almost ashamed to slow down the guys in Jaguars, BMWs following us…

In the evening, I called Remy, a French pilot I knew who lives in Santa Monica. He was just returning from a flight to Catalina Island so we decided to meet at Santa Monica Airport. It was pretty cool, we took a drink on a terrace over showing the entire airport!

That night, we stayed at the Comfort Inn in Santa Monica. A little more pricey than the first hotel but still reasonable.

Monday:
The next morning, we drove down to Newport Beach. But before leaving LA, we had to make a stop at Los Angeles International Airport, next to the arrival path of the airplanes… but that’s for another blog post !
So we drove to Newport Beach. I wanted to see this place… those who know me will know why hehe : )
That’s a city south of Los Angeles, in Orange County. Again, my little trick with the GPS worked like a charm and we ended up on the Balboa Peninsula in Newport Beach. Once there, we were reminded that we had a big car and there were very few parking spots! We cruised for about a half an hour in the streets and finally found something…
We then spent a couple of hours walking on the beach… Funny thing is that is the first place where we encountered what I call the “Dudes”.
These are the typical college kids that you see in the TV shows, movies… I always thought it was exaggerated but let me tell you that it is not ! The TV shows are showing exactly the truth! Or maybe it’s the other way around…

There were some expensive houses on this beach! Most of the houses in front of the sand had open windows where you could see everything inside! One of them had an entire side of the first floor that was sliding over the ceiling, uncovering the living room… Of course, all the furniture inside were probably very expensive and of course there was a huge plasma TV screen…
Even closed houses had their stuff like fancy chairs outside… really surprising…
This reminded me of the time I went on vacation with my parents in the south of France… We had to lock our plastic table and chairs with chains and padlocks so that people wouldn’t steal them… *plastic chairs* for crying out loud!
And in Newport Beach, they were leaving their expensive art design chairs with no chains! :-)

After a fresh salad in an Italian restaurant, we geared up to San Diego, first by following the shore to Laguna Beach to see some more of these beautiful houses, and then we took the Highway 5…

We arrived in San Diego at about 5pm, checked in at the hotel, and again started the location finder with the GPS… It indicated three things, but we wanted to see the ocean so we went to Coronado on North Island. This is apparently a refuge for rich people of San Diego as they were lots of beautiful houses there as well. Again beach, again walk… and again food in a crowded but very good restaurant. Oh yeah, I think after each meal we had during the trip, we wondered what all those French were talking about when they said “You’ll see, you are going to eat very bad food there !” Oh yeah ? Well they couldn’t be more wrong! Some people should really update their stereotypes database, it’s getting old… :)

Tuesday:
That was our last day of the trip. We took a walk in the Gaslamp Quarter and then headed to the third point on the GPS: Pacific Beach !
Now that was CRAZY !
We didn’t really know what to expect, just another beach with people chilling for the 4th of July… but man it was not that AT ALL !
We arrived there at about 12pm… there were some people, but it was still okay… Then when we got close to the beach, we decided it was time to look for a parking spot… and 45 minutes later we found one! Man that was starting to be annoying… Every street we went in were completely packed with parked cars ! Not even a single free parking spot!

The one we found was at about 30 minutes walk time from the beach… But what the hell, we had a spot… We started walking towards the beach and stopped in a restaurant for a salad.
We saw a lot of people walking towards the beach… Among these people, lots of “dudes” and little Paris Hilton wanabees… you know with the bathing suit top, a little light colored skirt and of course, oversized sun glasses !
Spooky…
After our meal, we walked to the beach and we were stunned by the amount of people that were on there! It was packed with college students drinking and having barbecues under tents… We walked along the beach for about 20 minutes without seeing the end of the crowd ! There were lots of people there !
You can get a pretty good overview of what it looked like in the gallery with the 180 degree picture I took !
That was really something interesting to live !

While we were on the beach, a dude and his girlfriend approached us, they were wondering if Julie and I were Swedish or something… (The blonde hair must have set him off a bit)
We got to talking and I don’t know why but he ended up talking to me about god, and if French people were very religious… Then we switched to stereotypes, and apparently, French people are very popular now as Car Burner! Yeah! :-/

Anyway… It was time to go home, and we walked for 30 minutes back to the car, hoping to make someone happy by leaving our spot… but no one showed up… we made an anonymous parking spot donation! How nice of us… :-)

Panoramic view of the beach

Well the rest of the trip is pretty common, car rental return, random price on the receipt if you add all the additional charges and fees... flight back home on a Southwest Airlines 737, and taxi-ride back with a crazy Pakistani guy driving recklessly on the 101 :)

Nice trip, when is the next Holliday already?

See all the pictures in the Gallery

Some Satellite / Birds Eye View of the location we visited:

- Hotel in Santa Monica (Sunday)
- Santa Monica Pier (Sunday)
- Santa Monica Airport (Sunday)
- Newport Pier (Monday)
- Coronado - North Island (Monday)
- Crystal Pier - Pacific Beach (Tuesday)

 Okay, that is way more important that actually writing what we did... I just wrote a little piece of code to export the track from my PDA-GPS to KML files. It's about 29000 points !

Not all the track is there. It only starts in Los Alamos, at about 6pm on saturday, but the rest is there, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, and on the pic on the right, the 45 minutes of desperate search for a parking spot in San Diego (Pacific Beach)!

You can download the track file by clicking here!

Happy Landings

Two intensive days I just lived ! I won't go into much details cause I'm kinda lazy tonite...

Sunday was spent in Los Angeles/Santa Monica/Hollywood... We had a lot of fun there :)

Today we drove down the coast with a little stop for lunch in Newport Beach, then continued to Laguna Beach and San Diego where we spent the evening on North Island/Coronado...

Lovely place !

 Here's what I can see as I'm typing this very message :)

Julie and I are on our way to South California via Highway 1 !

We stopped for lunch in Lucia, on the Pacific Coast ! Can it get better than this ??

I have a bunch of stories I felt like sharing...

Since I'm no longer in France, I thought about cancelling my phone contract there. If you think having an internship or even a job abroad is enough for Orange, think again !

I sent a copy of my job offer and everything that they would need as a proof that I was no longer in France. Problem is, my offer doesn't say I'll stay at this position for 12 months+. Therefore, they can't cancel my contract.
These guys are idiots, the US is not France, there is no way to say that you will stay at the same position for a "indefinite" amount of time... It's more the french way of doing stuff. Here it's *really* indefinite, meaning I could no longer have a job tomorrow.

Julie is coming in a couple of weeks, and she wanted to do the same. She just sent a letter saying that she was going to study english for two months here... and Bouygues said : "Sure, we'll cancel it !".
Funny thing is, she renewed her contract only 5 months ago and bought a new phone with a two years contract...

This whole thing is just ridiculous...

This makes me think that if one day I have my own company, I would advise you not to buy anything from me as you will end up with a 50 years contract uncancellable unless you die... or maybe not, think about reading the small lines at the end of the 518th page of the user agreement ;-)

One last... I received a registered letter at home in France. My parents wanted to pick it up at the post office. They are my parents, they have proofs that I'm not in France right now, and yet, the postal services won't give them my letter... *I* have to pick it up...
And when you ask: "Alright, then what can we do ???" the answer is "You had to think about it before he left."
Well that's very wise... thank you !

Good thing is maybe if we ask another teller, this will be a completely different story !

Still having fun here... a little step back weather wise lately... we had a crappy Sunday with rain, wind and everything...

Last Friday, I finally decided it was time to pass my california driver's license... I had to go to the California Department of Motor Vehicle. I thought it would be terrible, given what I had heard about the DMV... but the people there were very nice... note quite like in this video from Family Guy (watch it before it gets pulled off YouTube, it's awesome !)

So anyways, I had to read the California Driver's Handbook to familiarize myself with the local traffic signs and everything... it was time I did that considering I had been driving for about 2 months before opening it hehe :-)

It turns out my so called "international drivers license" that I got in France is valid for a year if I'm not resident, and if I don't have a car of my own... but since I bought a car, it is only valid for 3 month... go figure...

Since I thought I would have to schedule another appointment for the "written test" I only browsed some of the pages of the driver's handbook... Actually, I didn't have to come back, I went from window to window, signing stuff, smiling at cameras, putting fingers on red things, and then a guy handed me a test sheet and told me "go there and good luck". wtf ?! I'm not ready pal ! Well, since I'm here, I might as well give it a shot...
There was 40 questions or something on that test sheet, and I made 5 mistakes out of the 6 which maximum allowed... Not that good but still enough to get my "Temporary License" that is valid for 60 more days, until I pass the "Behind the Wheel Test" in June...

That is so strange... I can drive for more 60 days, but I don't have a licence... but.... alright, nevermind...
Strange thing about the test too... I can still recall the day I took the written test for the driver's license in France... I was scared as hell, and everyone was freaking serious when the slides were shown on the screen... here I felt like it was just another information sheet I had to fill out, only difference was I couldn't talk to anyone... the room was not even secured or with some guy checking that you don't cheat... really strange...

I've been hanging out on youtube a lot lately... This is a place where ppl can upload videos... and you can find anything ... so here's a pick of a bunch of stuff I liked...

The Jackson Five (Don't ask... they are awesome on this vid...)

Eva Cassidy (Amazing singer... A shame she is no longer with us...)
What a Wonderful World
Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Not youtube, but still very funny video from Family Guy

Oh yeah and this one from South Park

South Park, very cool show... not as terrible as they depicted it when it came on air in France... Some people should have watched beyond the first five minutes of the pilot episode...

Well, time to go sleep...
Happy Landings !

Well, I have not posted lots of pics from California since I got here. To fix this I just uploaded a 58 new pictures of various things I thought would be worth showing.

It goes from streets, airplanes, animals, stoplights ... I hope you'll enjoy them.

Click here to view the pictures.

On an other subject, ever since I wrote that post on Adam's talk a couple days ago, I got lots of new referers (websites pointing to mine), mainly from forums, saying that a new video was out, and that it was worth checking it out.

One of these referers thinks I actually released the video and documents ... Of course, that's incorrect, I just pointed to the stuff that Adam mentionned at the end of his talk.

This reminds me of the time FSP was believed to be Flight Simulator 2006, or when it was tought as a side project of a Microsoft Developer. =) Sometimes, I wonder where they get all this from ...

Happy Landings

Well, I really had a great time there :) Even though I had no booth duty, I never got bored at all during the three days I was there.

Yesterday, I attended Adrian Wood's talk about the "Make Art Button". It was really interesting even for a developer like me. Well, especially for me since I kind of have to do everything on FSP. I learnt lots of stuff on Photoshop, Max Script and even DOS hehe.

Like Adrian said, this talk was not a course about how to make the perfect max or photoshop script. It was more giving ideas and talking about how he does things in Flight Simulator, to get rid of repetitive tasks and leave more time for creation.

On the FSX Exciting News, well, not much, he said this talk would not contain new FSX announcements, hehe. Nonetheless, if you looked closely at the names of the Normal Map files he was manipulating, you could perhaps guess the types of aircraft that could potentially be in the next release of Flight Simulator hehe ;-)

After the talk, I ran into Adam who was waiting for Adrian's talk to finish so they could pack up stuff and perhaps go back to Seattle.

I'm really glad I was so lucky to live all this and meet all these interesting people ;-) (Thanks again Philippe !)

So, back to my terrain engine ... (how coincidental, hu ?! :P)

Happy Landings !

Today was THE day I had been waiting for ever since I found out that Adam Szofran was going to talk about terrain generation and rendering at the GDC !

Adam Szofran is the developer in charge of the Terrain Generation and Rendering on Flight Simulator X. Those old flight sim fans might remember him from the FSASM days ;-)

I was lucky enough to get a pass for this session. I got there a few minutes early and Adam was at the door chatting with some of the GDC staff people.

I introduced myself and we chatted a little bit, and apparently, he already heard about my work :)

His talk was very informative, I learnt lots of things about how they do the terrain generation, and we saw a nice video of the new terrain engine with a camera starting from the ground and going up to space ! (Download here)

After the talk, I hung around and listened to the other attendee's questions. I just had one stupid question about vertex buffers and textures, and he thought that it would be better if we could sit down somewhere so he can give me more details !

So we spent a few minutes outside seating at a table with the power point presentation. It was really cool, I was actually talking with a Flight Sim developer guy hehe ;-)

Well, that was THE event of the day, so it got on top the stack of things I have to talk about here !

All the information about Adam's talk, and his paper can be found here.

Happy Landings Everyone !

Perhaps some of your readers remember my previous posts about the track export from my GPS to Google Earth. Basically, what I did was using a program called Navigation, to import the data from the GPS, and exported it to a kml file to give to Google Earth.

These tracks are points or coordinates that are recorded by the GPS at a certain interval so that you can review your flight afterwards.

Problem was, Navigation couldn't handle my GPS apparently (a Garmin GPSMAP 96C). It was only importing the latest portion of the latest track. I had some mail exchanges with the author but none of the fixes he tried fixed the problem so I eventually let it go.

Since I've been flying quite a lot lately, I thought I would give this track thing another shot... Still no go with Navigation... I figured I would have to do this myself.

It turns out that the latest version of MapSource, the mapping software from Garmin, the GPS Vendor, is now exporting to Google Earth. Since we don't live in wonderworld, there had to be a problem : they don't export the altitude, or it seems that google earth doesn't represent it.

So I had to find a way to do this myself. I tried to look at the export options of MapSource and found out there is an xml export format called GPX.

Enters GPX to XML, a wonderful C# piece of program that creates a nice 3D view of the flight from the GPX File.

It reads the GPX file and exports each track in individual files that you can open with Google Earth. At last, I have what I wanted, and without subscribing to the 20$ Google Earth Plus just so that I can have a stupid import feature activated. That goes the same for the huge pack of GPS Import programs that were sold 20$ each...

Anyways, click here to download the program. (Requires .NET 2.0 Framework)

EDIT : You need to have the latest version of MapSource to be able to export tracks in GPX Format.

Some screenshots of the result :

 
A fligth to Gap last summer


Guess where the airplane I took is parked ;)


Touch and to at Livermore


MapSource view


Palo Alto Approach

And oh, yes, I still have to write about the flights of this week end, but if you look closer at the screenshots, you'll have an idea of what we did hehe :)

Happy Landings

Well, I wasn't at the GDC today, but I met with a couple of .NET Managed Direct X guys, Andy (ZMan) and Todd.

Andy is the creator of the famous TheZBuffer.com so if you ever coded a few things in MDX, you probably know his website.

It was quite a pleasant dinner and I'll sure give these guys a call when I'll be at the GDC Conference Center on wednesday so that we can chat some more !

Other than that, everything is still fine. I have a couple of blog posts in the pipe, a report about this aeronautical week end, and another about some piece of code that is really cool ;) but more on that later ... or sooner, depending on when you read this post !

Happy Landings !

Every year, in the US is held the GDC (Game Developer Conference) a big event where lots of game developers and game companies gather in the same place to chit chat. This year, is it in San Jose, which is about 5 miles from where I live.

Needless to say I'll be there !

There are three conferences that I'll try to attend. A couple from Flight Sim developers Adam Szofran and Adrian Woods, and also Will Wright's about what's next in game design.

Of course, I'll stop by as many sponsored sessions as I can, among which :

• GPU Performance Tuning with NVIDIA Performance Tools
• Havok FX™: GPU-accelerated Physics for PC Games
• NVIDIA Mobile Performance Tools and GPU Performance Tuning
• Physics Simulation on NVIDIA GPUs

All the sessions can be viewed here.

If one of you readers is coming to the GDC, let me know, perhaps we can meet !

Happy Landings!

This week, I met with a co-worker who happens to be French, and a Private Pilot. We got to talking and three days later, we were ready to take off in a Cessna 150 at Oakland International Airport ;-)
This flight was scheduled for the morning originally… But the forecasts weren’t very optimistic so Bruno (the co-worker ;)) decided the night before that we were not going to make it, so it got cancelled …
Once again, the weather people got it completely wrong, at noon, even though it was kind of cold, the sun was shining…
Bruno called me, the flight was back on !
We drove all the way to Oakland and half an hour later, we were taxying in a C150, to runway 33. Nice piece of machinery, well, kind of old but still, that’s an airplane, you gotta love it :-P

Oakland is another legendary airfield for me, as Half Moon Bay, it was in Flight Unlimited 2, so it was nice to be there and see it in real at last !

We took off from runway 33, and headed east towards Livermore…
Everything was going well, and we were on our way to Tracy Airport.
During the climb at around 3000ft, we heard a little stutter in the engine … then normal engine sound … then about a minute later, another stutter …
We didn’t let a third happen, we headed back to the airport, Bruno didn’t want to take a chance on that one! That was a smart decision I think :)
Meanwhile, I took as many pictures of the area as I could; it was really a great day, weather-wise!
As we flew back to the airport, no more stutters happened, and we landed safely on runway 27R at Oakland.

Well, that’s too bad, little C150 wasn’t nice that day… I guess I’ll have to practice my radio some other time. (thanks anyway Bruno ;-))

Later that day, I received a call from Steve, my instructor about the next flight, and I took this opportunity to ask him about the afternoon mishaps in the C150. He told me that was a known thing for the C150 and 152, and that probably leaning the mixture would have solved the problem… Good to know.

Well, next flight is scheduled for next Saturday, then next Sunday ! hehe stop me if you can !

The Flight Media :
Photos
Video

Happy Landings

I remember myself in 1998, opening the box of Flight Unlimited 2 that I just purchased off my local retail store … I fell in love with this game, the way the developers depicted the scenery was just awesome. This game title was featuring coverage of the full bay area from Sacramento to South County. After some time playing the game, I found an airport that would become my “home base” : Half Moon Bay. I just loved the name of this city and I thought the location of the airfield, right by the Pacific Ocean would just be perfect !

I remember thinking someday I’ll fly there… see the actual airport, see the cliffs up north, see the ocean, experience the turbulences that pilots report in final due to the relief on the shore… As a matter of fact, I did all that for real yesterday !
I actually went to Half Moon Bay Airport and it was awesome!

I had an appointment with Steve Finnie, a flight instructor from the West Valley Flying Club at 11:00am Saturday. We had booked an airplane over the phone the day before, a nice Piper 28-181 Archer : N3576J.
After reviewing some stuff about the airfield, what the departure and arrivals were, taxiway and tie downs locations, we were ready for take off !
We went down to the aircraft at tie down L16, right in the middle of the airfield. I looked it up in local.live.com and the aircraft was there at the time the photograph was taken, it’s here, right underneath the blue pushpin.

So anyway, I faced one of the differences between flying in france, and in the US. In France, the aircrafts are mostly stored in hangars, here, they are outside, with covers and ropes tying them to the ground. After a pre-flight check, we were ready for rolling. And I faced some difficulties with the radio… I felt like the first time I had to send a message to the ground controller in July 2000… I had to say: “Palo Alto, Ground, Cherokee 3576J, at L16, for a 270 overhead departure”. Not very hard, right? We rehearsed and I don’t think I got it once without making a mistake… What an idiot!… Anyway, Steve helped me, and we made it to runway 13. Soon after, we were ready for take off and I said: “Cleared for take off, Cherokee 56 Juliet !”  Yikes ! ?

After take off, we made 270 to head towards the city of Palo Alto and Stanford University. Just before reaching the mountains, we headed west towards Crystal Springs Reservoirs, leaving San Carlos airport on our Right. We had a nice view of San Francisco International Airport in the distance.
As we arrived at the reservoirs, I told Steve that we could see Half Moon Bay on our left, and he said “yeah, that’s where we’re going…” “Cool !” I said, and he said “Are you happy ?”  hehe hell yeah I was ! Half Moon Bay, I could see the ocean and everything … Well, I couldn’t say the ocean was blue, looked more like gray than anything else, but it was because of this thin layer of cloud that had formed at noon…
So anyway, we contacted the airport and did a few touch and goes there. I’m certainly going to return there, mainly because the scenery is wonderful! Touch and goes at Half Moon Bay have so much more cachet than touch and goes in Lyon hehe :-)

I had some difficulties landing the aircraft; Steve let me land it, just to see what my skills where, it didn’t break so I guess I didn’t do too bad of a landing… I extended full flaps in final, that perhaps was not the smartest idea in the world judging by the wind… He told me some tips about his way of landing aircrafts. I never heard of such a way, and I think I’m going to add this way to my “instructors-ways-of-landing-an-aircraft list”.

The view that is stuck in my mind since the time I flew there is what you see when on final on runway 12 at Half Moon Bay… Waves hitting the cliffs, the Pacific Ocean, nice houses… Simply breathtaking!

After these touch and goes, we went back to Palo Alto, via a VOR in the mountains west of the terrain. The landing went pretty smoothly, no shock or anything…
In the end the totals were : 1.3 hour of flight, 3 hours and a half of instructor time … way too much money … That instructor part is way more expensive than in France, that’s a shame …

 When looking back on this, what stroke me the most about this whole thing is the Radio Communications, not because I completely failed in this area, but because it’s so clean and quick.
No useless calls, short messages: efficient!
I was surprised that when leaving the tower airspace, we didn’t even say anything to the controller, apparently that’s the way it works around here.
 
So that was a nice flight, besides the financial aspect, it was interesting and I could see what some of the difficulties of flying in the US are, at least, some of them. We only did a local flight this time, but Steve said next time or the time after that I would have to prepare a navigation to some airfield of my choice. I really look forward to that.

I was supposed to fly again today (Sunday) but the weather forecasts where planning gust winds and rain … so it got cancelled… I should be flying next Saturday hopefully…

Full Photo Gallery

Video

Final at Half Moon Bay

Happy Landings !

Yep, this is sooo cool, I'm now a member of West Valley Flying Club ! I came by their offices this afternoon and completed the registration form.

My first flight is scheduled tomorrow at noon, I'm sooo excited ! It'll be a flight on a Piper Archer !

More details on that later !

Also, this afternoon, I had the first video+sound chat with Julie, my lovely girlfriend, it was great, and so good to see her speak to her :) :-P

I'm just back from IKEA and on my way to a computer store in Santa Clara. I just bought some furniture for the house, and killed my back while carrying stuff in the apartment ... :-P

Okay, I'm off to the stores !

(note to self : stop buying stuff ...)

Happy Landings !

My second day in the US has been exhausting! I needed to get some things done, like get a bed, a cell phone number and lots of other things …
I took care of the bed the first day, it should be delivered sometime tomorrow. Today I decided I needed to rent a car to do things faster than by the new bike I bought. Besides, some of the stuff I wanted to do would have required long bike rides so I really needed a car.
I booked a car online in the morning, and called the renting company to come and pick me up ! (they can pick people up, and this is free, that’s amazing ?) A friendly guy came to my house and  to drive me to the rental facilities a few miles from my house.
I got a Ford Focus something, a really nice car that has AC in it hehe. What I like the most about this car is that it has automatic transmission! It’s like Managed Driving ! I don’t understand why we don’t have more of these automatic things in Europe…

So anyway, I used my GPS to guide me to all the places I needed to go like computer stores, San Jose FSDO, and of course Palo Alto Airport ?
I’m glad I had it to tell me when to turn left and right cause all these roads can be pretty confusing sometimes!

Okay, now things I like about driving in the US :
1 : The automatic transmission !
2 : The large roads
3 : The highways are huge !

Things I don’t like :
1 : Way too many red lights ! Especially when turning left at an intersection … Have Americans ever heard of roundabouts ? Sometimes I ended up waiting like 2 or 3 minutes for the green light !
2 : The highway is full of imperfections and holes… at least on the portion I drove on…

Okay, back to the places I drove to, first, the San Jose FSDO. I had to schedule an appointment at this FSDO to get my Temporary Airman Certificate in order to fly in the US. It was all done in an hour and I decided to drive to Palo Alto airport to check out the flying club I’ve had an eye on for the past three months. (West Valley Flying Club). I came to their office and I spoke with a nice lady who gave me the application papers. This club seems to be alright, they have lots of aircrafts and I’m really looking forward to flying there !
Since no instructor was there at the time I came, I think I’m going to have to go there again tomorrow.
I still took the time to visit the neighborhood and listen to airplanes talk on the radio. Then I got back home.

Some random things :
- When you buy something, don’t trust what’s indicated on the price tag, they always add the taxes in the end apparently…
- I was sad to finish my last box of “Petit Ecoliers”, a French biscuit with chocolate on top of it, but today, I found the American version of these biscuit : “le petit écolier” à la française. Different box, same brand and tastes the same.
- Danone brand is spelled Dannon here
- Bio yogurts also became Activia in here too. (no one cares, but I found this funny…)
- I’m completely disoriented in an American grocery store, I don’t know what’s crap or not and all the stuff you can buy

That’s all for tonite…
Happy Landing

I'm there ! Finally ! Sunny California !

It was a long trip, especially the part from Chicago to San Francisco. There was a kid in the plane that wouldn't stop making high pitch noises... and he HAD to be seated next to me ...

Anyway, I'm there and I've got lots of stuff to do... More later !

Meanwhile, you can check out the first pics by clicking here !

Funny thing, I just heard two typical american noises : a train horn, like in the movies, and a police siren ! :)

Happy Landings !

February 28th... I've feared this day ever since I book my plane tickets...

We're there, and in eleven hours, my flight to San Francisco will be leaving...

Expect news from me... whenever I can, either at the airport, or from Sunny California...

Wich me luck, profesionnally or personnally, whichever one you want ...

Happy Landings

This had been in my head for quite some time now, I wanted a GPS Receiver to hook up to my QTEK 9100. This is now done hehe :-)

I bought a nice Holux GPSlim236 GPS Receiver ! It sends data over Bluetooth, and works great on both the PocketPC and the Laptop.

So far, only one thing that bugged me about this device, is the weirdness of the COM Ports. It works, and I don't know why, so this has a high potential of not working for whatever reason some day...

One of the things I'll do with this device is use it as a navigation helper tool while I'm flying. Okay, I've got the 96C already, but I like toys, plus, it's a backup system, just in case.
I browsed around to find out what was available and I found PocketFMS, a Flight Management System that works on  PocketPC. I find the interface quite hard to handle, and the qtek is perhaps a little slow to run this program correctly, but I'll sure give it a try during my next flight, whenever it will be.

On the right, you can see a screenshot of the tool that is shipped with the device. It runs on the PocketPC as well as on the PC and now you know where I live !

I have also played a bit with the GPS samples of the Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK. I think I'm going to have a lot of fun with this :-P

Happy Landings

I was still in high school. Back then, I worked on a scenery project for Flight Simulator 2000 called Polynesia 2000.

This came back to my mind when today, while cleaning my apartment, I found a magazine that contained a 2 page article about this scenery package. I remember being thrilled when I discovered that our project made it to the cover of the magazine !

We were three working on this project and it took us 8 months to complete the 25+ islands of the whole area. We modeled dozens of 3D objects, aircrafts, hangars, poles, lights... to populate the islands. I remember coding a simple program to place random points of light ... I'd like to recover the code of this thing, just to have a good laugh, hehe :)

Anyways, I'm back to cleaning...
Happy Landings

Well, weather forecasts were wrong again for Lyon area yesterday. We were supposed to get nasty weather, but it was far from that.

It was a good thing I didn't cancel my aircraft reservation for the afternoon.
Julie and I went for a one hour flight around a mount next to Lyon, the "Mont Pilat". Given the orientation and position of the windsock at LFLY, flying in the vincinity of a mountain might not have been the best idea... Nevertheless, it was the place where the weather was the clearest, so we headed there...
As I suspected, it was kind of shaky when we flew near the mount, it was fun :-P

My pink co-pilot took some pictures for you viewers to watch :) Accept our appologies for the quality, of the shots, we forgot to bring an actual camera so we were stuck with my telephone's built'in camera.

Also, my good friend, the Garmin 96c accompanied us in the trip, and it was kind enough to record the track of the flight :)
Using MapSource, I imported the track to Google Earth, and here is the result.

 
Complete flight track

 
Touch and go track, and departure / arrival on the taxiway

As you can see in the pictures, I couldn't keep myself from making a few touch and goes at the airport ;-)

Happy Landings

Yep, I'm done with the studies, yesterday was my last day of school ... It's been 6 years since I graduated from High School in my home town near Lyon.

Now I'm gearing up to a whole new start, I'll be gone by the end of the february for 6 months in Sunny California.
I still can't believe how fortunate I am about this ... I couldn't thank Philippe enough, well, maybe with a few aircraft tours in the San Francisco Bay Area ;-)

Anyways, It's been 4 great years at Epitech, from September 2002 to today, I've met lots of interesting people, learned an incredible amount of new things... and most of all, I've spent amazing times with 5 fellows that I will never forget !

I wish the best for the 6 of us guys !

And Kitti, see ya in Hawai !

... is in sight ... in 4 days, my long 23 years of studies will be over (Including pre-school ;))

This is the last week, and I've got two presentations to prepare with my pals from school... One of them is in english, and I'm trying to rehurse it over and over again, but man it's way more difficult than doing a presentation in french ... and to make it worse, it's about commercial/finance cr*p ... you know, the kind of stuff I *really* enjoy ... (or not)
So this one is saturday....

The next one is on Monday and it's about a game I've been developing with my team mates. This presentation will be more fun to do since it's a project we've all enjoyed working on.

So I'm putting FSP aside for another 4 days, and after that, I'll have plenty of time to work on it like crazy, along with the preps for my big departure to the Bay Area at the end of February.

Speaking of that, I'm looking for temporary housing in the Santa Clara area, if anyone has anything for me ... ;-)

4 more days ... 4 more days ...

Damn winter weather ...

I'm supposed to be flying in a half an hour, and from the latest metar, looks like its not gonna happen today either...

LFLL LYON SAINT EXUPERY
METAR LFLL 301030Z 00000KT 4000 BR FEW005 BKN230 M10/M11 Q1018 88010095 NOSIG=

LFLY LYON BRON
METAR LFLY 301000Z 00000KT 2000 BR FEW001 SCT100 BKN250 M09/M11 Q1019 16010095 BECMG 3000 BR=

In short for Sharkone ;) : Visibility of 2000 meters, few clouds at a hundred feet, -9 degree celcius ... Not good :-(

This'll give me some time to work on FSP so this is still an interesting trade :)

Happy Landings

Here's what my front yard in Lyon looks like this morning ...

I was supposed to fly this afternoon, so I immediately connected on the weather website to get the latest weather updates ..

LFLL LYON SAINT EXUPERY
 
METAR LFLL 281000Z VRB01KT 1000 R36L/1400VP1500N SN SCT003 SCT030 OVC050 M04/M06 Q1009 18491095 NOSIG=

TAF LFLL 280800Z 280918 VRB03KT 7000 FEW010 BKN030 TEMPO 0918 1000 SHSN BKN005 OVC020=

TAF LFLL 280500Z 281206 34008KT 9000 SCT025 BKN035 TEMPO 1224 2000 SHSN BKN008 OVC020 BECMG 0003 5000 SCT010 OVC015=

LFLY LYON BRON
 
METAR LFLY 281000Z 17003KT 0800 R35/1000N SN FG SCT016 BKN050 M04/M06 Q1010 340 4 //95 BECMG 3000 SN=

TAF LFLY 280800Z 280918 VRB03KT 7000 FEW010 BKN030 TEMPO 0918 1000 SHSN BKN005 OVC020=
 
Needless to say I'm not going to be flying ...

This is bad news, I haven't flown for almost a month and a half and I was really looking forward to flying again ... Looks like I'm going to have to try to schedule another flight :-P

All this snow reminded me of last year when me and my brothers built this HUGE snow ball on top of which the three of us could stand on ! :-)

The next morning I couldn't resist overflying the house to see what this snow ball would look from the sky :)
It was visible, kinda like the great wall of china !!

Happy Landings !

Lots of work lately, but not really much on the Flight Simulator Project.

I've been working for the past week on a school project, an RSS Aggregator Webservice thing, kind of like NewsGator, in .net  2.0, and with clients on many platforms (Web, PC, PPC ...) A really interesting project !

I wanted to thank Jason (Pixelpoke) Wakey, from ACES to write a post about my website moving to this new location :) (Hello Fs Readers !)

One other thing too, it turns out I'll be leaving Paris by the end of February, to move to the US for a 6 months internship in the Silicon Valey. I’ll be an intern at NVIDIA in Santa Clara (Thank you Glitch ;).
This is going to be very exciting! I’ll sure be posting about this so stay tuned!
 
If you are a new visitor to this blog, please check these links to read about the Flight Simulator Project.
Flight Simulator Project FAQ
Flight Simulator Project Gallery
Downloads

Happy Landings and Merry Christmas !

I’m in the middle of a commercial class in what I would describe as pretend English and since it is so boring I thought I’d blog about an old project I worked on about 5 or 6 years ago…

Back in these days, I was a flight simulator 98 scenery designer working on a scenery of Lyon airport in France. I got contacted by FlightWorld editions to work for them and sell my sceneries as part of a package called Geneva 98.
At the same time I discovered computer programming. I started desigining tools such as a bitmap to r8 converter and so on… all sorts of utilities that would help me in my scenery related tasks.

The boss of FlightWorld thought it would be a great idea to sell all these utilities… I was young, I went for it and I ended up making a set of 7 utilities designed to help scenery designer...

One funny thing though… I didn’t know anything about malloc at the time… hehe =)
I remember myself coding something like that
”int points[10000000000];”
right on the stack and wondering what the hell this “stack overflow exception” was =)

You can read a couple of reviews at these addresses:
Review at Simflight
Review at Avsim

I sincerely apologize to whoever bought this suite for the design of the programs, it was not (entirely ;) my responsibility…

Happy Landings

Just a little post about this option of ipconfig that kept me from pulling hair a few times ...

When you can't connect to an address when every other addresses work fine, this is probably a dns problem, a Windows Dns Cache problem to be more precise.

A google search lead me to this explanation : Apparently, when a DNS Request fails (no connection available, or for any other reason), Windows keeps the returned address in cache, even though it's a false IP address. (randomly generated ?)
When the connection is available again, since Windows has an IP associated with the name you request, it won't request it again, thus it'll use the false random IP...

So don't forget this option of ipconfig, it might come in handy ...

Happy Landings

It's snowing today in Paris ...

I'm glad I'll be moving to warmer latitudes soon ...

For those wondering whatever happened to the flight simulator project, I've been quite lazy euhh I mean busy lately, I have compiled a list of stuff to do though, so expect news in a near future ;-)

Happy Landings !

A part from being a Flight Simulator addict, I've never been a real console game addict. But a month or so ago, my gf offered me a Nintendo DS :P
Yesterday, I bought a recently released game: Mario Kart DS. It's kind of a fun game, It seems that all my reflexes from the SNES days are long gone though hehe :)

So when I was about to go to sleep, I fired up the DS just to race a few CPU opponents ... That's when I remembered my friends talking about some Wifi option thingy where we could play online...
I went through the menus, configured the DS to pass through my Wifi Access Point and ADSL Connection, and 5 minutes later, I was online waiting for the system to find random players for me to play with ! Simply Amazing!

When your opponents are selected, you can review their skills, and their number of wins/losses. Then you select the character you want, and the car variation. Then there appears to be a choice for the most wanted circuit in some sort of vote or something.
After the circuit is chosen, the fun starts, and man this is fun! :-)
I've lost a couple of races and ended second at the last one. And this morning, I played again, and ended up 2second at the last one, but got the last place for the 3 prior races hehe.

Anyways, regardless of the result, races are fun and the bonuses you get on the track add a lot of fun to the whole gaming experience.

I hardly recommend this game ;-)
Happy Landings

A new feature has been added to this blog : rss feed !

I'm using RssDotNet a really cool rss reader/writer.

Happy Landings

Well, not me actually, but a friend of mine who was having computer problems. She called me saying that some of her programs were randomly crashing and that most importantly, the winks in MSN were not working anymore because it was freezing !

Once I could get my hands on the machine, I tried a few things ... Well, apparently, the computer is definitely having problems, applications that were running fine the day before were crashed that day ...
A particular dictionary application kept crashing, so I thought I would re-install it ... I went to the control panel in add/remove program, clicked on uninstall, rundll32.exe or something started hogging all the cpu time... weird ...
Then I went onto the msn case, for some reason, when it was showing the winks window, it was going at a hundred percent of cpu time ...

I called my brother to see if he had any ideas … He suggested I install adaware, since this could be a spy-ware issue… I downloaded it, and ran the setup… and you got it right, it went a 100% as well … 

Every installers kept crashing …

I tried one last with MSN messenger installer … of course 100%, but this time, I fired up ProcessExplorer from SysInternals.
I went into the properties of the application and saw that this process only had one thread, and it was apparently blocked in an infinite loop. Then I had the idea !
Click on the Stack button of Process Explorer ! It stopped the process and showed me a stack trace. It was blocked in a GetTempFilenameA or something!
A quick look in filemon (from SysInternals again, thanx guys !) showed that setup.exe was actually trying to create temporary files, and that all these actions were denied.

It was still not the solution, but I was getting closer … I took a look at windows temp folder, and it turned out it was filled with approximately 32700 files ! (probably some kind of a limit on FAT32)

After removal of all these files, everything went back to normal, and she could wink me again ;-)

The moral of this story : if you computer behaves weirdly and you are thinking about formatting your system… think again J

After a year and a half of service, my former website http://www.matt-online.homeip.net, has now been shutdown ... Well officially shutdown. Some services remain active, but the site will be unavailable.
The only task that the IIS server on it will have to perform from now on will be a simple Response.Redirect() to this website.

Just for the fun of it, here are some of the stats I gathered :

Here are the links to my other websites :

My Blog at Epitech where I wrote lots of articles about The Flight Simulator Project.

My old Website where you can download The Flight Simulator Project

Happy Landings !

What you are looking at now is my new website.

My old blog and personal website will be merged into this new space.

I will certainly post more personal stuff on this website since it will only be viewed by people who explicitely visit this page :-)

Happy Landings !