It’s the parkzone corsair. I love it but I feel like it’s not as stable as the parkzone trojan. It has plenty of power, but not unlimited verticle. You can get her to scoot around prettly quickly. With throttle she noses up some and just wants to climb fairly steeply. This trait coupled with windy conditions requires you to really read the plane and give her some elevator so that she cuts into the wind, otherwise you’ll get blow back and around. At zero throttle she glides really well, and in windless conditions you can dead stick the landing. The landing gear are very poorly attached. They will rip out in grass even on fairly light landings. You’ll need to reinforce them when they get ripped out. Out of the box, this plane is great! But I had some trouble with it after I had a narly crash a few weeks back.

The problems began after I lawn darted it from about 300 feet up. I had stripped the screw while attaching the wing and it tore off while pulling out of a tight loop high up. The wings fluttered away like confetti carried off by the wing and the fuse exploded in someone’s front yard (Thankfully not hitting anyone or anything!). Someone came to the feild a couple days later and returned the wings that ripped off during flight and luckily they were completely fly worthy. Hardly any damage. I bought a brand new PNP version of the plane anyways as the fuselage was completely shredded. I trashed the stock 1800mah 12C battery in that crash and got some zippy flightmax 2200 mah 20C batteries.

The new corsair had some SERIOUS issues though. It was pitchy and wouldn’t trim to fly straight. Given power the plane went straight up and the the surface area exposed to the wind would just push her over. It was a handlful to fly. I’ve been spending what feels likes weeks trying to dial her in and make adjustments whenever the wind died down enough to take her up again. Given that almost everything in the plane was brand new and stock except for the wings and the battery I was dumbfounded that the plane I had was now such a dog to fly. Turns out this plane is EXTREMELY sensative to CG changes. The esc needs to sit completely pressed into it’s slot pushed forward. My landing gear has been torn out numerous times. I used hot glue, tech bond, CA glue, silly putty, almost everything trying to find a sutible glue that could hold the gear. In the end what worked was gorilla glue and toilet paper. The TP gives the gorrilla glue fiber that ends up reinforcing the hold kind of like carbon fiber with resin. This repeated gluing though ended up screwing with my wing weight and balance as well which is the reason it kept slipping to one side and would not trim.

After checking the CG and balancing the wings the plane flies great now. I took her out for 2 flights today and she handled the 12mph winds great. There’s still a tendancy to nose up in wind and under throttle but you learn to compensate. It’s a great plane.

Just throwing it out in the long tail.

Red5.org has Red5 9.1 final up without a changelog. Upon some research Red5 9.1 (final) was a hotfix for 9.0. Regardless. Red5 9.0/9.1 (we tried both) gave us botched audio recorded flv files. Our application (http://www.blabberize.com) needs to read the time index when playing a flv sound file, and when we played back flvs created by Red5 9.1/9.0 we got numbers that were just wonky. Generally they were beyond the bounds of the flv file. For example a 2 second flv file was reading back time stamps that were beyond 2 seconds.

THE FIX:

Use Red5 8.0

From our experience- 9.0+ isn’t ready for production use.

The following is a reply to an email from an entrepreneur that is trying to build a team for a company. The individual does not have strong coding skills and isn’t a techie. They were asking for suggestions and help in building out their tech team.

Are you looking for coders?

If you are, I’m sure you’ve already discovered, it’s really hard to find engineers or technically inclined people to help your cause.

The thought most engineers have when being approached for a technical project is “What are you bringing to the table other then the idea?”. And it’s a valid question because having an engineer who does not value your contribution to a project makes the engineer a liability to you. By that I mean that the engineer could essentially oust you from your own company because he understands the technical underpinnings of your business . Any request for change or control ends up going through your engineer.

You as a non-coder can bring value by presenting the following:

1. A large population of users that will follow you to use your product that the engineer can not easily produce.
2. Money - either by connection to funding or supplying your own funding.
3. Ownership of IP by legal means there by forcing your engineering partner to commit to working with you and not being allowed to run off with your IP.
4. Charismatic Leadership (This is that certain special sauce)

The best example of someone who we know that pulls this off is Cort Johnson of DartBoston (twitter @cortlandt). He’s always hustling. Never late. Remembers everyone’s name and inspires a lot of camaraderie among the group of people he works with. I think still though, he even struggles with attaining dedicated coders.

Now usually for entrepreneurs in school. Funding is something that just isn’t feasible. But if you have even as little as $200 capital to start with you have some options of buying your technology. Outsourcing your technology over seas is a great way to get things off the ground but not lose control of your company or idea to an engineer.

Here are some things you’ll want to have:

Have a CLEAR idea of functionality of your site. What does every single button do. Draw out a wireframe of your site screen by screen. Make your wire frames incredibly detailed and overlay them with notes about functionality. Every button, slider, picture must have detailed functionality specs and notes.
This step is so important because the more detailed your wireframe is. The more money you will save over confusion when working with an outsourcing company.

Most out sourcing companies will take the images that you give them and just slice the image up and CSS the design giving you the exact layout you asked for with the functionality built on the back end. It’s best to ask of their process for producing your site/product

Look for companies that will give you a free quote (many will). Call them and ask about their basic pricing. If it seems economical to you; send over your design and have them quote it. Make sure that the quote includes all stipulations of price changes. Some outsourcing companies hold fast to their quote, and others change them on you. Make sure they understand the complexity of the project and don’t be afraid to show your design to get a proper quote. Ideas are a dime a dozen and they have probably seen most of them.

Don’t be scared to make the initial call. They don’t have any money from you. Get as much information as you can before you hand over any information.

Mo

Man I feel like such a chode tonight. I’m totally into watching this show about how tubas are made.

11:40pmThomas

lol

is it how it’s made?

dont do it!

11:40pmMo

Too late.

11:40pmThomas

you’ll get sucked into watching it for hours

11:40pmMo

I’m already building a tuba now

and paddlocks

and paper coffee cups

11:42pmThomas

lol

i know how they make paintbrushes, screwdrivers, surf boards, all kinds of stuff

11:43pmMo

that show is like crack

we grew up watching crayons being made on sesamee street and they they kicked it up a notch

11:45pmThomas

haha i know!

one day i come home

and was gonna head up to MSU for a party around 6

11:45pmMo

HAHAHAH!

11:45pmThomas

and at like 4 it was on

11:45pmMo

missed the party.

11:46pmThomas

and when i realized what i was watching it was already 7

11:46pmMo

I know! I KNOW! Dude it’s bad!

11:46pmThomas

i was like DAMNIT

i got there and told drew and he goes “oh dude..how it’s made gets you EVERY time”

11:46pmMo

seriously!

11:46pmThomas

and it’s the most retarded stuff sometimes

11:47pmMo

you just pray it’s a rerun

11:47pmThomas

like car manafolds

like..wtf

11:47pmMo

HAHAH!

The best was they made a boat pontoon

11:48pmThomas

oh god

11:49pmMo

blew my flipping mind.

I’m posting this convo to my blog.

I don’t see the use of Data Portability. I just went to dataportability.org looking for a list of partners to see a number of sites that are using DP which will at least entice me to jump on board and change our site to be a part of the DP project.

I clicked on Users. I clicked on Developers. I clicked on Executive.

Data Portability holds no value to me or my users. If there is no large partner of the service presented with whom my users have data with that they’d like to walk away with, then what’s the strength of it all?

Why use DP when I have an option like Facebook Connect? People are actually using that.

And don’t tell me about how facebook supports DP. Because that’s like saying Honda supports Toyota.  Facebook is saying: “Your service is great! But guess what. We’re building the same thing and it actually has value. Sup Social Graph?” And then they breakdance way better then you expect.

Best thing about DP is Chris Saad. I met him. He’s cool.

Anyone got a reason to support DP? Let me know.

Full post coming up:

I might be renting a car for the weekend because it’s cheaper then taking a taxi from SFO to Sunnyvale. Anyone have transportation and want to share? Leave a comment and let me know. Or if you want to just meet up at hackday let me know.

Hmm and the bigger problem is how am I going to do something more impressive then then what I did at the first open hackday:

Yahoo Open Hack 06: Saved By Patrick Stewart

Google launched chrome with goofy terms that said they own any data you transmit through their new shiny browser, Chrome. That has been changed:

As of 2 p.m. PT, it looks like the terms have changed. Section 11 now
reads simply: “11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you
already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or
through, the Services.”

-taken from webware

About every half hour I get a little message from my firewall that Chrome is trying to get an update from the internet. It’s nice that it wants to stay up to date, but I’m not sure what data it’s transmitting. Especially after reading the terms of service that say that google gets ownership of anything transmitted from their little browser.

How To Keep Motherfu#%s From Putting Their Seats Back from fi5e on Vimeo.