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
3D Graphics With Silverlight 

I've been playing with Silverlight lately, and there was one thing I wanted to try for a long time... Displaying my flight tracks in real time 3D with Silverlight.

There is a pretty advanced 3D engine on Codeplex called Kit3D that does 3D graphics with Silverlight the same way WPF 3D works.
I used this library to display the GPX tracks. I had to add lighting as the current version on codeplex doesn't support it.
The code is pretty clean and easy to understand, so it was quick to add reasonably fast lighting calculation (for one directional light only)

To make this thing a bit more useful, I added the possibility to load 3D terrain underneath the GPX track!
Bear in mind, the resolution of the terrain is pretty limited. Right now, it's hard coded to a 20x20 grid for whatever the gpx area covers. I tried increasing it to 50x50 but it starts to get a bit slow, and retrieving the elevation data for that much points (2600+) takes quite some time...

For those who want to know how I got the elevation data, I did this using Geonames.org which has nice web services for all kinds of world positioning related things.

There is a link to a live demo below.
For those of you without GPX files handy, I added a link to a sample GPX file that came from a flight I did with Joost, the founder of Everytrail.com quite some time ago. It was a flight from Palo Alto to San Carlos, Hollister and back to Palo Alto.
Everytrail.com has tons of other GPX files available for download. If you want more test data, do not hesitate to visit the website!

Live demo!

Comcast's Shady Business Practices... 

So i've been in my apartment for 6 months now... And I was expecting Comcast to end their "6 months promo" price for my internet access... They didn't forget to update the rate...
However, they did forget to tell me when I subscribed how much I'd be paying...

If you go on the website, and click on "High Speed Internet" they will take you to a page that makes you believe that you will pay the 6 months promo rate of 33 dollars, after which the rate will to go 42.95.
That's what I remembered I would be paying eventually when I subscribed 6 months ago. However, this is completely misleading.
In reality, the intro price and the $42 roll to rate are only available to people who already have Comcast Cable with their high speed internet. (Both TV and Internet). The actual price that you are paying if you don't have cable is $58.
They fail to mention this clearly anywhere... and, there is NO WHERE on the website where you can find the rate without Cable. NO WHERE. Even if you go through registration, they will only mention the $33 rate, and never mention the $58 rate.

There is no way to actually find out online how much you will eventually pay past those 6 first months...

So I called Comcast to complain and ask for that $42 rate I was entitled to. The first person I got was rude and told me that it was written in clear and publicly available... in the "terms and conditions page".
Well, when she says in clear, and publicly available, she means it says "call for additional rules on restrictions".
In fact, if you call, they will tell you the actual price (I still have to verify that though...), and that this promo is only available with a TV Bundle... but you can't find it anywhere online... It's still "public" however... Jackasses!
I confronted her to the extreme absurdity of this practice, but all she could reply was that the rules were here, and that calling to get the info still meant that the information was public... gees...
So according to her, the website is not lying... it's, as some Republicans would say about McCain's lies, "stretching the truth" or "not passing the 100% truth test". (Who comes up with this shit by the way?)

I so hate people...

I finally called again to get another dude and tried to make him and his supervisor admit that this is borderline scam, and that this was a completely unfair business practice... He agreed to credit half an hour of Citabria ($50) to my account.

I'll try to call again sometime and ask for just High Speed Internet only and see how the "representative" behaves, and if there is anyway to extract the actual post 6 months rate...

At the end of the call, something funny happened... the manager told me he would tell his hierarchy that the website was misleading about that particular issue. Clicking on HighSpeedInternet only, and not a bundle page, should present the $58 rate and not a cable bundle rate of 42 bucks.
This made me laugh, and I couldn't resist telling him how idealistic he was... Like this misleading part was not completely intentional, come on dude :) What company do you think you work for?

So, am I still happy with the Aspire One? 

Hell yeah!

It's a great machine! The fan problem I had at the begining is now gone. I found a little utility on AspireOneUser.com that slows the fan a bit. It's still running but barely audible, which is exactly what I wanted :)

The only remaining complaint I have with this laptop now is apparently a widespread problem with the WLAN card that fails randomly upon waking up from stand by...
Rebooting fixes the problem, but that's lame... I hope they'll fix the problem soon...

Oh and also, they lowered the price to $350! What are you waiting for?

Happiness is Delano 

At the end of last August, I drove all the way to Delano California to attend the "Happiness is Delano" Aerobatic competition.

A bunch of people from all over CA came over with their airplanes to compete. My friend Bruno was there try to get to the top of the Primary group in a Decathlon!

He made it to the second place, nice for a first participation in the competition!

Delano is in the south of the Central Valley, needless to say it was very hot there... We had to drink lots of water.

It was a wonderful week end!

Here are the pictures of the week end: