Sun Feb 26 15:11:30 UTC 2023 So my attention to Vattastic waned for a while and things fell into disrepair as technologies changed and I didn't keep up. That has changed, and Vatatstic is back with a whole lot of changes, improvements, and bug-fixes. I am calling this release v1.5.
Here is a list of things that have changed in v1.5:
The shoutbox is currently undergoing an overhaul. I hope to bave that back online within the next couple of weeks.
Other than the shoutbox overhaul, this version of Vattastic is now in end-of-life maintenance. I will maintain it with modern technologies and of course fix bugs as they arise, but no more features will be developed for "Vattastic Classic". I will be focusing all development efforts on version 2 of Vattastic.
If you have questions, comments, or need help, feel free to hit the "Feedback" button. I'd love to hear from you.
Kind Regards,
Larry Wimble
Wed Jan 2 19:37:19 EDT 2019 Over the holiday break, I went to the datacenter and replaced the host operating system and implemented an entirely new storage strategy. The difference this has made is astounding. The daily system backup that formerly took 4 to 6 hours to run now runs in 22 minutes with negligable CPU usage. Similarly, the hourly off-site Vattastic database backups that used to nearly cripple the server for 11 to 12 minutes at the top of every hour now run in about 3 minutes with no noticable slowdown. I would say this has been a major success, though the next Cross-The-Pond event will really tell us the tale.
Next up are some improvements to the shoutbox and secure access via an "https" address.
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and I wish you all a peaceful and prosperous new year!
Kind Regards,
Larry Wimble
Thu Aug 2 09:31:19 EDT 2018 Again, a very long time since a blog entry has been made. The server has been down for a few days and I wanted to explain that situation, and give a little idea of what's to come. Warning, there's lot of geek-speak in the following paragraphs.
Over the weekend of July 28 while I was on my annual scalloping trip and completely out of touch with the world, one of the disks in the server failed in a fairly dramatic way. The server performance degraded, but actually managed to keep running without the failed disk until Monday morning when the server crashed completely. It's almost as if it waited until I got home from vacation to crash. Lucky me. I made a trip downtown to the datacenter to try to restore service using the remaining 3 disks. This is where I ran into trouble. The disk that died was the only one that had a bootloader on it, and to make matters worse, the boot partition was completely wiped out. This was in part, due to a mistake I made when provisioning the system originally. I corrected the problem, but still had issues getting a bootloader to install. After 12 hours of standing in a freezing datacenter with their massive air conditioner blowing directly on me, I chose to call it a day. I went home and ordered a new drive to replace the old one (In hindsight, I probably should have done that immediately but I was so wrapped up in trying to restore service, it never even occurred to me).
The new disk arrived from Amazon Wednesday afternoon. Once again, I trekked downtown to the datacenter and installed it along with some new RAM. I had spent some time on Tuesday analyzing a backup copy of the server that I maintain here at my house so I had a pretty good idea what I was up against, or at least I thought I did. After installing the aforementioned hardware, I set to installing the bootloader again. I quickly realized something was wrong in a major way. I won't bore you with the details, but basically there are two versions of the "grub" bootloader used by Linux, and somehow, the latest version had gotten uninstalled. It still remains a mystery to me as to how this occurred. I reinstalled it, and then installed the bootloader. Miraculously, the system booted. I was elated.
I set the new drive to sync with the other three drives in the system. It said it would take 19 hours to resync. That seemed excessive to me, so I set off to do research. And here is where I learned about yet another mistake I made when provisioning the system back in 2016. It seems that when disk writes are made, that an actual read-modify-write cycle is physically occuring on the disk surface due to the way it's configured. To use the word "inefficient" is a major understatement. Whenever "write" activity is high, the system load goes through the roof. This also explains the recent "server runaway" problems we've been having during VATSIM events when the server load is high (I'm sure we all remember the 4 crashes that occurred during Cross-the-Pond). Frankly, the server harware should be able to handle that type of loading with no problem, but I apparently misconfigured a single setting when I provisioned the system and gave it a major handicap. The sad part is that in order to correct it, I will have to entirely redo the data storage strategy which will require more downtime. At least this time, the downtime can be planned.
Enough about the outage! You may be wondering what's been going on behind the scenes recently.....
I attened FlightSimExpo in Vegas in June, and renewed my developent efforts on Vattastic 2.0. The 3D spinning globe is coming along great. I still don't have a release estimate as my ability to work on this stuff is highly dependent upon my professional and family obligations, but I will produce a Youtube video soon of the progress so you can see what's to come. I'm trying to put in a few hours each week on it.
In the mean time, I hope you're enjoying Vattastic. I know I have been difficult to contact over the last several months. I promise to make a better effort at communicating with you all. I also want to make a special shoutout to all of you who have donated recently. The server fund covered the replacement disk :-)
.Kind Regards,
Larry Wimble
Mon Dec 1 06:27:31 EST 2014. It's been quite a long time since I've written a blog entry here. I just wanted to touch base with my users and let you know what's going on in the world of Vattastic.
Recently with he help of some excellent VATSIM facility engineers, we've made many improvements to the Vattastic airspace database. In fact, all of the VATRUS airspaces and their high centers were recently updated. In total, we've added and/or modified over 55 airspaces over the last few months. We will continue to update airspace information as changes are reported to us.
Also, we've been having some issues with the Shoutbox server occasionally "running away" and filling up the disk with error logs. I've spent some time trying to locate this problem but haven't quite pinned it down yet. Stay tuned on this issue. I've added more log messages to try and locate the cuause of this.
Finally, I want to thank all of my users for making Vattastic so popular. The downside of all of this popularity is that the old server just isn't cutting it anymore. For the geeks out there, the load average sits around 6.5 or so on a 4-cpu machine during the weekend busy times (that's 160% CPU utilization). I've seen peaks of 18.0. Also, our bandwidth usage has skyrocketed over the last few months to over a terrabyte per month. This means that not only do we need to replace our server, but that the monthly cost of running this site is also going up by about 30% per month. In terms of the new server, I've already ordered a new case and power supply. We will be needing a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and hard disks (about $600 worth of hardware).
Why am I telling you all of this? Because we need donations to cover the rising costs of providing this service. To those of you who have donated this year, please accept my highest thanks. We've more than met the goal I established at the beginning of 2014. To those of you who haven't yet donated, I am running a "special" during the month of December 2014 which will give you a full year of supporter status for a minimum $5 donation. Please consder donating. Any amount over the goal will be used for the benefit of Vattastic.
In any case, I'd like to wish everyone a wonderful and happy holiday season.
Enjoy!
-Larry
Mon Nov 26 19:46:52 EST 2012. In case you didn't notice, the Shoutbox is actually working. I re-wrote it from scratch using a more robust technology. I've also made some airspace updates, and made some performance adjustments to the back-end processing scripts.
Standby for more features and airspace updates...
Enjoy!
-Larry
Thu Jul 26 14:04:30 EDT 2012. Users of Microsoft Internet Explorer version 9 (and higher) now use the mainstream mapping engine just like users of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. This map mode is much easier on our servers and makes for a faster load and pan/zoom of the map for the user. If you are using an older version of MSIE, we encourage you to upgrade to the latest stable version which is version 9 as of the time of this writing. Those using IE 6, 7, or 8 will continue to use the "legacy tile mode" which is slated to be disabled in the future. More info on "Legacy tile mode" can be found in the FAQ under "Map Questions"
Airspace updates and some new featrures coming soon. Stay tuned!
Fri Apr 20 07:43:22 EDT 2012. It's been a long time getting here, but Vattastic is now operational on it's own server. You know what this means? It's time for another celebratory Vattastic Fly-out event. The tentative date for the event is Saturday May 12. It will be a group flight from KORD to KTPA (The previous server was located in Chicago, and the new server is in a Tampa Datacenter). I'll post here and also put an event in the event registry when the event date is confirmed.
Enjoy!
Larry Wimble
Wed Mar 21 07:09:08 EDT 2012. A couple of days ago, I ordered Vattastic's new server. It was shipped yesterday and should arrive to my home within a week or so. It will likely take me a few weeks to get it configured and into the datacenter here in Tampa. I will keep everyone up to date.
I want to thank everyone who has donated to the server fund. You all have definitely made a difference for me. For those that haven't donated, please consider that the server itself is expensive plus the monthly costs to have it hosted are not cheap.
Also, I wanted to update everyone on the Shoutbox re-write. I've bitten off quite a bit with this because I decided to go with a Javascript library called socket.io for the client (browser) side. There is currently no server for socket.io written in PHP (and I'm not about to add an additional dependency to Vattastic). I am working on a PHP-based server for it, but it is somewhat slow-going due to all of the demands of my professional life at the moment. I would say that the server software is about 40% done, and the overall shoutbox interface is about 30% done. I'll keep everyone updated.
Finally, when I get the new server up and running, it'll be time to promote Vattastic again with another Vattastic Event! Just like last time, we will probably piggy-back onto one of VATUSA's "Friday Night Ops" events. More details once I'm closer to bringing the server online...
Fri Feb 10 09:07:09 EST 2012. It has been a while since I've had time to work on Vattastic. I'm back in the programmer's seat again and I have some cool stuff coming. Among these will be a Teamspeak Viewer, message sounds for the Shoutbox, a fix for the shoutbox for IE, and user profiles.
I'm sure you've also noticed that I've placed a "Donate" button in the upper-right of the main site window. Vattastic is consuming more and more CPU, memory, and bandwidth on a weekly basis and thus is becoming expensive to operate. I am about to migrate the site to it's very own dedicated server located at a datacenter right here in Tampa, FL. This will not be cheap, so if you can help out a bit, I'd appreciate it greatly. I am working on a way to recognize Vattastic supporters when they are online. See the FAQ for more details on this. In any event, I hope you're enjoying Vattastic and if there's anything I can do to make your experience more enjoyable, please don't hesitate to leave feedback for me.Thu Jun 30 10:42:02 EDT 2011. It's been a while since I've updated everyone, so I thought I'd take a moment to let you know what's in the works.
As I'm sure you've figured out, Teamspeak was added a couple weeks ago. Only registered users can use the Teamspeak server, but it's very easy to obtain access to it. See the "Teamspeak" menu on the main toolbar (top) for everything you need.
I'm currently working on turning the lower section of the screen into a Shoutbox. Not only will Vattastic post automatic messages to the shoutbox (such as events that are starting shortly), but Vattastic members will be able to "shout" messages anytime they want to. This functionality is mostly complete, but in need of some refinements. Look for it in the next few days.
I'm also planning a user profile/preferences system. The profile will allow members to upload their pictures and write a little about themselves. Anytime someone clicks on their aircraft, their profile will be available in the aircraft or ATC window. The preferences system will make it so that whenever you log in, your last known preferences (map options, sounds, searches, etc. will be restored automatically.)
I am also looking at making up some special tools for VAs who want to have a map of their own aircraft on their site. This is a little ways away, but in the works.
Ultimately, though.... You folks are the users. What do YOU want to see in Vattastic? How can I improve your experience? What do you not like about Vattastic now? Please leave me some feedback by using the "Feedback" button in the top toolbar.
Enjoy!
-Larry
Fri May 27 11:44:22 EDT 2011. It was much more involved than I originally thought, but it is now done and ready for ARTCCs/FIRs and others to use to promote their events. When events are added, flags will appear in the map to show where the events will take place. There is an option in the "Map Options" menu which will let you control how far into the future the map looks for events when displaying flags.
The Vattastic Teamspeak server is provisioned and most of the code is written to interface Teamspeak to Vattastic's user database. I hope to have that online within the next couple of weeks!
As always, if you have any questions or problems, feel free to leave feedback or email me at admin1@vattastic.com
Enjoy!
-Larry
Thu Apr 21 12:23:25 EDT 2011. Over the last few days I've completely redeveloped how the Vattastic map is generated. For users of Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and MSIE 9, this has the effect of speeding up the generation process and significantly improves performance in terms of panning and zooming. For example, when you zoom, the entire map no longer has to be reloaded (it just scales in your browser). These changes also signficantly reduce the load on the Vattastic server and result in a much faster user experience overall. These new methods provide me with a great deal of flexibility for some future improvements, such as hovering over an aircraft to show it's route, using different colors to represent friends' aircraft, etc. Sounds great, right? Not so fast.....
Enter the problem: Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8. When I finished doing my refactoring, I brought up my copy of MSIE 6. Vattastic was literally unusable due to slowness. I powered up my laptop and tried it with MSIE 8. Still literally unusable. I waited more than 60 seconds for the map to load and it woudn't even pan correctly. Absolutely not acceptable.
The problem is that Microsoft elected for many years not to support certain technologies that all other major browsers have been supporting for a long time. It is only with MSIE 9 that Microsoft supports Scalable Vector Grapgics (SVG), and other HTML5 goodies like the <canvas> tag. All of this coulpled with Microsoft's incredibly slow Javascript engine, and you have an unacceptably slow user experience with Vattastic.
I have temporarily solved this problem by re-enabling the old tile generation process for MSIE users only. For many reasons however, this is not a permanent solution. Most importantly, users of MSIE 6/7/8 will not get to participate in the coming improvements as the old technology does not scale (and I will not continue to develop it). Secondly, the old process is very taxing to the Vattastic servers resulting in slowness for everyone.
Fear not, however: I have identified a few potential solutions to bring MSIE users back into the 21st century:
PLEASE: Let me know via the feedback button what browser you are using and what your thoughts are on the improvements. I get surprisingly little feedback on Vattastic which gives me little to go on as far as what you like and don't like.
Finally, work on the event registry will resume some time next week. There is one more dialog box to be developed, plus it must be hooked into the mapping system. Be looking for that feature soon.
Tue Mar 8 10:39:40 EST 2011. The server move went flawlessly yesterday with less than 20 minutes of downtime. The Vattastic data server (data provided to programs such as VatSPY, Servinfo, etc.) transitioned with zero downtime.
You may have noticed that Vattastic now has a real logo. I want to thank Kurt Pedrosa (1133703) for taking his time to put that logo together. I'll be making that logo available to others to place links to Vattastic on their sites and will update the FAQ accordingly.
I've been quite busy in my professional life and Vattastic has necessarily had to take a backseat to that. I've managed to sneak in a few hours here and there to work on the Event Registry and get the new Teamspeak 3 server set up. As my professional life is nearly at max capacity, it'll unfortunately be a month or so before those features will be available.. Please stay tuned, though.... More cool features are on the way!
Wed Nov 17 10:26:16 EST 2010. In order to address recent load-related issues, I have re-factored the entire tile generation process. Hopefully you will see less (or perhaps zero) pink tiles on the map at this point. We will continue to monitor the situation and make incremental improvements as necessary.
Also, the Event Registry code is well underway. I'm actually testing part of it now. It'll likely be a couple more weeks before I release anything since my professional life is calling me, but it is shaping up nicely.
2010/11/08 16:02 EDT 2010. The new server has brought us a much snappier Vattastic map, but has also shown us some major problems within the Vattastic tile server relating to memory consumption as well as periodic crashes. These problems appear primarily when there is heavy usage of the VATSIM network. This past Sunday night showed some record number on the VATSIM network with upward of 1200 clients logged on at once. If you've seen a lot of pink tiles over the last few days, now you know why.
Due to the threaded design of the tile server, tracking down these problems is not a simple task. We've added some safeguards to insure that only a certain number of images can be generated at once as well as improved the caching ability of the server. These things have helped greatly. I apologize for the lack of stability over the last few days. Please bear with us and rest assured that we are doing everything possible to keep the system running smoothly. We will definitely get the bugs worked out of the system.
Finally, there are two improvements in the works. The Event Registry should be forthcoming within the next two weeks as well as a notification system.
Enjoy!
Mon Nov 1 12:03:59 EDT 2010. We've migrated Vattastic to a new server and updated all of the libraries that it depends on to the latest and greatest versions. Be looking for some additional improvements over the next couple of weeks....
Tue Oct 19 13:27:28 EDT 2010. Just wanted to drop a note to everyone and let you know I'm still alive. Being a self-employed contractor, I sometimes go from having little work to being oversubscribed. That is exactly what happened over the last 2 months.
In any case, lots of things are happening on the back end. The server migration is nearly complete. I'm ironing out a few bugs in the new system and will likely cut over to the new server within the next week or so. I'm also working on some changes that many have requested such as A) Make the map come back to where it was last centered/zoomed, and B) Save searches. Look for this and more within the next couple weeks :-)
Fri Sep 24 07:48:57 EDT 2010. I've had several requests for the FIR/ARTCC bounfaries to be displayed. This is now working. If you don't like it, you can turn off the display by going to the little '+' symbol in the upper right corner of the map and unchecking "FIR/ARTCC Boundaries".
Also, Vattastic will shortly be migrating to it's own dedicated server. In fact, the FIR boundaries are already being served from the new site. If all goes well, the downtime will be minimal (less than 2 hours). I will let you know when the actual cutover is to take place.
Tue Sep 7 10:01:41 EDT 2010. I took some time over the Labor Day weekend to add a powerful search feature to Vattastic. I also permanently removed the "Loading" mask that was annoying so many of you. If you see any side-effects of that (other than being less annoyed), please let me know. The loading mask has been replaced by a small loading icon in the status bar (lower toolbar). You should be able to pan and zoom the map while updating is taking place.
Sat Aug 28 20:14:29 EDT 2010. I just wanted to touch base with everyone. Work is progressing, albeit slowly, on more new features. Right now I have two projects going at once in my professional life, so it might be another few weeks before I can focus on new features. Hang in there and I'll get to it as quickly as I can!
Mon Aug 9 11:27:05 EDT 2010. As many of you know, I'm on vacation... However I managed to sneak in a little feature update this morning based on requests from many of you. When you log in, there is now an option to get Vattastic to "remember" your username and/or password. Enjoy!
Some new features are now in the works: First is a user "Profile" system. Vattastic users will be able to upload a photo and other related information and have that photo and info display when someone clicks on their aircraft or ATC position. I'm also planning an "Event Registry" where ARTCCs/FIRs can register their event with Vattastic. Vattastic will automatically promote the event by placing a "pin" on the map where the event is to take place. Finally, I'm planning to add an ability for Vattastic users to text-chat amongst themselves, including a group-chat function for group-flyouts, etc.
In the meantime, enjoy the existing features and let me know if you see any bugs. Vattastic is now officially out of beta since VATSIM has announced the site (I didn't intend this, but it's OK :-)
Thu Jul 29 08:51:31 EDT 2010. Some people were having problems registering because Vattastic didn't recognise your VATSIM CID. While the issue is fixed, many CIDs haven't yet made it into the database. Since this data is collected from VATSIM, registrants may need to log onto VATSIM for a few minutes before attempting the registration process.
Wed Jul 28 12:10:23 EDT 2010. Today, I've launched Vattastic in it's beta trials. Over the next month, we'll be monitoring server load and user comments to make Vattastic the best it can be!
I would like to give a warm welcome to the folks of the Miami ARTCC, California Airlines, and American Virtual Airlines who will be participating in the beta trials. Beta is open through Sept 30, 2010. Please accept my thanks in advanc for your comments and feedback on this site. Enjoy!
Wed Jul 28 08:50:57 EDT 2010. In order to address a security issue and make the registration process more robust, I had to clear the database. All users will now be identified (for the purposes of logging in) by their VATSIM CID or their email address. If you previously had an account on Vattastic, you will need to re-register.
The new registration process requires you to answer a security question. Neither your password nor the answer to the security question are stored on our servers. We can only recover your password with the correct answer to the security question as this answer is used to encrypt your password.
Beta launch will be either today or tomorrow :-)
Enjoy!
Fri Jul 23 13:33:58 EDT 2010. I'm still working on the registration problem. Actually, I'm completely refactoring how account management works. If you are currently registered and your username/password combination suddenly stops working, try using your VATSIM CID or email address (and the original password you supplied for Vattastic). It'll be a few more days before I open registration back up.
Wed Jul 21 08:35:20 EDT 2010. I'm delaying the beta launch pending a security bug-fix and some changes to the registration & login process. Your Vattastic login ID will now be your VATSIM CID or email address. I'm now looking at Monday the 23rd at the absolute earliest for beta-launch.
Tue Jul 20 08:28:29 EDT 2010. As you probably have noticed, the Vattastic map contains NEXRAD composites for the U.S. I've also made updates to some of the libraries Vattastic depends upon and am seeing much faster tile loads on the map. Beta launch will happen on schedule tomorrow.
Fri Jul 16 12:35:31 EDT 2010. I added a Feedback button to the application today. Feel free to tell me how much you like it or hate it :-) This constitutes the last major feature before our beta launch. A few small bugfixes and tests are next. It looks like the beta run will commence on or about Aug 21 and will involve the folks from the Miami ARTCC, the NY ARTCC, and California Airlines (CAX).
Wed Jul 14 17:06:54 EDT 2010. I added an FAQ button to the main toolbar to answer a number of questions I've already received. Next on the list is a feedback form. After that and a few little bugfixes, we will launch the beta run :-)
Mon Jul 12 09:23:37 EDT 2010. It's been a long time coming, but all major features for the version 1.0 release of Vattastic are now working. Certainly not everything is working perfectly, but within about a week or so, we'll be launching in beta-testing mode. Be watching for many minor cosmetic changes over the next several days as we prepare for the beta-launch.
Tue Jul 6 19:23:39 EDT 2010. The map is now fully active (with MUCH more flexibility in where you click). I cleaned up the registration process, and added decent icons to most of the functions. You can now remove friends from the aircraft and ATC dialog boxes. I'll be working on the Airport Detail dialog box over the next week. Enjoy!
Thu Jul 1 16:53:47 EDT 2010. The map is now fully active. For the moment, you must be zoomed in fairly close (I'll fix this in the next couple of days), and you must click directly on the target dot (not on the name or callsign). If you click where there is more than one target, you'll get a little dialog box with a list of targets to click on. Enjoy!
Mon Jun 28 09:30:05 EDT 2010. Vattastic is now fully running on the new database. We'll be watching for problems over the next week. We'll also be working on making the map "active" so that you can click on an airport, aircraft, or center callsign and actually get information. Enjoy!
Fri Jun 25 11:30:47 EDT 2010. The user database was completely cleared (as well as friend lists) during our migration from MySQL to Postgres. You will have to re-register. Please be advised that there will likely be one more clearing of the user database before initial launch! This is likely more than a month away, however. As of now, all systems except the map are running on the new database. Expect the map not to be blank (or possibly inconsistent) with the data in the other tabs every now and again until I get the tile server converted. It's already underway, but may take another day or two.