Matthieu LABAN
.NET, My Life, Flight Simulation and Real Flight...

 
About Me :
25 Years old developer and aviation
enthusiast living in Santa Clara, California.
View Matthieu Laban's profile on LinkedIn 
Contact me at :
mlaban at gmail dot com


Photo & Video Galleries:
- Gallery List
- Flight Videos
Resume :
e-mail me to get my latest résumé
More Collada Support and Animations 

Here's three new videos of some google earth 3d files, the Google HQ, San Francisco Airport, and a landing in Palo Alto.

All models are from Collada asset files. Load time is back to something reasonable now. It turns out the massive slowness I was experiencing was due to some error in my parsing of the polygon groups and an accidental linking with a debug build of FCollada... duh!





Happy Landings...

Sysinternals Suite 

Sysinternals

I found out today on digg that all the Sysinternals Tools can now be downloaded in one single package.

That's good news; it always took me too much time to download them one by one... until I made a package for myself... which it was never up to date anyway...

For those who don't know what is sysinternals, it's a company Microsoft recently acquired that develops system utilities to help solve lots of problems. My two favorites are Process Explorer and Filemon.

Download it here

Windows Live Search for Mobiles and Google Maps Mobile 

I recently changed my cell phone from a pre-paid account to a contract. I couldn't do it before because credit wise, I was nobody... so I had to pay a $500 deposit to get in a contract... And without a contract, there is no data plan, or if you try to use data on your phone, you are charged a ridiculous amount of money for every single bit sent/received... So now that I've been here for a year and that my credit report is starting to look like something, I've been able to get a decent contract, with an unlimited data plan.

The unlimited part is something I had been wanting for ever! I didn't have this in France, I was limited to some 20MB a month... ridiculous... anyways, now that I can download as much as I want, I decided I would take a look at some of the mapping applications for cellphones.

I found two, Windows Live Search for Mobiles and Google Maps Mobile. Both perform the exact same functions and are very fast and extremely cool! I'd like to mention that both are native PocketPC applications and not some ugly slow java app...
I especially like the fact that you can type any random store and tell it to use my current GPS position, and it'll find the nearest store and give me directions... It's not real time guidance but still, it's very cool and with the tracking, you can almost use it as an actual GPS, but on satellite imagery downloaded on the fly.

So on my way back from the airport this evening, I plugged the GPS in and just let it download the maps as I was driving, very cool! Oh and also, it shows you real time traffic information!

3 years of blogging... 

I just realized by looking at my blog history thingy on the left that I've been blogging for a little more than three years, so about 12% of my life...

What else lately?

On the flying side, I got my tailwheel endorsement three weeks ago. I'm addicted now :) I thought it would be crazy hard, kinda like the swirly Extra 300S in FSX,  but not at all, at least not on the Citabria 7ECA I fly on.
I didn't fly this week end. Weather was supposed to suck, but it didn't... so to compensate for the lack of flying, I went to the airport and watched aircrafts land and take off... Yes, I need my fix... :-)

GDC is coming up, we can already feel it here :) Is anyone coming? ZMan? Any flight sim dev? Some people from Epitech maybe?
Drop me a line if you are going, we can probably meet there...