Matthieu Laban - White-Clouds.Org

Oakland, Tracy and Palo Alto

Matthieu Laban — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:16:00 GMT

I accidentally smashed my camera when I was in Quebec last week... so I had to get a replacement. I chose a Panasonic DMC-TZ5. It's a pretty good camera, so far, the only negative points I have against it are the lack of an optical view finder which makes...Click here for the rest of the story

Propellers in Infinite Runway

Matthieu Laban — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:10:00 GMT

I'm glad to say that aircrafts in Infinite Runway are finally being propelled by actual computation of lift coming from rotating airfoils :) In my last post, I wrote that I needed the following to properly simulate the propeller: propeller...Click here for the rest of the story

Propeller Simulation

Matthieu Laban — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:17:00 GMT

The more I read about it, the more I feel like propulsion theory, although very similar to regular airfoil theory, is much more complicated... There are lots of variables that come into play when trying to simulate this. I'm currently trying to gather so...Click here for the rest of the story

Silverlight DeepEarth Tests

Matthieu Laban — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 14:28:00 GMT

Tonight I played a but with an open source silverlight project called DeepEarth . It's basically a Silverlight implementation of Microsoft Virtual Earth . It has smooth scrolling and panning and blending between different layers. They have a live ...Click here for the rest of the story

Progress with PhysX

Matthieu Laban — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:39:00 GMT

Lots of progress has been done on the PhysX front... My initial frustrations, although not completely gone have been mostly solved... I now have OK ground behavior and am making progress on the flight front... I've updated two aircrafts so far, the Cess...Click here for the rest of the story

PhysX in Infinite Runway

Matthieu Laban — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:35:00 GMT

Don't ask me why... but I got this urge last week to change Infinite Runway's physics engine... It's a pretty stupid move as the physics engine is the most important part of a flight simulator... Anyhow, I made the necessary backups and started to play wi...Click here for the rest of the story

Remote Aircraft Flight Model Configuration System

Matthieu Laban — Wed, 28 May 2008 23:35:00 GMT

The citabria is almost done... The moving parts, cockpit, wheels, painting are all done and the flight model is close to the real thing now, thanks to a new feature of FSP called Remote Aircraft Flight Model Configuration System. Tweaking a flight...Click here for the rest of the story

Quick comment about the accuracy of news reports...

Matthieu Laban — Sun, 25 May 2008 23:01:00 GMT

I don't know about you, but when I read an article in the mainstream media (CNN, CBS, or any of those...) that is about any of the topics I have some knowledge in, there is always a WTF in it... The one that appears the most is in aviation articles...Click here for the rest of the story

FSP News, Twitter...

Matthieu Laban — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:40:00 GMT

I mentioned here a few months ago that I had found a name for the simulator... I'm not quite ready to reveal it yet... but I'm working on the website... I've got two versions... one fully in Silverlight 2.0 and one in boring old html+css... I'm not sure ...Click here for the rest of the story

Hiking for the Lazy Aviator

Matthieu Laban — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:17:00 GMT

Last saturday, Julie and I went hiking with a group of friends in a park in the mountains between San Mateo and Half Moon Bay. It was quite cool, and it brought back some memories of when I was a kid... when my parents would take me and my 2 brother...Click here for the rest of the story

G1000 Bay Tour !

Matthieu Laban — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:32:00 GMT

Yesterday, I flew with two friends from my school who live in the area. We went for an extended bay tour, departing from Palo Alto, overflying SFO Airport, San Francisco, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge... then we continued north to Petaluma for a...Click here for the rest of the story

Playing with Silverlight...

Matthieu Laban — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:12:00 GMT

Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1 was released on Wednesday and I've had some time to play with it. I coded two application, one that connects to my website and retreive all the comments posted by my fellow readers, and another more amusing one, a small minigame......Click here for the rest of the story

Autopilot Fighting with the Wind

Matthieu Laban — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 15:35:00 GMT

Two quick videos before going to bed... I worked on the Autopilot today... trying to get rid of the shimmering/stuttering effect in the yoke whenever the autopilot was in control. I solved this problem by fixing a long time bug which had the animati...Click here for the rest of the story

Silverlight 2 is coming...

Matthieu Laban — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:53:00 GMT

Silverlight 2 is coming... this is my dream come true... create desktop like experience in my favorite managed language, but on the web! (and cross platform!) Beta 1 will be released next week during Mix08 in Las Vegas! Scott Guthrie has...Click here for the rest of the story

G1000 Checkout!

Matthieu Laban — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:33:00 GMT

I finally had time to fly with an instructor at West Valley to complete my G1000 checkout and BFR. We flew for about an hour, played around with the G1000 (but looked outside 90% of the time ;)) did some stalls, slow flight, touch and goes, landings...Click here for the rest of the story

G1000 in FSP

Matthieu Laban — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 13:38:00 GMT

Ever since I started flying on the G1000, I've wanted to find a way to add G1000 support in FSP, or at least something that looked like it. I had tried simulating the Cirrus Glass cockpit in the past, but the heavy graphics made the whole thing render su...Click here for the rest of the story

Garmin G1000: First Impressions from the left seat

Matthieu Laban — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 09:50:00 GMT

Two weeks ago, I flew in the evening with Cory, for my introductory flight in a 2006 Cessna 172S NavIII equipped with a Garmin G1000. The Garmin G1000 is the set of two LCD panels replacing traditional steam gauges. Since I joined West Valley...Click here for the rest of the story

Big rant about Air France... And how they stole money from me...

Matthieu Laban — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:22:00 GMT

This is going to be a big rant at what I consider one of the biggest rip offs I've ever faced... Airline Companies are just thieves. I don't understand how they can get away with stealing money from people... Here's the story... Julie and I boo...Click here for the rest of the story

HD Videos of FSP

Matthieu Laban — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:57:00 GMT

I finally found a website where I can upload HD content. Youtube is becoming older and older with their video quality making me think I could almost reach the same quality with our family's old MDA screen back in the 80's. I tried a bunch o...Click here for the rest of the story

Garmin GPSMAP 96C, another review...

Matthieu Laban — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:24:00 GMT

I often receive emails or comments about the Garmin GPSMap 96C that I bought and reviewed about 3 years ago... Here are a few keypoints I felt like mentionning to people considering the purchase of this GPS Unit. I still like my 96c, it...Click here for the rest of the story