Matt Tyler's Bits

I took for granted that non-pilots had an understanding of the weather conditions on October 11, 2021. They were this: Surface winds out of the South, 10 to 20 knots; broken and overcast ceilings ranging from 1,700 to 3,000 feet above ground level; cloud tops from 3,000 to 5,000 feet. Anyone flying cross country would most likely be passing through cloud layers and therefor require instrument approaches to land. Critical phases of flight would be spent in the clouds, meaning the pilot has no visiblity outside the aircraft and has to rely on his instruments to manage course, speed, altitude, and attitude. All these measurements are critical to the safe traversal while flying under Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC). A man behind me at the local grocery store checkout line hears me respond to the cashier's inquery as to why I'm buying a couple of boquets of flowers. My response was, "One was for my wife and one was for the vigil tonight at 7 PM." He chimed in an

Something happened today that me disturbed. I didn't notice this "thing" that has been occurring over the past two months, but had I, I'd have spoken out sooner. Today, Blue Origin sent another group of tourists into space for a short time. The headliner was William Shatner, a cultural icon. I'm happy for him and the rest of the group for being able to have the experience. This isn't the thing that's bothering me. On their descent back to earth, the mission control commander dubbed them America's newest astronauts, designating them an incremental astronaut number somewhere in the 500's. Astronauts? If what they did, which was to sit in a seat, qualifies them as astronauts, then everyone flying as passengers on an airliner should be anointed "pilots". Correct me if I'm wrong, but astronauts spend decades learning and practicing science, engineering, or aeronautics before applying to and being accepted into one of the most rigorous prog

I have no intention of pontificating on the impact of television on humankind. Before TV, people went to movie theaters to get motion pictures from around the world. Before that, they attended plays and other theatrical productions. Before that, they played with sticks and rocks (known today as golf). Enough on that. Last Sunday, after Dawn and I were fortunate enough to watch Donald Trump speak at CPAC, Life, Liberty, and Levin, and Steve Hilton, our living room TV died. It wasn't necessarily unexpected as it was exhibiting turmoil prior to its final Swan Song. But, still, dissappointing. The TV was purchased six years ago at Costco. Neither Dawn nor I were happy with a TV that only lasted six years. If it made it to ten years, then that would be acceptable. Nonetheless, it's time for another television and defining the television's mission given what's now know. In particular, with regards to mission, the living room TV must not have a screen glare. The windows on the

While reading through a mountain of standard operating procedures related to my company's policies for the development and operation of medical devices, it occurred to me that being fully aware of and to make full utilization of sed policies requires a full-time position. This not necessarily reasonable for everyone involved in the process of engineering medical devices and information systems in support of the same. The scope and complexity of so many procedures also incurs a tremendous amount of overhead. Time and money spent performing many boilerplate tasks is time and money that can be spent providing better value elsewhere. I am reminded of AWS's "Well Architected Framework" or "Well Architected Tool" (whatever it's being called). The WAF or WATool provides a comprehensive strategy and checklist for meeting various important criteria in an AWS deployment. The content and guidance could easily be externalized and declarative and therefor easily exte

Spring Roo is available as a CLI shell-style application and as an STS plugin. Since I'm not a fan of the Eclipse IDE (no offense and I don't need to debate it), the focus will be on using the CLI. The first step is to download the latest release from the Spring Roo project homepage . Before getting too far into it, it will be helpful to understand some basics about the Roo Shell (RS) application. The startup script can be used to bootstrap RS commands or to simply launch the shell program when no commands are included. The commands are applied relative to the current working directory, so be prepared for that. The recommended approach is to unpack the Spring Roo distribution to its own folder, add its /bin directory to the path, and execute RS from your project directories. This will become more obvious in the examples below. To keep it simple, I've created a directory under my Linux home directory and unpacked the distro: ~ $ mkdir spring-roo ~ $ cd spring-roo/

I've been thinking about a project scaffolding tool for Java for a long time now. Many modern technologies now come with CLIs that can lay down project skeletons and add conventional concerns by simply executing command line actions. This scaffolding, as it has come to be known, jump-starts project work significantly by laying down the typical boilerplate and, in many cases, simplifies the wiring of ancillary technologies. As a top-tier technology, Java has benefited from the many available IDEs that also provide scaffolding-like functionality. These IDEs, and even Maven archetypes to some extent, provide very powerful tools for project foundations and instrumentation of specialized components. You are even able to produce your own extension, provided you're willing to figure out some of the rather obscure mechanisms to do so. However, architectural patterns change very rapidly and IDEs fail to keep pace. Plus, the IDE capabilities are usually driven through user interface