Category Archives: Development

AreNavis Project Moving Forward

I have been putting a lot of work into the AerNavis proposal documentation. Things are coming along nicely. I started out with a 7 page plan that quickly turned to 10. All of a sudden I realized it had expanded to 22 pages.

TakingNote

When I have some “for public consumption” paperwork prepared I will get it posted. For now, I  will be posting stuff piece by piece.

The folks are in from Mass. and are staying with us all month so posts may be a little sporadic, but stuff is still getting done. I am very excited about the direction things are going.  I am off to a family BBQ, so I guess that’s it for now.

~FBJ

The Great HD Crash of 08

There has been a lack of posts on the blog since the “Great HD Crash of 08”.

nuke-background

I have been under a great deal of stress, as of late, and a lack of sleep doesn’t help. The club gig has come to an end. Less than the stellar ending I had hoped for, but this is good in the long run, it doesn’t help with the stress right now, but “it will all work out“. I must admit, I didn’t expect it to go longer than a year, so thirteen months is not far off. After the issues surrounding the big awards show, things deteriorated with some interpersonal relationships that where not expected to recover. I stuck it out because I wanted it to end gracefully. With all of the software and hardware problems poking there ugly heads at me regularly, basically telling me its time to hang it up, I gave it the old college try, but in the end, there was little to salvage.

On the positive side; I took the time to review a couple of other projects I had in the wings, so to speak. The Steam Faire project is moving along, slowly but steadily. The website now has 50 members, there was a good turnout for the first organizational meeting, the second meet-up looks like it will be successful, and I have leads on a couple of sponsorships. The over all plan is maturing quickly. There are several scheduling things that need tending this coming week, a few appointments need to be set, venue, sponsors, promo items, and the like. I have a very good feeling about the project and the support received thus far. Response has been positive, and with a little promotional push this began rolling beyond the initial buzz.

Galeatus AerNavis

AirshipPilot

The second big project is on a slower development track. There are several tie-ins with Steam Faire, mainly in the promotional arena. If I can garner some financial interest in the basic project concepts and development track, the public “roll-out” could be as early as January. I am hesitant to push for public support as a “grass roots” movement until getting some feed back from a potential interested party.

A number of successful companies have used a similar structure and tactics by opening up to public contribution and support, providing full scale development funding with only subsistence funding from the investment sector. The advantage of this approach is a lower initial investment, typically from an “angel” type investor, low dollar, high return potential. This kind of venture is seat-of-the-pants boot-strapping, and pure risk capital. With smaller investments, and funding commitments at key developmental benchmarks it spreads out the cash flow, and risk for the investor.

~FBJ

I frackin hate puters! (pt.2)

(Part of this is cross posted)

computer-stress

I figured out why the network drive wasn’t responding. It appears that the hard drive failed. Why how did you come to this conclusion? I made several attempts to connect the entire device through the network and by direct connection. After no response, I decided to pull the physical drive and test it in another computer. As all of the available and suitable computers are old, the results where unreliable. Although I had a suspicion that it was the drive, I needed to confirm it.

A Fry’s run. Normally I enjoy a jaunt to geek mecca, today I wasn’t feeling up to par and I already put time in doing diagnostics and cracking the case (the warranty is expired anyway) so I wasn’t thrilled. I thought of a couple of potential solutions and fortunately could afford, sort of, to get them both. I picked up a special USB cable for creating and peer-to-peer network and an SATA hard drive dock. The dock allows you to plug a hard drive directly into the dock.

Using the dock I found that the hard drive was fried. The mechanicals are good, but the on board control is screwed up from over heating. So what options do I have? Two, really. One, I could dink with the drive, having no experience opening a drive case or replacing the board; or two, send it off to a data recovery company. Lets look at the options. Option one, I stand a 90%+ chance of loosing all the data, but not spending any money. Option two, I have a 97%+ chance of getting all of my data back, but I spend $500 to do it. Oh, and I still need to get a back-up drive.

(not cross posted)

I have put the desk back together. Since it may be a few weeks before I get the data back, I have to put a few things on hold. I am trying to rebuild some of the data from other sources but the extraction is very slow going. I am building a file server on paper and will see how much that will cost.

In this day of home offices and everyone in the house on their own computers the back-up situation has gotten, interesting. When on the phone with one of the data recovery companies, I told him I was using a network drive and that it had been running for about a year. I was a bit thrown by his response, “Ya, thats about right. Actually you got your monies worth.”. I don’t agree with that last part. I can buy an inexpensive complete computer for $200-$400. A regular computer running on the network will last for several years, mainly because of the power saving features. Auto sleep, NIC access wake-up, HD spin down, and the like. Apparently the companies that build the pro-sumer / consumer network appliances didn’t account for this.

If you are looking to buy a network drive in this environment (home office / home) look closely at whether or not you need to shut the device down every night. A real computer can solve most of these issues and might just end up costing less, particularly if you want to run back-ups or add drive space on a whim. Don’t forget, just because they say it will work for a small office / medium, doesn’t mean it’s any better the standard home user equipment. It just means its more expensive, usually. If I thought I could compete with the lowball online discount retailers, and people would actually pay for quality, I just might sell custom built network storage / backup servers. I don’t think so.

~FBJ

Frackin computers!

I have been working with them for a while now, (20+ years) and I don’t think I like them much.

computer-stress

I spent way too much time trying to get a network drive back on line tonight. I don’t have the one cable I need to connect a laptop directly to the drive. I have literally thousands of cables in various configurations. Just not the one I need.

I guess I am off to Fry’s in the early AM to pick up that pesky cable and give this another shot. I also need ink for the printer so it’s not like the trip wasn’t going to happen any way. I just wasn’t expecting the tech-fest in the morning. I have a meeting for the SteamFaire project in the afternoon, and things to do to prepare for that.

I have another project that is taking form that ties into SteamFaire and the Daedalus project as well. It is the Galeatus AerNavis project. I will be posting more on this project as it fleshes out, which should be soon. I have been doing the web development on it for a couple of days now and the project details are coming together.

TTFN,
~FBJ

Busy Bee Buzzing Blissfully

So much going on. Over the weekend, Thursday the 22nd through Monday the 26th, I was fi/fantasy/media/costume convention and actually did stuff. This year was also a year of firsts, I was not working the con, I paid to attend, I was a contestant in the masquerade costume contest (in a group), the group I was in, WON Best in Show for Presentation!

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There was drama within the group that caused stress for a week now, but I think that is over with. I do love costuming and theatrical presentations. I always have fun.

On other fronts, the SteamFaire project is moving along nicely. I was able to do a great deal of meet and greet at BayCon and had nothing but positive responses from everyone. With over 40 registered users on the SteamFaire.com website I am moving forward… wait for it… full steam ahead. Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

I have called for a meeting on June 8th to move the planning to an open forum for discussion and input. I expect there will be a great deal of creative and interesting things brought up at the meeting.

Tomorrow, back to the gristmill. I have to something about that.

~FBJ

SteamFaire

PromoPosterMini250x320As previously posted, I have been kicking around an Idea for a con/faire for some time now (3-4 years at least) now that I have come across a genre that I can sink my teeth into and feel good about extending the effort, I am moving forward with SteamFaire. I have not yet put down much of the data rolling about in my head. This is something I will be working on a lot over the next few weeks to get the ball rolling.

If Steampunk is your thing, and you would be interested in a SteamFaire check out the site at SteamFaire.com

~FBJ

A new project is developing

AirshipPilotAs many of my friends and associates know, I have been producing events for many years. Over the years I have toyed with the idea of producing an annual historical reenactment event. This is a tough field to get involved in with most of the established genre.

There is a genre that does not currently have that many organized events devoted to it. There are hundreds of fans in the local area, and many more in the region. I don’t want to go into it to much right now, but I am developing a position sheet and project outline. Once the paperwork is done I will post them and move forward with more info on this site.

I will go so far as to say that the concept is for a Steampunk Faire to be held somewhere in the greater San Francisco Bay Area with the possibility of additional events along the west coast or nationally. Another aspect is a Guild association of some kind. The guild portion I need to ruminate on a bit more.

I am very familiar with kind of operation after years of convention and ren faire work in all levels from volunteer to board member, and from actor to guild master and guild association member. There are many drawbacks to the fire format over the convention format, however, there are a lot of benefits to this direction as well. It sound crass to many of the participants when you start talking money and cost / benefit analysis, but it is a business, and I do intend to make a profit, otherwise the event wouldn’t keep going.

A group up in Washington state is starting a convention in the genre, but they opted to go the 501(c) route. Having been down that road and knowing what ultimately happens, I am not going to contact them for collaboration as I original wanted to. I wish them well and will do my best not to interfere with there operation. I do want to go to there event.

~FBJ

Code Crazy

Recently I have been working on enhancing my coding and site design skills. I decided to delve deeper into PHP and CSS. Over the weekend I built a test server and installed an Apache web server, SQL Data Base server, and PHP. After testing the servers functionality I began writing and running some BETA applications.

2014-01-04_coding

So far things are running well. I hope to begin integrating PHP applications on several web sites soon. I have also been looking at incorporating applications into the WordPress blog model. I will start development of some of these here on this site.

For now, back to the books.

~FBJ

Daedalus Development

Writing, for me, is a complicated process. Alternate history requires a knowledge of history, alternate technology requires a knowledge of period technology, add historical figures, and this brings on a whole new level of study.

As you can most likely imagine I have been immersed in research for the last couple of days for the Daedalus project. One thing that kept me up last night was an idea for a steam powered mechanical/electrical power generation system.

The power generation system is a single boiler plumbed to multiple, steam turbines, lined up in series. The turbines have a direct drive gear with a flywheel and clutch, below the turbine is a gear box that allows an operator change gear ratios or to a different PTO (Power Take Off ) system, gear, screw, belt, or directly to a rotor/stater generator for electrical power generation. This provides a modular configuration making it easy to add engines or change the configuration of power transfer without shutting down the entire system. Very flexible, and maintainable.

With turbines lined up in series, pairs could be assigned to critical tasks, it would then be easy to pull one engine down for maintenance. Clutch the engine in need of service out, and its mate in, now you can switch back and forth and disassemble and service ether one without loosing a beat.

By introducing a secondary boiler you can create a level of redundancy that provides a maximum of reliability, efficiency and mechanical/electrical power output. This whole operation could provide mechanical and electrical power for a large facility with only a few people in the engine room.

A different configuration using the same components would be a distributed drive system moving the engines close to the equipment requiring power and plumbing the steam to the engines. Although this reduces the mechanical complexities of power transfer it is inherently more dangerous. Running high pressure steam pipes and steam turbine engines throughout the facility is just asking for trouble.

In ether case, the most complex part of the system is the delivery of the mechanical energy to the equipment in need of it. The placement of the engine room and the layout are totally dependent on the operations of the facility.

Ah, Industrial Revolution period engineering. Looks like fun to me.

~FBJ