- This topic has 17 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 13 years, 8 months ago by
Bruce R. Schaefer.
Bruce R. Schaefer.-
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Steve Huntwork
There is a reason why I have not altered our website.
At the moment, I have been trying to reproduce the entire website (to include the database) on my personal computer. Even if I do something horribly stupid, the public website would not be damaged in any way. Not that simple, but that reproduction is almost ready.
In the last month, I have listened to many people explain what they would like to have changed on the website. Heck, even I realized that the ability to post and view pictures was not working!
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For things like the altitude records, the easy solution is to include a record of what specific altimeter was used in the database. As long as everything is properly recorded, then any historical conflicts can be resolved when additional information becomes available.
Bistatic radar uses standard FM radio stations as the transmitter and can detect a stealth F-117 in flight. I have used that technology in my own home to track meteors and the cost is very low. Perhaps this is how we can finally verify any altimeter debates…
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Only accepted members of this website can view this, so please send your comments to my personal email:
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BTW, right or wrong, all new members of this website must have a valid IP address that can be traced to an American friendly nation.
Each day, I must review every person that has requested to become a member of this website. So far, I have only rejected two people, and they were from Russia and Spain.
But in all honestly, if you are not living in Colorado (or about to move there) then simply explain to us why you want to join this website.
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As your new website manager, I hope to do my absolute best to provide you with what you want to see. Some things will happen rapidly, and others will take more time for me to figure out.
Dave Smith
Hi Steve,
Looks like you are doing a great job with assuming the Webmaster tasks that Warren had done so admirably for so long.
I’ve been in the club just a few years and am quite happy with the variety of members we have; their beliefs, and opinions about all kinds of things. As much as I have lived and traveled overseas, fluently speak several languages, I have never experienced “unfriendly” nations. Sure, there are “unfriendly” people, but overall, the vast majority of humanity just wants to be able to love and raise their children in a safe and joyful environment.
It is a policy that our club is focused on supporting the advancement of rocketry for all who show interest, safety, and common sense. We don’t really care where an individual is from, what they do in their personal lives, etc.
Through our love of rockets, members from different backgrounds and beliefs find a common interest that often bridges the gap between our so-called “differences”. In this way of finding things more in common rather than things that are different between people, eventually our descendants may find our world to be a little safer than it is today.The idea that “unfriendly” nations are not invited to share in our rocketry passion strikes me as being politically motivated and prejudicial. Did you deny membership to an individual simply because he/she was from Spain? If not, than why bother mentioning what country was involved? It can’t possibly be for “national security issues” as BATF has made sure that we all behave ourselves. Last time I checked, all Spanish citizens and their government was a member in good standing with NATO.
Russia? Like a multitude of other nations, I read recently in the NAR magazine about their participation in the Rocketry World Championships that were held in Serbia this past year.It is a club rule that we stay away from “political” discussions on the forum, yet if willing, many a beer has been consumed over the years while discussing personal opinions. I can’t imagine that stereotyping of governments has a place in our club.
I have learned over the past years in this club that we tend to focus mostly on the safe implementation of Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. Perhaps if necessary, club members and officers can chime in, vote, change policy regarding membership. But until that time, I cannot find any reason to deny access to our rocket ramblings unless they are just plain rude and mean spirited.
Jeffrey Joe Hinton
Just a quick, off the cuff response and please note – I’m not a computer tech geek savey individual. I have to believe that the reasons a few specific ISP’s have been denied access, stems not from whether they are actually from an “unfriendly” country but because the number of “spammers” and Phishers” and smut pushers out there are in-tolerable to allow bandwidth space on any server, especially ours. I
I have basically quit monitering the President@NCRocketry email because I don’t need fiftyseven thousand different knock off watches, health and life insurance from unknown companies, medicine chestfuls of pills and rememdies and I certainly don’t need a mail order bride or facsimile thereof. This website has been attacked in the past by nasties and it is impossible to prevent the cyber robots without some form of verification and as I understood, ISP verification (at least the origin of such) is a fundamental first step. Web Security should not be taken lightly. It’s got nothing to do with political, religious, sexual, socio-economic basis.
Thank you Steve for stepping up and protecting the behind the scenes weirdness that make this web site work.
Warren B. Musselman
There are, believe it or not, a number of issues in our hobby that skirt the edges of ITAR restrictions that the US government has in place. These are very serious laws and not subject to court oversight but purely in the province of some ‘crat in the Department of Commerce or the State Department.
While we have very little that we need to worry about in all likelihood, better safe than sorry. When I set this site up, I discussed the issues with the ITAR specialist at the company I then worked for and his recommendation was to limit site membership to US, CA, AU, NZ and western European nations. After managing the website for so long, my finding is that anyone who registers on the site who is outside those countries is invariably a spammer or mining email addresses. There have been NO exceptions to that that I have seen.
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While I am glad that Steve has agreed to take over the day to day management of the website and to begin working to move the site forward with new code, I am still here and still exercise oversight of the site as a whole with an eye towards maintaining 100% uptime and site stability. As such, I still maintain control over major code and database changes to the live site as well as maintaining our relationship with our hosting company. If changes are made to the codebase without prior discussion with myself and the hosting company, the automated backup system at the hosting service WILL replace the code and the associated database with the last known working version (24 hours or less). I set this up with the hosting company when Jeremiah first took over writing code for the site just in case we had some sort of catastrophic crash and burn. Site uptime and stability is the primary goal – not making massive changes immediately without regard for continuity.
As for Steve’s issues in setting up a development site at home, Steve, please be aware that we maintain 3 separate sites on our host – the live site that this post is on, a test site for testing code prior to roll-out to the live site and a development site specifically for the building and testing of all new code. I guess that this issue didn’t get clearly discussed when we all met a month or so back. Until such time as we are all in clear agreement about what, when, and why – such changes should be run past me before roll-out to the live site.
I have no problem with getting things updated – in fact, I welcome the fact that someone has stepped forward to take this site to the next level, but my primary concern is maintaining a fully functional site WITH all historical data and forum postings. Changes to the contests are long overdue and that should be a major issue of discussion at the annual meeting. However, particular rule changes for things such as the altitude contest and such should certainly be discussed and agreed upon in executive committee with at least Joe Hinton, Chad Moore and myself before anything is changed on the site.
Most rules, such as the altitude contest rules, were developed over a period of many years of such discussions beginning long before I took over the site in 2004 as well as since then. If you’re going to change rules, the affected folks need to be a part of the changes. In the past I always sought consensus for rule changes among the folks most involved in the contests. In the case of the altitude records section, that was predominantly the folks who thought of themselves as altitude junkies – myself, John Wilke, Jon Skuba, as well as with input from a wide range of other club members and visiting flyers who were interested. In fact, it was the inability to achieve consensus that was one of the primary reasons I shut down the altitude records contest.
Our current rules do need to change given the number of club members who now make their own or manufacture commercial altimeters – particularly issues of conflict of interest and verifiability at the LCO table when the altitude is reported. Those changes should be discussed and voted on by at least the executive committee and preferably by the club as a whole during the annual meeting.
Adrian
I deal with ITAR issues all the time at work, because all specific technical information about spacecraft designs are covered. I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure that there’s nothing we’re discussing on this forum that is covered by ITAR regulations. If there were, letting people from Canada join but not China, would not help. There is an ITAR-related poster hanging at work that makes the point. It says: “Late breaking news! Canada is a foreign country!”
Warren B. Musselman
Yeah, I agree with you Adrian. However, the company lawyer I talked to was a conservative type. He was clearly of the opinion that as this was “hobby” stuff, we had no need to be concerned. After I explained to him some of the higher-end stuff people play with like active guidance, he said “Better safe than sorry”.
As admin, I have generally refused access to ANYONE outside the US that does not have a verifiable TRA #. (I don’t care about NAR or CAR – I’m not a member of either and neither have impressed me with their support for high power or more technically complex projects.) In the end, that leaves perhaps 5 Aussies, 2 Kiwi’s, a couple Canucks like Dr. J, and Frank DeBoewer in the Netherlands. Beyond that I don’t think we have any legitimate foreign registered website users. Then again, I gave up vetting who is actually in the user database when we had that massive spammer intrusion a few years ago. Last I checked we have 3885 registered users of which perhaps 50 are truly active in any sense – the rest are disabled from reading or posting. Most of those are spambots and the user management tools in our content management system makes it extremely difficult to purge them in bulk. Beyond that, I’ve just been too damn busy or distracted to waste several hours doing it manually via MySQL.
Steve Huntwork
I have been following what Warren has recommended about tracking all IP address of those who request membership. The two that I did reject had rather suspicious names like “undertheladder” and were outside of the USA. If they were honestly interested, then they could have replied to my email.
As for any changes with the website, Warren has instructed me on the proper approval procedures and those will be respected.
That is why I have been working with a copy on my personal computer, as I explore “what does what” on our current website. There are many things happening under the covers with the SQL database that I want to fully understand.
Some items have already been suggested at my original meeting with Warren, Joe, Jeremiah and they have been my priority.
One simple thing that I want to change on the admin side, is to display the IP location of all new member requests with a simple button, without having to use another program.
Most of the high priority items are related to the display of images. The image on the home page is too large, and the photo album does not work.
Anyway, I am very careful and will not be making any changes on the active website until everyone is happy with the improvements.
Steve Huntwork
Altitude records:
“In the case of the altitude records section, that was predominantly the folks who thought of themselves as altitude junkies – myself, John Wilke, Jon Skuba, as well as with input from a wide range of other club members and visiting flyers who were interested. In fact, it was the inability to achieve consensus that was one of the primary reasons I shut down the altitude records contest.”
Nobody spends hundred or thousands of dollars building a highly technical rocket unless they are trying to set some type of record!
Warren’s current rocket project impressed upon me now important the requirement of recording and archiving each altitude record attemp is to the people involved.
I intend to simply archive the information as recorded, with all of the hardware and software involved, as simple SQL database items.
If there are specific items that need to be recorded that I have not mentioned, then please let me know.
What y’all do with the information in the future is up to you, but it must be archived.
Perhaps that is the scientist in me. Raw data must always be recorded for historical analysis!
Doug Gerrard
Nobody spends hundred or thousands of dollars building a highly technical rocket unless they are trying to set some type of record!
Sorry to disagree with you but this statement is completely wrong and shows how media influences perceptions. It is true that nearly all the nature of rocketry that draws us into the hobby is to have something go fast or go high and the media concentrates on such features. But there are many of us that spend much more than that on greater challenges than setting some arbitrary record.
Doug
Adrian
I’m reposting what I wrote on another thread, with minor mods, because it’s relevant here and it might have been missed before:
Different people get hooked on rocketry for different reasons. For me, the idea of flying a rocket higher than anyone else has flown for that motor class is kind of an irresistible challenge. If it weren’t for the NCR and Triopli record lists, I probably wouldn’t have built half of the rockets that I have, or produced and sold altimeters at all. So I was quite disappointed to find out, months after the decision was made, that the NCR records list would no longer be kept up-to-date. And I’ve also been disappointed to have record-breaking flights of mine rejected from the Tripoli list, simply because I’m an altimeter manufacturer. Despite that, I’m still having fun breaking records because most of the satisfaction just comes from knowing I achieved my own goal, regardless of whether someone else acknowledges the accomplishment. Accuracy and completeness have been not been as high of a priority for some of the gatekeepers as I would want, but there’s only so much I can do about that. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, etc.
I’m glad there is at least Rockoon’s unofficial list so that there’s a place where someone starting out, who has some good ideas about how to squeeze out some more altitude, can learn the complete story about what has been accomplished. Not very many rocketeers are altitude junkies who care about the records, but for those of us who are into it, an accurate list is a great thing.
So much effort and worry is spent by the various list gatekeepers on keeping out bad applications, that they have made the lists more inaccurate by keeping out legitimate achievements. I know a couple of altitude junkies who are so put off by the hassle, aggravation, delays, and lack of trust implied by the application process, that they have stopped bothering making applications altogether. I’m almost there myself. But I keep sending them in so that I’m doing my part to keep the lists accurate. If the gatekeepers would just take a deep breath and trust the integrity of their fellow rocketeers, then I think that we would have a more vibrant and active community of people going for records, as well as more accurate lists. John Wilke had the right attitude when he told me when I was starting out: “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
I hope that we re-establish NCR’s record list and maintain it in an accurate and complete manner. If the club decides not to do that, I can get over it as I have already done. I would hope that we would not keep the record list incomplete just because one or two people want it that way.
If we decide as a club to refresh the altitude record list, the current list is missing flights of mine in H, I, J, and L. All were fully documented to Tripoli’s standards, and I still have the witness-signed record forms, etc.John Wilke has a high I flight that’s an official Tripoli record, too, that should be on our list. There may be others.
Steve Huntwork
Dave Smith
Jeffrey Joe Hinton
Warren B. Musselman
Adrian
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