The Owl has changed it's nest.... again.

[gsnde]

April this year I changed my webhoster to an US based provider because the performance of The Owl's Nest had become absolutely unacceptable. The coming months were great - I received a technical perfect and very friendly support. Since I was very much taken by real-life work I did not immediately realize that the daily visitor count was down to a half of the former average and that there was no traffic at all from many countries. Large parts of South America, Africa and Asia were gone. I started to ask questions and learned that the IP ranges of these countries were blocked by default and that this is common practice. The reasoning was that most visits originating from there are attacks anyway.

Until now I have encountered nothing worse than some data harvesting attacks on my web data. And I want The Owl's Nest accessible for everybody. So this left me with no choice than to move again. The Owl's Nest is now hosted in Switzerland, and traffic from the blocked countries is coming in again.

I am sorry for this incident - it never occurred to me that website traffic could be blocked pro-actively. The good news is that the new infrastructure is as fast as the last one.

Some further news:

1. This weekend I have migrated several pages from flat file format to SQL.

• the real military aircraft reference page, 1009 records
• the MAIW Packages reference page, 268 records
• the military AI reference page, 2931 records

These pages had become extremely large and the load time was dreadful with a slow internet connection or on a mobile device. Now they should load very fast, plus the data grid has better sort and filter features.



2. I have replaced the "Most missing AI Aircraft Poll" with a new one. One reason was to prevent people from pushing a single aircraft. Also it had been requested to be able to vote for several aircraft at once.

• the poll history has been taken over
• you can vote for as many aircraft as you want in one go
• you can vote once every 24 hours
• the result list is sortable

3. Daryl Payne, a very talented painter, has stepped away from this hobby. Sooner or later his web presence will be gone. In order to make sure that his great collection of paints is not lost he has moved it under the umbrella of The Owl's Nest. He has a dedicated section: Daryl Payne's AI Paints Collection.



4. Zsolt Beleznay is another very talented painter and luckily he is still active. He as well has a dedicated section for his repaint collection at The Owl's Nest. You find it here: Zsolt Beleznay's AI Paints Collection.



5. Last week was the first time after half a year that I started the sim with the intention to make some screen shots. If you are interested to see the AI Bell UH-1 Iroquois from Jordan Moore & Rob Nieuwenhoven, then check out the AI Screen Shot Gallery.

[Charl]

Fantastic resource! It's getting as big as the Internet!
I'm keen to transplant that Iroquois into the RNZAF AI as the one in there is quite old... have to be quick I suppose, the real ones are almost gone now I think.

I had a quick look, some really useful info on the site.
A suggestion: Airport ICAO Database entries would be more handy if they conformed to the traffic txt file format so one could simply copy and paste to a CSV file.
e.g.
S45* 12.7000',E169* 22.4000',229.21M,NZLX
to become
NZLX,S45* 12.7000',E169* 22.4000',229.21

Keep up the excellent work, and thanks for the update!

[gsnde]

Thanks a lot, Charl

As for the Iroquois... just hold on another second, there is the real chance that just now somebody is doing the real AI thing on the source files as was originally intended by Jordan Moore & Rob Nieuwenhoven. Meaning we might have a real multi-lod Huey soon.
Anyway, if reality is so boring to take away all nice aircraft - then it is retro for me.

I see your point with the coordinates and appreciate it. Let me give it some thoughts how best to implement it.