Flight Map......where?

[mav214]

What's the deal with the flight map? Temporarily not working? I like to check that out occasionally during the day, and not having it is a real bummer

[1691]

+1

Same issue here. I like to watch myself when I do it...uh...I mean fly. Its quite disturbing. The map being inop sucks too.

[mav214]

Yep, I like to watch myself while I'm doing it too.....flying that is

[Eugenio Leal/1878]

Well, I'm really into watching how others do it.

I'm talking about the flights of course.

I miss it already!

[mav214]

ROFL.....this thread gets better with every new post

[thansson]

Well, you stumbled on the map when no one is actually flying! The current design just puts up the No Pilots Actively Flying message if there are no flights. To avoid confusion, I will just recode the page to always show the map!

[Marko Tesselaar]

Tomas,

I was actually doing it when i decided to take a look at myself doing it, and while i was sure i was doing it myself and also made sure i was connected to the net so that others could see me doing it, i didn't see myself doing it nor anyone else doing it and that was a great turnoff, i can tell you. I also did not receive any comments on my messy way of doing it, so i'm sure others did not see it either (my flying that is offcourse).

[Eugenio Leal/1878]

I am flying a TTN727 from KIAH to KMCI and is not showing in the map...

[mav214]

Yep, sorry Tomas, when I flew from PGUM to PHNL last night, it still claimed that no one was flying. Which I know was a dirty, filthy lie!!!!! Ok, maybe it wasn't that big of a deal, hahaha. It actually worked out pretty well, since no one was witness to my bonehead missed approach at PHNL.......ack, now I just told everyone

[thansson]

Ah... Ok, that is a different issue. Are you guys using GCP? It may be that something in the code broke. I will have a look but nothing has changed on the server side that I am aware of.

[Update]
Ok, I just remembered that I put in one small change and started running all internal dates in UTC format. I guess the PIREP clients didn't get the memo so they kept sending the times over in local time. It would have been all good if it wasn't for the fact that the server now thought that all those entries were too old to display and removed them from the map.

It should be fixed now - thanks for the heads-up!

[Eugenio Leal/1878]

Hi Tomas,

I am indeed using GCP

[mav214]

YES, thanks Tomas, I see airplanes again. And they look like they are having so much fun.......there's that darn sexual innuendo again

[thansson]

Just a follow-up for those who are technically inclined. Since PHP 5.1, the date functions want a timezone otherwise they start to give warnings and fill up our logs. So I went ahead and changed the default timezone to UTC across all the code in the whole site thinking that being consistent was good. It turns however that there are a few places here and there on the site where I use the SQL "NOW()" function to enter a time stamp into the database and the position table where GCP (and FSFK) writes the flight info was one of them.

It turns out that the SQL time functions look at the server time. Since the server is located in Utah (Mountain timezone), the code that was checking if the position was "stale" indeed saw a 6 hour difference and deleted all the entries before they could be displayed on the map. There were two possible solutions to this problem:

1. Change all the SQL functions to write the time stamps in UTC format
2. Change the default time zone to be Mountain time

Since all these time stamps never are seen on the actual site, it made little sense to try to figure out how to change the timezone in the database (something that I have little control over) and instead I chose to run all the code using the same default timezone as the server. This of course is going to cause some interesting behaviour on my test server that is running on EDT but I'll deal with that...