News & Updates Archive - 2007

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News & Updates from 2007:

24 December 2007
Merry Christmas! And here's my Christmas present to the world - I've added a new factoid page, Factoids Debunked & Verified, Part II. I went through another of these trivia list e-mails, trying to determine the veracity of the claims. Once again, most of them were untrue.


30 November 2007
My Factoids Debunked & Verified page is turning out to be quite popular (at least compared to other pages on this site). A reader, Susan G., a clinical audiologist from Kansas, sent me some feedback on two of the factoids dealing with, obviously, ears. I've included her comments in the page. Also, I decided to add a small feature to the main home page, including links to the 10 most popular pages on this site. I figured, that's a good way for people to get an idea of some the of the best I have to offer (best as voted for by Internet traffic, not necessarily my favorite pages). I'll try to update that list every month - it'll be interesting to see if it changes at all. I'm also going to try to go through and make lists for months past, but I'm not making any promises on how long it will be until I've gotten that compiled.


10 October 2007
I only have a very small update for today. Way back when I had my co-op during college, I figured out a way to fold a pretty good glider out of a Post-It note. I put up a page with instructions on how to fold it not long after, but that page has never been as "attractive" as I would have liked. A few years ago, I tried taking digital photos of the glider to put at the top of the page, but the camera I had then didn't have a good macro setting, so the pictures were awfully blury. So, just recently, I wasted a few minutes making a 3D model of the glider in Solidworks, and using a screen shot from that for the picture at the top of the page. I also added a small note of about a book that used that glider, Post-It: Ideas That Stick!,along with some pictures.


5 October 2007
The single most popular page on this site is my Autogyros essay. Consequently, I never want to mess around with it too much (if it ain't broke, don't fix it). However, I saw a few areas that I could definitely improve upon, so I made some changes. The biggest of those were expanding the explanation of autorotation, adding a German translation that a reader had sent to me, and creating an archive of previous versions (mainly to give a stable copy at a fixed url for citations). Numerous smaller changes were made throughout the text to improve readability, and a few typos were corrected.


21 September 2007
I've made some slight modifications to my Photo Page Generator program, so it's now at version 2.2. I've uploaded the updated version to my Programming and Downloads sections. The main upgrade is the ability to use 3 different resolutions of the same image. This could be useful for an archive of images that are high enough resolution for printing. The way I've used it is to have 1.) low resolution thumbnails, 2.) intermediate resolution for previewing, and 3.) high resolution suitable for printing (specifically developed for this site: http://www.cartercopters.com/catma/, which is still unfinished at the time of writing this update). I've aslo improved the readme file. The full list of updates is available from the history in the readme file.


7 September 2007
How's that saying go, "Never discuss work, politics, or religion?" Well, I break all three of those rules on this site. Considering the third one of those, since I have recently gone through some changes, and no longer have the same beliefs as what I stated in older essays, I thought it would be most honest for me to discuss my current beliefs. So, if that's the type of thing that interests you, I've added a new collection to my Writings section, Religious Essays. Since it is such a different theme than most of this site, and probably bound to ruffle a few feathers, I've decided that this is the only mention I'll give it here in my "Latest News & Updates" section. If I do make any changes to it, or add any new essays, it will be noted in the History section at the bottom of that page, and possibly on my blog.


20 August 2007
Well, after nearly 3 months of dormancy for this site before the last update, I've got another one ready to go already. I've added a new page to the Photos section, titled Galveston, Houston, & Natural Bridge Caverns Photos. It's from my family's recent road trip vacation to those areas. I mention this on the page, but it's worth repeating here. Our old digital camera had been stolen a few weeks before, so we went out and bought a new camera just for the trip. It was an 8.1 MP Sony DSC-W90. We were extremely disappointed with the image quality from the camera, and took it back it as soon as we returned from our trip. The images were very grainy, and not even as good as our old 5 MP Sony camera that we'd lost. In fact, they were so grainy (even in decent lighting conditions) that the employees were sure that we had the settings wrong (we didn't). I even tried taking pictures with another W90 to make sure we didn't just have a faulty one, but the other camera didn't work any better. In the end, we exchanged it for the 7.2 MP Sony DSC-W80, which we are much happier with. Who would've thought that 1 MP would make such a big difference?


18 August 2007
Man, am I long overdue for some updates to this site. The last one was way back in April, so I completely missed my update per month goal in May, June, and July. I guess I'll try to make up for that with a lot of changes this time around.

Okay, for my biggest update today, I've done some work to the X-Plane, UDP, Visual Basic Tutorial for X-Plane version 8. Thanks to feedback, I've realized that some of the algorithms on that page weren't as good as they could have been, so I've added more efficient algorithms. I've also given the page a clickable table of contents. Also, on the X-Plane, UDP, Visual Basic Tutorial for X-Plane version 6, I already had a small note telling people of the Version 8 tutorial. I updated that note to include mention of the improved algorithms, and made the note bold so it would stand out more.

In the article, X-Plane as an Engineering Tool, I've added an additional paragraph explaining in more detail some of the shortcomings of X-Plane. I also fixed a typo, misidentifying one of the screenshots as from Plane-Maker, instead of from X-Plane.

Okay, now to get into the smaller changes. I get a lot of e-mails from people sending me links to interesting sites. I've received a few that I want to include links to on my site. (Note: This isn't a link exchange, and please don't send me an e-mail asking for a link exchange. If you have a cool site, I'll link to it, but only because the site is worth it, not so that I can get a link back to here.) So, here are the links I added, and the pages where I added them.

BTW, if you're reading this on my blog, and you happen to be aware of my post per week goal, since this entry does link to new content on this site, I'm counting it as this week's post. Yeah, it's kind of cheating, but I don't have time to write a longer post.

30 April 2007
Well, I came into work this morning and realized that it was the last day of the month, and I still hadn't posted anything to the site this month to keep my update per month goal. I've been so busy in my personal life recently (don't worry - all good things), that this month just slipped right past me. Anyway, I'd received an e-mail this month about the crocodile tongue statement on my Factoids Debunked & Verified page, so I spent my lunch break today doing some quick research on crocodile tongues. Go visit the factoids page to see what I found.


28 March 2007
At my job, just about every time we have visitors that have never been to our shop before, my boss has me give a short demonstration on how we use the X-Plane flight simulator, not just as a pilot training tool, but as an engineering tool, as well. Most of the people find it interesting, so I thought I'd adapt it to an article on this site. It's not very technical, so hopefully non-engineers will still find it interesting, and get a small taste of part of what is that us aerospace engineers do. The article is X-Plane as an Engineering Tool, and I've added an appropriate entry to the Aviation page.


28 February 2007
Looks like I still managed to keep my once per month update goal. I slightly updated the Artwork page. For each collection, I now use the same type of set up that I use for my photo pages - when you click on a thumbnail, instead of taking you simply to the .jpg or .gif file, it takes you to an html page displaying the picture, so that I could put navigation links on those pages, and you don't have to keep hitting the back button to view different pictures. Also, I added two new images to my Technical Drawings collection. On one of my more obscure pages, I've updated the Rough & Unfinished POV-Ray Work page. It was pretty much an all text page before. Now I've added thumbnails for each of the images.

I guess I'll make one note here - the reason I haven't been adding so much to my main site recently, is because I've been trying to update my blog on a fairly regular basis. Essays that before would have gone in my Writings section are now getting put there, instead.


31 January 2007
The first update of the new year, and I've managed, just barely, to keep up with my goal of an update per month. I did a small update to the X-Plane, UDP, Visual Basic Tutorial for X-Plane version 8. With version 8.60 of X-Plane, you're now able to have X-Plane communicate via UDP with a program running on the same computer, so I've updated the Winsock section of my tuturial to explain how to do this. I also updated the sample source code that you can download from that page. I fixed a label on the form, where I'd mistakenly labeled an input box as "Local Port," when it should have been "Remote Port." Also, I went through and organized the code a bit better - putting the subroutines in alphabetical order, and adding a few more comments to explain things.