Website update
Posted: Sun May 10, 2009 5:39 pm
I sent the family out to the trailer we keep in the 1000 Islands. So I actually had some time to add a few features to the site! 
The first feature that I hope everyone notices right away is the statistics info on the home page. Behind the scenes of this new info box is a script that pulls the statistics out of the database once a day. This should still give us fairly current stats while avoiding a major hit on the database! So don't go right back to the page after you submit your flight and expect the numbers to have changed. It doesn't work like that! If this works as expected, we will be able to take advantage of the scheduler to run other reoccurring tasks on the site. More about this later.
Oh, if you think that the numbers are a bit off, it probably has to do with the way our PIREP programs send the data across. Especially with FSFK, there doesn't seem to be a uniform way to specify the aircraft type. I've seen flights sent with the type "C-172" and we have nothing in place right now to catch it!
So I am doing things like looking for the string "b744" or "747-400". It should give us fairly accurate numbers - I hope!
The second feature - somewhat more hidden than the first one - is the use of the real date on the route assignment page: http://www.globecargova.org/Polar/view_assignments.php
This has been on Justin's wish list for quite some time and I finally got around to implement it. Take a look at this page and please let me know if some of the dates are off. The algorithm was not trivial so I might have messed up somewhere.
As always, let me know if things don't work or you would like to see any enhancements or new features added to the site. We have lots of info gathered in the database so I could pull addition stats if we can come up with something meaningful. (No, I don't have the info on how many cups of coffee were consumed per flight!
)
The first feature that I hope everyone notices right away is the statistics info on the home page. Behind the scenes of this new info box is a script that pulls the statistics out of the database once a day. This should still give us fairly current stats while avoiding a major hit on the database! So don't go right back to the page after you submit your flight and expect the numbers to have changed. It doesn't work like that! If this works as expected, we will be able to take advantage of the scheduler to run other reoccurring tasks on the site. More about this later.
Oh, if you think that the numbers are a bit off, it probably has to do with the way our PIREP programs send the data across. Especially with FSFK, there doesn't seem to be a uniform way to specify the aircraft type. I've seen flights sent with the type "C-172" and we have nothing in place right now to catch it!
So I am doing things like looking for the string "b744" or "747-400". It should give us fairly accurate numbers - I hope!The second feature - somewhat more hidden than the first one - is the use of the real date on the route assignment page: http://www.globecargova.org/Polar/view_assignments.php
This has been on Justin's wish list for quite some time and I finally got around to implement it. Take a look at this page and please let me know if some of the dates are off. The algorithm was not trivial so I might have messed up somewhere.
As always, let me know if things don't work or you would like to see any enhancements or new features added to the site. We have lots of info gathered in the database so I could pull addition stats if we can come up with something meaningful. (No, I don't have the info on how many cups of coffee were consumed per flight!
)
