Airplane in google maps

I was looking around in google maps at the area near where we live to see if they have updated photos of a new road extension that recently was completed, and found a weirdish image of an airplane in one like you sometimes hear about:


View Larger Map

A couple of things jumped out at me:
1. The plane looks flat, which made me wonder why; was it high-altitude and got flattened out in appearance because of the telephoto effect?
2. It doesn't have much in the way of markings except for American flags on the wings.
3. It looks like it is on a pretty steep bank angle
4. It looks like the front of the plane is on the left and the back is on the right, but when you look closely at the wings it looks like the flaps and ailerons are on the leading edge of the wing, which doesn't make sense
5. If you zoom in a little more to see what is on the ground, there is a very small landing strip with a "don't use" X on it that may be a RC strip but I can't tell. I don't know if that has anything to do with the airplane but perhaps it does -- maybe the plane is a remote controlled one being flown from the area immediately below

So, I'm off to search a site that has weird objects in google maps photos to see if there is a better way to identify aircraft in the pics.

UPDATE: Shaun was able to identify this as the Fly-A-Ways RC Club in Aloha, OR.

Sudoku

I recently (as in last weekend) became interested in Sudoku and in addition to thoroughly enjoying solving them I found that it is thoroughly annoying to have to manually track which answers remain as possible choices are ruled out when I commit answers to my answer grid. Naturally I wrote a program to handle that tedium for me, which I present to you here: The Sudoku Solver Helper.

Here's what the instructions say:

When solving Sudoku puzzles you need some way of keeping track of
what possible answer values remain as you work your way
through the answer grid. The newspaper puzzles have squares that are too small to write more than a couple of numbers in, and using scratch paper isn't very practical unless you go to the trouble of creating a grid to hold all of your markup.

This seemed like the perfect job for a web application, so I set out
to create a grid I could use to track my guesses and remaining choices as I worked my way through a Sudoku, and what you see here is the result of that effort. To use it you enter your answers in the top grid, and the lower grid automatically removes those values from the row, column, and sub-grid region that the answer is in in the top grid.

A couple of things to note:

• Puzzles that are easy and medium pretty much solve themselves. As you enter values in the top grid, enough values are eliminated in the lower one to leave only one choice per square. This gets boring fast, and if you don't want to see the answers, either try harder puzzles, or don't use this tool.


• There is no undo -- if you make a mistake and want to change your value in the top grid you can, but the lower-grid values that were removed already for the mistaken entry will not be restored.


• As I tested a few different puzzles I thought it would be handy to somehow lock the starter values in the top grid, or at least to be able to know what they were initially by giving them a different background color. That way, if things go wrong and you start shifting things around to get a fit on a tough area you would know which ones should not be changed. I ended up not adding that feature but may do so in the future.


• There is no code in place to enforce using only digits 1 through 9. I went back and forth on this one and decided that it doesn't really matter what you use as answers in a Sudoku as long as you have only one of each in each row, column, and region. So, use letters or symbols if you like; it doesn't matter (except that the lower grid always holds 1-9 -- sounds like another future feature to allow setting the answer types).

So, it takes the drudgery out of tracking answer choices and is pretty simple to use. If you have any comments or questions, shoot me an e-mail at sudoku@leobartnik.net.

Enjoy!

WATIN

WATIN totally rocks!

Download Nintendo DS demo games on the Wii

Not sure why it took so long but you now can download demo games for the DS on the Wii. You could download demos for the DS all along but you had to go to your local game seller that served up the demo. Now you can do it through the Wii in the comfort of your own home.

Let the synergisticism begin!

Self-reassembling robot

There's a robot that reassembles itself after being kicked apart; that's some freaky stuff right there. It's all Terminator-like, crawling across the floor to find the other parts of itself. I wish I could live to be 500 just to see what this kind of thing turns into (as long as it doesn't actually turn into Terminator!).

anonymous post

Worse than the "I'd hit it" McDonald's ad campaign? You be the judge:

Today's Target ad:



and:

UPDATE: I removed the actual image and replaced it with this link because it seemed a little crass; click here to see possibly NSFW image

4000 Dead

I try not to get political in my blog but today I am breaking that rule by linking to a mosaic made up of the photographs of 4,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq. It's a political statement because the mosaic of the dead makes an image of George Bush.

Whether you agree with the sentiment that the deaths are directly the president's fault, you can't help but be moved by seeing the faces of all those people on the screen at once.

Fios performance

It's been a few months now that we have been living with Verizon Fios after ditching Comcast, and I can say that the two most important criteria are being fulfilled; they are:

1) Reliability: it's always up, and the issues we had initially with connectivity were resolved and have not returned.

2) Performance/speed: this screenshot says it all:



(1901 KB converts to 14.85 megabits, which is right at the service level we are paying for)

So, Fios is two for two in my book, and I am loving it. Vista does *not* do the smoking fast downloads that XP does, though, so if I have something large to download like the 800 meg ISO in the screenshot above I remote into a computer that is running XP and download it there.

free subversion host

A while back I was looking for a free subversion host, and I wasn't able to find a whole lot. I had thought about setting up a server on one of my own machines at home, but part of the reason for using a remote host (outside of me not having to hassle with setting it up) was that I wanted it to be offsite so that I didn't have to worry about my clunky old hardware going toes-up and taking out my source code with it. The last time I looked I found cvsdude, which works well but only gives you 2 megs of space for free. Tonight I looked again, and I found unfuddle, which offers free account users 200 megs of space, a vast improvement over 2!

I just started using unfuddle, and I haven't used cvsdude much at all because of the space limitations, so I can't offer a comparison yet. unfuddle is looking better because of the additional space alone, but they also offer a set of project managment tools that might come in handy.

If you love subversion, you'll love having a free offsite host. If you don't love subversion, it just means you haven't used it yet; once you do you'll never want to use anything else. Get yourself the tortoisesvn client and enjoy.

Fun new way to read Dilbert (in color no less)

Friday funny

Other articles in the series: hearing difficult for the deaf, living difficult for the dead, etc.