Dave Smith

My friend Steve (who has appeared on this blog before) took his newly built GWS Tiger Moth R/C plane out for its maiden flight today after about 15 hours assembling it. His very first flight lasted only 4 seconds, and resulted in disaster. After hand-launching it, the plane climbed at too steap of an angle, and ended up stalling and falling straight to the ground. It hit so hard that the fuselage and both wings snapped. The propeller shaft was embedded several inches into the ground, and both blades of the prop broke. Apparently the center of gravity was too far toward the plane’s tail, causing it to nose up, and stall. I think it’s fixable, but it’s still a hard hit on the man’s morale. Good luck fixing it Steve!

Parsing XML is fun again with Xerces progressive scan.

Do you have large XML files that you need to parse in your GUI application? Are you sick of your XML parser blocking the event loop while it laboriously parses all that XML? Don’t waste another day! Xerces-C++ progressive scan was made for you, my friend.
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After a few solid crashes with my new RC plane, I noticed that its battery box started to come loose. It’s a HobbyZone Super Cub, and even a semi-rough landing on thick grass can cause it to come loose. Read on for pictures and an explanation of how I solved the problem.
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Through painful personal experience, I’ve learned the best techniques for freeing your RC airplane from the evil clutches of mother nature’s best weapon against pilots: trees. Read on and I’ll share with you the pearls of wisdom that helped me libreate my HobbyZone Super Cub after 3 long days of arboreal bondage.
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