That is NOT a plane!!!

What is it with people these days that are calling anything with a prop, that is able to lift itself off of the ground, a plane?

Take for instance the thing in the picture. That is the so called shooting star. See a video of it on youtube They call this "A plane built from trash"

I would offer a contrary opinion. Just because they made some control surfaces, and put enough grunt in the front to get it off the ground does not qualify this thing as an airplane. An airplane as defined as a powered heavier-than-air aircraft with fixed wings from which it derives most of its lift. This is not one of those. At best One could call it a Helicopter. (Or rotary wing aircraft, if you prefer)

It does not derive lift at all from its "wings." In fact the wings are little more than immovable control surfaces... anti rotation flaps, even. It derives its lift from an overpowered prop/motor combination. Strapping control surfaces to a toaster, and a huge ass, brusless motor, that enables it to get off the ground, still only makes it a flying toaster, NOT a plane!

A hundred years, of airplane design, is being cut off at the knees, by these so called planes, and their designers, and I just can't frickin' stand it anymore!

Designers? Did I write Designers? Maybe only in the academic sense, that they thought about what shape to cut the foam, and how to rig the control surfaces. I would think a real airplane designer would need to take into account things like drag coefficients, airfoil lift curves, thrust, and gravity, as well as shape and control surfaces.

I have spent many hours, designing and simulating different airfoils, and power to weight ratios and Lift surface area, and I'm not saying I'm better than these so-called foamy plane designers, but I at least know more about what makes a plane work then their simplistic... "it doesn't go in the air? Get a bigger motor! Get a Bigger prop!"

I've also made some of these things before too, it's cheap, and it requires very little thought, and it's fun to mess with, but I knew that no self respecting model RC flyer would dare call these particular type of abominations "planes"

Ugh! STOP IT! if you need a name, stick with rotary wing aircraft... and stop making the Wright brothers spin in their graves!

Fruitcakes...

What the hell is wrong with fruit cakes? I just read on CNN that they aren't edible, and so should be turned into biofuel. What!? Give me a frickin' break. Fuitcakes are edible, and if properly prepared, quite tasty! I dont' understand where a big news organization like CNN can get off telling people that fruitcakes are not edible. For crying out loud they are a combination of FRUIT and CAKE! (and in the normal case, rum) I know everyone eats fruit, and cake, and most people drink rum... so what's the deal...

Stop the hate people. Go get a fuitcake, or better yet make one, and try it.

Gosh Darnit, I am upset.

AllenKll out.

8 years and 4 months later...

I never thought my warrenty would run out, next to a chicken shack in downtown Patterson

Webcam IIII

Now, why would I go with IIII instead of IV? look at a clock with roman numerals... and ask the same question... Now onto the main content...

atspace is damned fucked up. Apparently there is an interesting leak in their FTP server, or in their file system. This leak, over time, has caused the server to believe I have reached my 50Mb limit, when in reality I had used les than 750k... silly thing... oh well...

Onto a new image server... this time I am using T35.com Same hotlinking workaround was required, as in Part III, But I have it up and running once again.

Let's see how long this one lasts :P

-AllenKll

awesomest mr potato head ever!!!

he comes with a ghost costume...fangs? Alien ears... Glow in the dark eyes..a pumpkin.. And the standard hat, nose, and feet... Just awesome.

My first tomato soup...

it's good!! Not as 'tomatoy' as I would have liked, but very tasty. I had to add and extra can of tomatoes halfway though... Because I added too much milk... And praise the lord for my Thunderstick Pro!

The Webcam Part III

Well, there are issues.
I think the issues are with my web hosting company. I've had issues with them for a while with doing rapid FTP uploads, or having multiple attempts at downloading e-mail lock up. And after using 3 different web cam programs, that use ftp of course, to see what the issue could be, I determined it is not the software, but either the web host, or my somewhat flakey internet connection.

Given the fact I can still web surf even when the FTPs are failing, I tend to believe it is the web hosting computer freaking out from having a log in every 1 minute. Yea.. don't ask.. it's a really cheap hosting company, and you get what you pay for. The upside is that they are nice people.. at least the 4 times I required tech support from them, in the last 6-7 years.

So I set out to find a free web host with unlimited transfer to act as the back end for the web cam images. Yes, this is a little hokey to have my images hosted, on a different machine than the main server, but maybe I can find one that can deal with getting FTP'd to every 60 seconds. This is a practice known as hotlinking. Most places HATE hotlinking as it uses their bandwidth, with no compensation... more on that in a moment.

So far I found a list of them at http://www.free-webspace.org/ and the first expressly prohibits exactly what I want to do in its terms and conditions, I moved to the second one which seems okay, it didn't even seem to have terms and conditions... odd... maybe they figure that there is not much you can do with only 50mb of web space, and a file size limit of 200k.. well 200k is plenty for a webcam picture! ha! fools to them! I might even set up a real camera with better resolution... with 200k I could do something around... say 1.5 megapixels with a not too bad amount of jpeg compression. Also I don't know if the 200K size limit applies to ftp transfer, or only to their web interface transfer. I'll have to push that one, and give it a try.

oh... I could also just adjust the jpeg image compression on the fly to get it to 200k... so images with highly compressible areas, will have better resolution than those with less compressible regions... hmm interesting concept: on the fly compression to allow for fixed file size, with maximum resolution... Not sure anyone has ever done that. It seems rather novel. I doubt I'll find web cam software with that built in. so I'm probably going to have to start hacking up an open source one, or roll my own. I vote for hacking up a free source one... or maybe... maybe I can find a standalone image compressor to my specs, then just pipe the image from the capture software to the image compressor, then to the ftp server. I would definitely need a program to coble together those three parts, but it shouldn't be too hard.

Well... maybe later... but to the issue at hand. Hotlinking. Apparently the web service I am going with now, does not like images to be hotlinked. The main issue of hotlinking I think is theft of intellectual property, and copyright violations, but since I am not doing that, I figure I should be able to. Well, they have a techno way of defeating hotlinking images.. I'm guessing it's a simple .htaccess file on their apache server.

So I come up with a somewhat brilliant idea, of hotlinking a whole page in a frame, so that the requester for the image is local, and it get around their hotlinking restriction. This works. But I don't like the fact that I have to download other crap that is not my image... that actually uses more bandwidth. Granted, it's less than 1k, but it's still something.

So, option 3. I ran a little test where the webcam software stores the image with a non-standard extension. First I tried html, as I know that should work, and it did! So I went with something a little more descriptive. I called it a ".image" file. I believe my assumption of their using a .htaccess file is correct, based on this test and ultimate solution, as in a .htaccess file one would make rules regarding extensions, and how they are to be treated. Since they can't redirect ALL extensions to their "You suck, you hotlinker" page, I just needed to pick
one that wasn't in the filter.

-AllenKll