Allan Hall, Berlin September 1, 2009 - 12:00AM

A DRUNK amateur pilot had to be guided to land by a rescue helicopter after he radioed the control tower of his airfield to ask: ‘‘Where the bloody hell have you hidden yourself?’’

The 65-year-old drank a large quantity of beer and wine before flying over the central German state of Thuringia in his Cessna light aircraft on Saturday.

Once airborne, he continued to drink while at the controls. Two hours later he was happy but alcoholically challenged - so much so he was unable to read the instruments telling him where the Schoengleida airfield was.

'’Come on, I know you’re down there,’’ he radioed. ‘‘Where the bloody hell have you hidden yourself?’’

Control tower staff say he also sang a few songs, cracked a mother-in-law joke and told them to ‘‘pull their fingers out as I’ve got a party to go to’’.

Fearing instrument failure, the tower scrambled a rescue helicopter, which homed in on the man in clear-blue skies west of the airport, and gave instructions for the pilot to follow it back.

Officials at Schoengleida said the pilot, who has not been named, managed to make a safe landing.

'’But when the helicopter pilot went over to see him, that was when he got the full force of the alcohol fumes in his face,’’ a spokesman said.

The man wobbled from the cockpit to his car. Airfield authorities alerted police.

He was stopped on the way home, breathalysed, and found to be nearly four times over the legal limit for driving.

Now he has lost his pilot’s licence - and his driving licence.

From The Age.

I’ve been tinkering a lot with Google Maps lately on my Windows Mobile based phone - and it just doesn’t quite have the edge to dislodge TomTom as a navigation platform. There are multiple problems with the way Google Maps is implemented that takes it from navigation solution to a mere playtoy.

1) Route planning. If you’ve ever had much of a play with the Get Directions part of Google Maps, then you know what I mean by this. Google Maps is known to not do this task very well. As an example of this, take a look at this screenshot of it’s awesome route planning skills :)

2) No adaptive route planning. Whenever you drive off the recommended route, the planning doesn’t keep up - this means if a road is closed, or you ignore a stupid plan like the one as an example to point #1 then you are out of luck in having Google Maps re-plan the route for you. Sure, you can manually get it to re-plot things from your current location and start the whole game again, but this is a trivial matter that should be handled automatically!

3) Stupid backlight handling! This is a major point for me. While Google have made a good point and made the software respect the backlight settings that Windows Mobile have been set with (via Start -> Settings -> System -> Backlight), the most useful purpose of Google Maps is rendered useless by having to keep tapping the screen or a button to stop the backlight turning off while attempting to use Google Maps as navigation software!

If these above issues can be fixed in newer versions of Google Maps then TomTom may have some very good competition - as the integration of searching for businesses etc within Google Maps would be VERY hard for TomTom to compete with - but at the moment, I won’t be switching my navigation software to Google Maps any time soon.

Yes, it’s that time of year for a new cycle of the AirServices DAPs.

These are now compiled and available here.

After being a beta tester for Microsoft Windows since Windows 98SE, I was happy to be invited to the Windows 7 testing group. With a somewhat revised testing schedule and process from the past - with only a Beta and then RC being released before RTM instead of builds every few months, it was quite a frustrating attempt - with many of my bugs being closed with “Unable to reproduce” and a comment saying it works in a later build. Read on for more of my thoughts.

That being said, after my massive dislike of Windows Vista, I have found Windows 7 a refreshing change. Even with the latest Release Candidate (Build 7100), things are very polished. Boot is a little slower than Windows XP (which is to be expected), however time from login to usability seems to be much better in Windows 7 than any other version of Windows I have used to date.

Looking under the hood, it seems that a lot of non-essential processes are loaded at a lower priority after boot - handing over control of the system to the user in as short a time as possible. The new option to set a service to “Automatic - Delayed” instead of at boot time is another awesome way to improve boot to use time. With services set to this state, the system will wait until load is low before starting these extra services - great for things like Tivoli backup clients - which add a lot of load on boot by doing lots of disk I/O.

The new task bar takes a little time to get used to - however once you do, navigating between windows is a breeze. I was initially annoyed with the new taskbar until I realised that a middle click on an existing icon will launch another window. This is something that is certainly not obvious - yet I don’t know any way to make this immediately obvious to new users of Windows 7.

Graphics drivers seem to be a bit of an issue so far - as for my ATI X1900 PCI-E video card doesn’t have any native Windows 7 drivers. I’m hoping that this will change as Windows 7 gets closer to it’s release date, but as of yet I am stuck with the default Windows 7 driver for the card.

The best thing however is that I have not had to manually install ANY drivers for any hardware in my system. The only driver I have had to install manually was for a cheapo USB-Serial dongle I purchased a number of years ago. For this, the Vista driver works perfectly - which is always nice.

Overall, Windows 7 has lots of potential. It’s the Windows XP to the Windows 98. A huge improvement, and really does address a lot of the issues that came along with Windows Vista. It will certainly be worth the upgrade for most people running Vista at the moment, although most running XP may well choose to wait until they get a newer or updated PC before making the switch to Windows 7.

For a while now I’ve been having to restart snmpd on my linux based router running CentOS whenever my PPPoE connection to my ADSL provider went down. This is because the interface disappeared, snmpd cracked it and returned 0 for all snmp queries until it was restarted. This becomes a royal pain when monitoring connection throughput with things like cacti or mrtg.

After getting sick of this the other day, I actually found a solution!

The file /etc/ppp/ip-up.local is run every time a PPP connection is established! This means I can restart snmpd from within this file and have it done automatically - forever!

All that is required is that /etc/ppp/ip-up.local contains:

1
2

#!/bin/bash
/etc/init.d/snmpd restart

You could also use the same file to call scripts to update dynamic DNS providers like homeip.net etc as well!