Friday, August 21, 2009

iApproach CANADA

Landing an airplane at an uncontrolled aerodrome in Canada is not trivial. All sorts of different approaches are required, depending on many factors. For instance, an airport with a mandatory frequency has different protocol than one without. Also, the runway heading and the airplane heading determine your approach path. Lastly, there are 'left hand circuits' and 'right hand circuits' in effect. So, what's the fastest way of determining the correct procedure? Well... I present to you: my latest iPhone application iApproach CA.
It compliments my other aeronautical iPhone applications iVOR and iPSTAR. The latter is a highly effective trainer for your pre-solo written examination. And yes, like they say in North America: "You have to eat your own dogfood". I trained myself using my own software, and scored a solid 100% on the test.
Those applications are for an extremely small niche: how many Canadian Pilots are there? And how many with an iPhone? On the up-side: competition is pretty much non existent. If you want to train yourself Canadian Aeronautics using an iPhone, you have only one option for a vendor, and that's me. Sure, a 100,000 applications in the appstore. But I've got the market cornered on this one :-)

Monday, August 17, 2009

1 2 3 4 5 6

One of my favorite quotes: "Lottery (noun) an extra tax for people who are bad at math." The record high Italian lotto prize is all over the news now. All you need to do, is pick the correct 6 numbers (out of 90). To educate the math-challenged I try to put the odds in perspective by telling them they can just as well pick the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 and 6. What are the odds that you randomly pick 1 through 6 out of 90 numbers? A quick calculation gives the odds of 1 in 623M. (6/90)*(5/89)*(4/88)*(3/87)*(2/86)*(1/85).

So... you can just as well pick the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6. Or... can you?

I thought a little more about this. Let's assume I chose to mark 1,2,3,4,5,6 on my lottery form. And then, by sheer luck, the draw is 1,2,3,4,5,6. Now, I'm pretty sure that if this ever happens, the director of the lottery will nullify the results, and redo the draw. The director will assume the procedure was flawed, a computer failed, or something like that. So even when choosing 1,2,3,4,5,6 should give you even odds with any other combination, it may not be wise to pick those numbers.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Free copy of 'the little tank that could'.

The people at iPhone World are giving away ten free copies of 'the little tank that could'. To enter the draw, just leave a message at this thread. Sales spiked to 100+ two days ago, and the feedback is encouraging. Version 2 so far has not been cracked, and version 3 is currently awaiting review by Apple. Version 3 will boast 6 levels of fun, and a proper game menu that lets you play the levels in any order. Kudos to Sweden, by the way, as most sales have been from Swedish customers so far. Thank you.