tbg.airframes.io

[thebaldgeek]

Fun day....
Added still more speed to the site search.
Added * wildcard to the text area.
Fixed the search page trackmap links.
Fixed the other table trackmap links, but it will take days for the fix to migrate through all the rows.
Restored the 143e STDC feed.
Fixed a bug in the way the search database was being trimmed, it was not always trimming to 120 hours.
Re-jigged the layout of the E6 page. Not happy with it. Any suggestions?
Washed my car.

[XWP29]

Fun day....
Added still more speed to the site search.
Added * wildcard to the text area.
Fixed the search page trackmap links.
Fixed the other table trackmap links, but it will take days for the fix to migrate through all the rows.
Restored the 143e STDC feed.
Fixed a bug in the way the search database was being trimmed, it was not always trimming to 120 hours.
Re-jigged the layout of the E6 page. Not happy with it. Any suggestions?
Washed my car.

Thank you a truly awesome info hub. Much appreciated.

[thebaldgeek]

Just discovered an interesting side effect of the trackmap page link fix.....
It's now possible to craft a URL and have it call up the trackmap page in an browser from that URL.

That means you can string up to about 400 ICAO hex's into one URL and put it in your browser and pull up 4 maps for that URL.
Note that I have dropped two of the ADSB sites off the page. 6 was just getting to sluggish for most browsers.
The 4 maps are either watermarked center bottom by each website, or have their name on the side panel, so you can tell what you are looking at.

Random example flight:
https://tbg.airframes.io/trackmap/dashb ... 708&zoom=3
Depending on the speed of your browser and my server, you still might need to heed the trick noted on the site, if you see the Node-RED logo, click on the text area with the url and press enter.
Not all options in the URL are needed of course, but put them there to show the art of the possible.

I still want to add more one click red buttons of lists you might have in mind (the 'bizjetsofwar' guy is going to hook me up with a list soon), but now you have your own custom lists of bookmarks etc.

A welcome side effect.

[thebaldgeek]

The site is currently down and has been for over 3 hours.
Contacted the data center and they said they are working on it.
It's very frustrating as its not my code that broke it for once and so its all out of my hands to get it back up and running.
I do enough work in IT to know you cant give an ETA, but I also wish I knew the issue.

Sorry. Its them. Not me.
Hurry up and wait.

[thebaldgeek]

Website is back up.

Everything is starting from zero.
I'm busy doing the usual cold start housekeeping, but its back up.

About time.
Still no word what the issue was.

[XWP29]

Website is back up.

Everything is starting from zero.
I'm busy doing the usual cold start housekeeping, but its back up.

About time.
Still no word what the issue was.

Mil USAF is not loading for me here this morning.

[thebaldgeek]

Mil USAF is not loading for me here this morning.

Thanks. Your right. It was broken since the restart.
Sorry about that. Found and fixed the issue.
I applied the same fix to the MMC pages that were not showing arrival and depart airport codes.

For those interested, the splitting of the sites seems to have tickled an interesting quirk (bug?) in Node-RED where the main data base (read / write) can come up after the split-site (read only) database.
This causes the sub-site to silently block data base access.
I think I need to better stagger the cold start of the main and sub-sites a lot more carefully.

Seems no speed bump goes unpunished.
Have I mentioned lately that I have no idea what I am doing and I really should not be doing any of this?

[thebaldgeek]

Found an odd bug with the trackmap page.
I was using 'icaofilter' as suggested back in this thread, but it was dropping a lot of aircraft out of each of my group buttons.
Have removed it for now. The side effect is that the side bar is back on the left, I tried adding the setting to remove it, but it is still there.
For now, I'd rather have the correct aircraft shown on the maps and the side bar vs very few aircraft and no sidebar.

Feedback welcome.

[thebaldgeek]

Turns out there are 3 different versions of Iridium decoder.
I added some code to the site to better detect and present the different types on the iridium table and thus into the site search database.
One of the decoder outputs is a bit funky. I've cleaned it up the best I can (took a few hours).

Here is one from Iridium I have a question about....R135. ZZZ665.

``` QUARINCXA~1GRD 2 AIR MSG
FR: DOC
TO: ZZ666
ALL COPIED WITH FUEL. AND PREFERENCE FOR EGBB IF NEEDING TO DIV. I WILL HAVE
A PLAN FOR US HERE TO SUPPORT YOU SHOULD YOU REQUIRE IT. I WAS A BETTING MAN
I THINK YOU WILL```

Who is 'DOC'?
Looking at the aviation abbreviation guide, the best I can do is 'Designated Operational Coverage'.
Thoughts?

[POL]

Duty Officer...something? I can't remember what the C is.

[FlyingFairy]

Duty Operational Control or Duty Operations Controller, I’ve seen the latter used previously

[thebaldgeek]

Don't know if this has been mentioned at all, but it looks as though on the search results page you are implementing word wrapping via forced line breaks at a particular column width.

Unfortunately if I've brought up the results of a search and then use the browser's local search function to find an ICAO code within the messages it's possible I'm going to miss a message if the ICAO code just happened to be split by your forced line breaks.

I would have thought it would be possible to post the ACARS message content raw into a suitable container and have the CSS for the container implement the word wrapping, which might solve the issue as an ICAO code would now be highly unlikely to split due to most messages having an abundance of commas/spaces/slashes in them to act as natural word-wrap points. Would probably need a bit of experimentation to ensure it wraps at a sensible point on these messages, but also at a max-width in the event of a long line of hex/text with no natural wrap points.

Would appreciate if you could consider looking at this sometime. I know it's not completely trivial and the interaction between CSS's "word-wrap", "white-space" and "max-width" would need to be looked at to see if it could be improved. There are other ways to fix it but they involve script and understandably you probably want to avoid that for resource reasons.

I've not forgotten about this feature request; it's just that website stability and search speed issues took precedence over formatting the results.

I think I got this working just now.
Sorry it took so long; CSS would not break up ACARS messages intelligently enough.
I needed to resort to REGEX, and writing regex for a non-programmer is tough. (Well, for me it's very very tough).
But I got some help (from an LLM) and together we beat on it and now break at space or coma or period or force a break at the 100th character.
I used to just blindly insert the new line at the 80th character, no matter what.
I've done some light testing, and it works as expected. I can clearly see the difference between how it was and how it is now.
Obviously if an ICAO is at the 100th character, its still going to be an issue, but splitting at space or . or , seems to help reduce the chances of breaking words.

Only implemented on the site search results at this point.
Let me know how you find it. If its working well there I can roll it out to the other tables on the other pages on the site.

[thebaldgeek]

Added a new page to the site.
Mission Code search.
https://tbg.airframes.io/mcsearch/dashboard/mcsearch

Feedback welcome.

[thebaldgeek]

If you are looking to setup an L-Band system to receive satcom ACARS, I have reviewed the 3 most popular antennas here:
https://community.airframes.io/t/discov ... -acars/181

[Eagle130]

Added a new page to the site.
Mission Code search.
https://tbg.airframes.io/mcsearch/dashboard/mcsearch

Feedback welcome.

Morning,

I have waited a little while before commenting to get an opportunity to give the new page a good test and I must say I am a big fan - thank you for providing this functionality. The mission code page on V1 of your site was my go to resource and I am very pleased with the ability to search through the codes with the new and improved V2 search features.

The only bit of change related feedback I have is more of a personal preference kind of deal so am happy if you choose to ignore it! The final column of the output table "ACARS" isnt one that I use, although I can see why it is helpful, so I wonder if you could add a tick box to toggle the display of this column? I envision it being like one of the three tick box options on the main site search where the results either do or don't show the final column of the table. I came to realising this might be helpful for me yesterday when I was looking through and a number of the mission codes had "undefined" in the ACARS column. This meant the results were stacked directly on top of each other in the same height rows which worked better for my eye to pick out interesting codes.

let me know what you think.

p.s - apologies for not having got back to you sooner re the extension to the site search playback, its been really great having 120h so a huge thanks as always for your hard work

[AyrForce1]

I've only been able to have a cursory look at your word-break changes and they look fine - as indicated previously I devised my own solution anyway - but it sounds like what you've done is very similar to what I did so hopefully you are happy with the changes. I too couldn't get CSS to solve this without regex although in my case the regex is on the clientside (thus not increasing the load on the server) so I wasn't really bothered. In my case I resorted to replacing dot-dot with dot-dot-space, comma with comma-space (unless it was comma-comma), and 80 or more consecutive non-breaking characters stuffed with a linebreak. In javascript form the regex's are:

Code: Select all

.replace(/\.\./g,'.. ').replace(/([^,]),/g,'$1, ').replace(/([^ \r\n]{80})/g,'$1\n')

Like your solution it's not perfect, but I've yet to see an ICAO split, although the extra spaces do slightly bloat the occasional message. Good enough for me though. I may still tweak it again sometime.

The other thing I did is to use regex to replace all search terms (and a few other hard-coded phrases) within the output with coloured spans to highlight them. Works very well. Example here of the output from your site once I pass it through some local browser magic. If an ICAO does ever wrap I'll probably tweak it so that it still gets highlighted even when wrapped.

[thebaldgeek]

Is anyone using the 'search' at the top of the table?
I wonder if any one has even noticed it?
If no one is using that search option then I can change table types and should be able to have a column selection option as @eagle130 is requesting.
If a bunch are using the table search then I will need to re-think my options.

Looks like folks have figured out how to scrape the site vs use it.... More backend code required it seems.

[thebaldgeek]

Oh, and the site search is 168 hours (7 days), not 5. Been that way for about a month now.
Made even more improvements to the sqlite structure and the search code to get even more speed since bumping it out to a week.
I kinda feel we are done with that. I'm mostly working on the mission code detection and extraction code and then same process for the position reports used on tbgmap.airframes.io (I have a new map in the works that will use those).

[AyrForce1]

Looks like folks have figured out how to scrape the site vs use it.... More backend code required it seems.

If that's aimed at me I'm not scraping the site onto another site. I'm using your site as is, and I'm using advanced browser features to tweak how sites are displayed (fonts, sizes, colours, widths, formatting, etc.). Knowledgeable users do it for nearly every site they use and for other users there are tools out there to help them too. Tweaks are even widely shared on dedicated sites with a great many for the worst offending sites (e.g. facebook, twitter, youtube). Sadly it's become necessary due to how bad many of those sites are, and due to the problems web authors face nowadays trying to accommodate a range of display devices (phone, tablet, notebook, desktop). Point is, once a webpage is served to my machine it's up to my software and settings how it is rendered on my device, and once you know how to configure a browser beyond simple colours and sizes you'll want to make any improvements you can to get a better web experience.

[AyrForce1]

Is anyone using the 'search' at the top of the table?
I wonder if any one has even noticed it?

That 'search' is more of a 'filter', and although I don't use that page, I think it works very well and should probably be left in if you can manage it.