Once again, I'm changing commenting policies. I'm removin the CAPTCHA (one of those pictures of a random string of characters that users have to type in to be able to leave their comment). It wasn't working properly - many people who were typing it in properly were still having their comments tagged as junk. Also, I went through the last 40 junked comments to this site (about 1 day's worth), and only 1 spam comment would have made it through if I didn't have the CAPTCHA. I figure that's not too bad, as long as I keep up with checking the comments a few times a week. And I'd rather have a few spam comments get through, than have a few legitimate comments get junked.

Posted by Jeff on Friday, Aug 17 | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Jeff on Monday, Apr 30 | Permalink | Comments (32) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Mar 28 | Permalink | Comments (29) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Feb 28 | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Jeff on Wednesday, Jan 31 | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (0)