My Droid received the Android 2.2 (Froyo) release last night. Last night I was here, at Folly Beach, SC.

Screenshot: Airplane Flying Handbook cover

I have completed converting the Airplane Flying Handbook into EPUB format, a type of digital book. The Airplane Flying Handbook is an FAA publication designed to teach basic piloting skills. I used the Airplane Flying Handbook in ground school when I was studying for my private pilot certificate. You can purchase the EPUB version of the Airplane Flying Handbook in my store.

The digital version contains all of the content from the paper version. But since it is digital you can easily search for terms using your reader. (It still has the index from the paper version too.) I found it to be very convenient to read on my Droid phone, an Android based device, using a program called Aldiko. Having the book on my phone allowed me to make use of my idle time: it was very convenient to open the book on my phone and read a couple pages as time allowed. I have provided a little screen tour of the EPUB Airplane Flying Handbook rendered by Aldiko, captured from my Droid phone.

Airplane Flying Handbook on shelf - thumbnail

Here is the Airplane Flying Handbook sitting on the bookshelf. I installed the digital book by downloading the file with the link provided in “Your Account” to the phone with the phone’s web browser. Once downloaded, Aldiko recognized the file and imported it to my bookshelf. Aldiko also supports uploading the digital book file from your computer to the phone via USB to a special Aldiko directory. Aldiko can then import the book to your bookshelf.

Airplane Flying Handbook cover - thumbnail

Pressing on the book will bring up the book’s cover. You can page through the book by swiping your finger across the screen. Or, the phone’s volume control rocker button can be used to page up or down.

Airplane Flying Handbook Table of Contents - thumbnail

You can also pull up the table of contents to jump to any chapter or section in the book.

Airplane Flying Handbook Figure 2-10 - thumbnail

Images are displayed along with the text. Aldiko lets you press an image and display the image in a zoomable format. This lets you zoom in to see more detail on the relatively small phone screen. Once done looking at the image, you can go back to the book and continue reading. The book also includes hyperlinks that let you jump to referenced sections, just like a web browser.

Airplane Flying Handbook Glossary - thumbnail

The glossary provides definitions for many different aviation terms. Aldiko provides full text search through the entire book. Together, this provides a useful and effective tool for looking up unknown words and phrases. You can also bookmark sections for quick reference later.

Some of the above features are reader software dependent. Depending on your reader, you may find different ways to interact with the electronic book. I have loaded the EPUB Airplane Flying Handbook to an Apple iPad by adding the file to iTunes and then synching the book to the iPad. I was then able to open the book and read it with iBooks. With the larger iPad screen, more text was available per page, which is one of the benefits of the EPUB format: the layout of the book changes to fit the reader.

“Remember that all the authentication in the world will not protect against a privileged user doing the wrong thing. It’s just that logging may help to determine what happened after the fact.”

mvn -Pserver

Here is what the profile configuration in the pom.xml looks like:

...
<profiles>
  <profile>
    <id>server</id>
    <build>
      <defaultGoal>test</defaultGoal>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
          <artifactId>exec-maven-plugin</artifactId>
          <executions>
            <execution>
              <phase>test</phase>
              <goals>
                <goal>java</goal>
              </goals>
              <configuration>
                <mainClass>demo.hw.server.Server</mainClass>
              </configuration>
            </execution>
          </executions>
        </plugin>
      </plugins>
    </build>
  </profile>
...
</profiles>
...

When the “mvn -Pserver” command is executed, the exec-maven-plugin will run the demo.hw.server.Server class. The id identifies the profile id used in the mvn command after the “-p“. The mainClass element defines the class with the main method to execute. The exec-maven-plugin does all of the hard work. One of the benefits of this technique is the standard Maven classpath for the project defined in the pom to build and unit test your software is used to run the mainClass. This comes in quite handy if your program uses many jar files. I used to use a Windows batch file (copied from the Tomcat startup script catalina.bat) to run little test programs. This Maven profile technique is much easier to use for me, since I use Maven for most all of my Java development.

Yeah, yeah, this could also be done with a typical router like the Linksys WRT54GL. Well, I do have a WRT54GL, which I hooked to the Opt1WiFi interface on the pfSense server. So the WRT54GL also has a concept of a WAN<->LAN interface. In my new configuration the WAN side of the WRT54GL is receiving a DHCP address from the Opti1WiFi interface and the DHCP service of pfSense. The LAN side of the WRT54GL is providing addresses via WiFi (which is how I am posting this from my laptop).

So why have both the pfSense server and the WRT54GL? What the 3 interfaces of the pfSense server allow me to do is separate the WiFi traffic from the LAN. I can add a firewall rule in pfSense to only allow the WiFi traffic from the Opt1WiFi interface to the WAN and block access to the LAN. This will allow me to have services on the LAN network interface that are protected from any WiFi connections.

But what if I want my laptop, connected over the WiFi network, to access my home LAN network? I believe that there are a couple different ways the pfSense will allow me to do that. But that is another task for another time. Because at this time, there isn’t anything (yet) running on my new LAN network segment.

Settings -> Linked Accounts -> Add a new linked account: -> OpenID…

I then entered my OpenID URL and clicked “Link New Account”.

Using OpenID to access Facebook is a little bit different than other apps that I have used to authenticate with OpenID. To use OpenID to authenticate to Facebook, you actually authenticate with your OpenID provider first before accessing Facebook. Then when you access Facebook, it recognizes the existing OpenID authenticated session and proceeds to take you to your Facebook “Home”.

This is a great enhancement to Facebook. It makes it much more convenient for me to access the application.