The Dangers of Private Planes

Yesterday, the New York Times published an op-ed piece on the dangers of private planes. Most people don't realize, on average, there's one incident each day that the NTSB investigates. Very few of these incidents are fatal. Regardless, all of these incidents are reported, publicly, in their database. Ninety-four percent of the fatal incidents involve general aviation (GA). GA flights cover everything outside of commercial scheduled flights and government flights. In other words, GA flights include operations like charter, corporate, balloon, glider, and small plane flights to name a few.

The op-ed author reasoned that GA flights – especially by private pilots – are susceptible to accidents because most are amateur pilots. That makes sense. A pilot flying a few hours per month isn't going to be as good as a professional pilot doing it a few hours every day. The author proposed:
The F.A.A. should require all general aviation pilots to carry liability insurance, which would force them to have better training.

Most Americans would be surprised to learn that a private pilot, unlike an automobile driver, isn't required to have insurance. I personally carry a "smooth million" worth of insurance which covers liability and hull damage in the air or on the ground. But carrying liability insurance, alone, isn't a high bar to set in terms of safety since insurance companies don't look too hard at how many hours/year a pilot flies. Instead, they're more concerned with the cost and size of the plane. To qualify for my insurance I only required seven hours of formal flight instruction in my plane.

Insurance requirements does not equal proficiency. Instead, the FAA's biennial flight review sets the standard.

I'm wondering why the op-ed author makes no mention of the biennial flight review requirement. Being current and experienced is the key to being a better pilot. Flying through the clouds, especially low clouds when landing, requires a pilot to fly six published approaches every six months. It's practice and FAA requirements like this which will improve a pilot's skills. Insurance is the wrong tool to solve this problem.

The Pitfalls & Virtues of Google Apps

If you've ever hosted a domain name with Google Apps, keep in mind that a hacker has a good chance of accessing your e-mail long after your domain's expired since Google stores your e-mail indefinitely if it's a free Google Apps account. This worked to my benefit, tonight, but it badly stung Twitter about five years ago: The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack

My Story

2.5 year e-mail gap

Two and a half years ago I let a domain name expire that was hosted on Google Apps. It was a domain I no longer needed. But, I forgotten that this domain was tied to a four letter Twitter account that I occasionally used which receives a lot of inquiries – mostly from people asking me to transfer this account to them.

When my Keychain became corrupted, several months ago, Twitter would not let me log in to this Twitter account without confirming my e-mail address. Obviously, I couldn't receive e-mail since I no longer owned the domain name. The problem was, over the years, I've owned a lot of domain names and I had no idea which e-mail address was tied to this Twitter account. When I tried to reset this Twitter account on the twitter.com website I was told that an e-mail had been sent to my e-mail address on file. That was of no help since I didn't know which defunct e-mail address the confirmation was sent to.

Tonight, on a whim, I tried to reset my password for this Twitter account with the iOS app instead of their website. Lo and behold, the app reported that a confirmation e-mail was sent to a slightly redacted e-mail address (it looked something like this: jo***@ex***.** – let's pretend that my expired domain name was example.com). It was just enough of a hint to point me in the right direction. I visited https://www.google.com/a/example.com and logged in. When I checked my Gmail account I could see that the last e-mail received was in 2012 – which was when I let this domain name lapse. A quick visit to GoDaddy and $9.17 later I re-owned the domain name I once had a couple of years ago. With the new domain name in hand I updated the MX records with the info for Google's mail servers and I received my confirmation e-mail immediately. The entire process took about 30 minutes.

Yes, it's very handy that Google keeps my e-mail forever, but it can be very dangerous too.

Swift First Impressions

Hiking the Pacific.

Earlier this month, Apple announced a new programming language, called Swift. It's designed to be fast, safe, modern, and interactive.

Swift is big news since it was unexpected. I haven't been this excited to learn a new programming language since Sun released Java in the mid-1990s.

Java and Swift both took about four years to develop. But, Swift is already more mature than Java 1.2 was two years after its initial release. Sun used to have an office down the block from the Apple Campus at Mariani One. When I started working at Apple, in 1998, we joked that we could hear the Java API's deprecating across the street in the Sun building. I do not imagine many Swift APIs deprecating anytime soon since they're based on, and bridged to, Cocoa's Objective-C APIs. (Coincidently, Java 1.2's codename was Playground which is the same name of Swift's interactive coding environment.)

Getting My Feet Wet

Last week I created a couple simple Cocoa Swift apps for both OS X and iPhone. It was a piece of cake. To this day, I still love that I can drag between my code and my UI in Interface Builder to link up ivars (outlets) and functions (actions).

I spent most of this past Saturday getting up to speed on Swift. I read the docs and watched a few tutorials including the Introduction to Swift, Intermediate Swift, and Swift Playgrounds videos from WWDC 2014. So, after hiking half a dozen miles along the Pacific, yesterday morning, I decided it was time to dig deep into Swift.

What to Code?

I wanted to write an algorithm requiring a fair amount of trial and error without much mental heavy lifting. For me, the answer was string parsing. I once spent a long time coding, testing, and debugging Java (Eclipse with the WOLips plugin for WebObjects) to parse SMS text messages for newspaper classified ads:

My Tweet Storm Swift Playground

Sell  (Item name)  ($Price)  (ZIP code)  (Item details)

For my first real Swift task I reverse engineered Dave Winer's Little Pork Chop algorithm which lets you send out a tweet storm. Basically, Little Pork Chop breaks up blocks of text longer than 140 characters into tweet size chunks.

Swift and Powerful

In a nutshell, Swift's Playground is worth its weight in gold. The Playground's interactivity is powerful. Typically, I write a few lines of code, compile it, and then run it. I would never recompile an app after writing every single new line of code. But that, effectively, is what Playground does for me. It kept me focused and my code clean. I caught my syntax and logic bugs in real time as it displayed my variables and loop counts. Even better was that my infinite loops were immediately visible in the sidebar. I can see myself writing all my algorithms in Swift's Playground before copying them to my projects.

Swift Playground Gotchas

On the flip side, it doesn't seem possible to step through code, so loops execute until they terminate. Once a loop completed I could see what happened by examining the value history or using Quick Look.

Quick Look into an array and then into each element.

Another wrinkle I encountered was trying to get the character at a string index. The best solution I came up with was fairly ugly:

var currentChar = String(Array(subTweet)[indexOfCurrentChar])

This might be due to the fact that an index into a string array element, which is usually equal to the number of bytes, doesn't hold true if you're using UTF encoding where each character may require multiple bytes. If that's the case, then I need to write my own String indexer. Please let me know if I'm off base.

Free Code

It took me about two and a half hours to code and debug my tweetstorm algorithm in the Swift Playground. Am I getting Swift? Yes, I most definitely am, but I'm probably still using old coding patterns while I learn the slick new modern Swift syntax.

One final piece of Swift beauty is that you can download my Tweetstorm Swift Playground and run it for yourself in Xcode6-Beta.

'What’s the Big Deal About Outliners?'

Balboa Park, 7 AM: The perfect place to think about outliners and this blog post.

Two years ago, while having lunch with Dave Winer at Carnegie Deli, I embarrassingly confessed to him that I didn't fully understand outliners. He told me, "That's OK, you will."

Fargo

While I'm a big fan of writing down tasks in flat to do lists, I never took the time to structure my to do lists into an outline. Since the beginning of last year, Dave has been working on a very interesting web based outliner that runs and stores your outline inside your web browser with the ability to also save it to your Dropbox. While saving data to Dropbox isn't a big deal, the ability to save data using a web browser's local storage feature seems underutilized by developers. The overlooked beauty of Fargo is that Dave's web based app can scale, big time. The Fargo web app is served up as a static HTML web page with dynamic Javascript (Node.js) so all the heavy "thinking" and storage is done in the client's browser. Since the outline is saved either locally or to Dropbox that means Dave doesn't have to worry about customer storage requirements if he gets a billion users, overnight.

Little Porkchop and Happy Friends

Alcazar Garden and the California Tower

Two weeks ago, Dave launched Little Porkchop which lets Twitter users send out a tweetstorm. As I played with it, Dave hinted that he had something bigger on the horizon. That "something bigger" came a couple days ago when he released Happy Friends.

Happy Friends is an outliner that let's you embed a Twitter user's feeds into an outline. And, since it's an outline, you can indent, outdent, and rearrange Twitter users while archiving individual tweets. Twitter and Facebook are very flat formats consisting of a post with comments threaded to it. Happy Friends, on the other hand, turns a flat Twitter feed into a mailbox style reader. Once again, the beauty of Happy Friends is it can scale to the moon and back without any load on Dave's servers.

So, after all of Dave's arm waving, I'm starting to get it. Slow and steady wins the race.

Aero Glass Augmenting the Cockpit with Google Glass

From time to time we see true technological innovation. As I've said before, innovation is anything that can reduce the cost of a transaction, either in terms of time or money. Revolutionary technology doesn't necessarily need to be disruptive, but, ideally, if a new technology (i.e. iPhone) can replace multiple, older, technologies, (camera, iPod, phone, maps, etc), then it's a game changer.

At last night's San Diego Startup Week VC after-party, I had a long talk with the VP of business development at Aero Glass (glass.aero). I had a clear idea of the augmented reality benefits of using Google Glass as a HUD in the cockpit. But, I didn't fully grasp the checklist benefits until I watched their demo video. Pilots, quite literally, live and die by their checklists. If I forget to turn on my carb heat when landing on a cold humid day, I could get ice built up in the engine. Also, a surprisingly common mistake made by private pilots is that they forget to put down their landing gear, even with an audio alarm beeping in their ear. Most importantly, during an emergency, a checklist displayed on a personal HUD will keep the pilot focused.

The Aero Glass features in this video, below, will become very common place in the cockpit. It's just a matter of when; and, from the looks of it, it'll be very soon since Aero Glass will be attending "Oshkosh" in six weeks. Their business will definitely get some attention there.

Facebook Tracking and Privacy Concerns

Facebook is tracking me and I didn't realize it.

My drive to and from the Grand Del Mar.

I was looking at my Facebook activity log and I clicked on "Include Only Me activity." That displayed my Facebook activity, which only I could see, including places I had been and how long I'd been there each day. The level of detail is surprising. Yesterday, Facebook showed my journey from home to Tech Coffee and then my drive and three hour stay at the Grand Del Mar's Club M.

Stop Following Me

Facebook provides instructions for turning it off, but, you'd need to realize it's turned on in the first place. It seems this tracking feature is turned on and off via the mobile app, but the Location History map is displayed on the website.

Forewarned is forearmed.

Author: Joe Moreno

Live Indians, Dead Puppies, and Fake Sea-Monkeys

When I was a kid I bought a Native American stone arrowhead at a Boy Scout event.

One Saturday afternoon I was sitting next to the shed in my backyard where we kept our trashcans when I found the arrowhead in the dirt. I thought my mother dropped it on the way to the trash thinking it was just a rock in my bedroom. I picked up the arrowhead and went to put it where it belonged when I discovered that the original arrowhead I'd purchased was right where it belonged in my room.

The arrowhead I found in my backyard was a real life archeological discovery from hundreds of years ago.

While my arrowheads are long gone this brought back a memory of when my namesake cousin found a dead puppy in Brooklyn when he was a kid and created his own archeological piece of history. He and his friends took the dead dog down an alley to a construction site and gave the pup a proper burial.

It turns out that the building being built was a public library and the construction workers later uncovered the bones of the dead dog. When the library opened, they had a contest for kids to write about what they thought the bones were. My cousin, Joe, was a sharp kid. He wrote about what had happened. He figured he was a shoo–in with his unfair advantage.

Did my cousin win? Nope, he wasn't even close. The kid who won wrote about how the dinosaurs roamed the earth hundreds of millions of years ago while wearing eyeglasses and taking vitamins.

As a kid, we learn, quickly, about truth in advertising and to never let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. Whether it's the pair of x-ray glasses we bought which really don't see through things or the sea-monkeys which don't look anything like the comic book ad. Everyone loves a good story.

Leadership

Leadership isn't something you only read about in a book. You have to live it.

I see newly minted managers focusing on the oddities of great leaders and lose site of the basics such as setting the example, taking care of your people, planning, and managing expectations.

Steve Jobs may have berated and told people their ideas sucked, but that's not what he did on a daily basis. These are just the stories that stand out. The basics are more important for your day-to-day business life as a manager.

Lead to get people where they need to be – don't try to be someone else. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Author: Joe Moreno

When the News is Virtual

San Diego video artist Cy Kuckenbaker.

I heard this piece on KPBS while driving a couple days ago. It's about a San Diego video artist who spends up to two hours editing for each second of video he produces. You've probably seen his work.

What's interesting is his art is displayed on his website, cysfilm.com, yet the KPBS reporter makes no mention of this fact. Instead, the reporter directs you to kpbs.org.

Obviously, the goal of KPBS is to direct listeners from the audio program, since that's their primary medium, to their website to generate revenue via ads. So, I somehow feel that a key portion of the reporting is missing, specifically where Kuckenbaker's art is on display.

Imagine an article about the Mono Lisa on exhibit in San Diego without any mention of where it will be displayed other than, "You can see it for yourself at kpbs.org."

Author: Joe Moreno

Salute

Flying over the Naval Academy on my way into Lee Airport in Annapolis.

Getting saluted is weird, at first.

By the time a I was commissioned I had rendered thousands of salutes, but, in the beginning, receiving a salute felt strange. I remember thinking: yesterday I didn't rate this salute, today I do.

Then, when I was promoted to captain, it happened again. It felt strange when lieutenants saluted me but I quickly got used to it.

I hadn't thought much about getting saluted until ENS @B.E.N_DRT tweeted about it after he graduated from the Naval Academy earlier today.

Getting saluted by mids on my way back from the stadium was the weirdest thing.
— B.E.N. DRT (@BEN_DRT) May 24, 2014 

How to Salute

As an enlisted Marine and a Midshipman I was intimidated by officers. Everyone is. In boot camp, my drill instructors were god and even they had to call officers, "Sir." It was best to avoid crossing paths with an officer whenever possible. Then, when I was a newly commissioned second lieutenant, I wasn't sure exactly how to return a salute in certain circumstances.

Salutes are suppose to be rendered within 30 paces of a senior officer. The problem is it can, at times, be awkward in crowded places like the PX or sometimes the junior doesn't notice the officer. Occasionally, a junior might intentionally ignore an officer's presence – as respectfully as possible – to avoid the awkward encounter. But, officers pickup on this and it's mildly disrespectful.

As an officer, I quickly figured out how to avoid these situations. I would preemptively greet the junior with a "How ya doing?" or "Good afternoon," – even before they saluted me. There's nothing saying that I couldn't greet a junior first. The only requirement is that they show respect by initiating a salute. I would always return their salute with a smile while looking them in the eye. Trust me, a junior greatly appreciates it when you acknowledge, rather than ignore, their presence.

Instead of waiting until a salute – or lack there of – escalates to the point of disrespect, just head it off at the pass.

Author: Joe Moreno