A bit of Viktorfeed news. I’ve noticed, in the last few months – when the damn thing’s been working – that the traffic seems to be concentrating into relatively fewer operators, and ones with less horrible reputations. Ariana, Iraqi Airways, Southern Air. There are surprises, of course – what, pray, is Tropic Air? – but…
Read More all quiet on the ViktorfeedYr Viktorfeed. I fixd it agin. Kthanx fr fiting evul strukturd html! In other admin, I finally found out what the mysterious lfgss.com referrals were. London Fixed Gear and Single Speed, indeed. Maybe I should get a new haircut?
Read More adminProgress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakYes, the Viktorfeed is indeed down. Dubai Airport has redesigned its Web site, and the parser is now not parsing, and the error handling has failed to handle an error where the target page loads but contains unexpected HTML. I’ve stopped the cron job to save filling up the system logs. There will now be…
Read More FAILSo mainline British political blogging is a horrible reality TV show, a eurobox estate crammed with CCTV cameras everyone welcomes and plays up to for the amusement of a tiny audience of media wankers and professional partisans. How about a bit of Viktorfeed data visualisation? Last weekend I wrote a little program to generate statistics…
Read More fun with statisticsMore mystery jets. In the last couple of weeks there’s also been some progress on the 727 abandoned in North-Eastern Mali. For a start, it’s a 727, which is something. And, finally, there are pictures. The National of Abu Dhabi – a newspaper that is developing into a surprisingly useful source – has a good…
Read More mystery jet update: Malian 727I should have done this earlier rather than committing fanfic with a sliver of valuable blogging time, but it’s high time to catch up with the 4L-AWA seizure. It’s looking like this is a serious coup – not only is the aircraft one with a long and complex history in the trade, but a lot…
Read More All the 4L-AWA that’s fit to printSo this is the best news story on the Ilyushin 76 seized in Thailand I’ve yet seen. Based on that, we know that the aircraft is ex-Beibars (a company that suddenly appeared on the Viktorfeed at the end of 2007, and which is banned from the EU) and ex-East Wing. But we still didn’t have…
Read More look what the cat dragged inOK, so there’s a recently wrecked aircraft on an airstrip in northeastern Mali and the UN reckons it brought over 10 tons of cocaine into the new West Africa-Southern Europe smuggling route. However, no-one seems to know what type of aircraft it is or what the registration was. All sources I can find – which…
Read More I should really think of an Ali Farka Toure lyric title for this postAfter this post, I thought it might be useful to provide a visualisation of the data involved. I then realised I ought to do it rather better, so I collated the figures for all 47 names from the paper accounts into a spreadsheet and graphed them. This chart shows average monthly spending on mobile and…
Read More do you want me to draw a bloody diagram?