It seems that the latest release of Google Earth has some hidden features that Google didn’t tell anyone about! In addition to Google Sky, a flight simulator mode has been added too. It’s been possible to fly around in Google Earth using a joystick for a while now but this is more of a full on flight sim with two aircraft to choose from.

Your probably better off starting with the SR22 as the aircraft can be hard to control with the keyboard. You can view a full set of the controls and instructions in the Google Earth documentation. When in flight sim mode you have a Head’s Up Display (HUD) which shows your direction, rate of climb, altitude, speed and flaps setting.

It’s much more playable when using a joystick as with most flight simulators. It’s not on a par with MS Flight Simulator quite yet, however with Google looking to compete with MS on every front, who knows where development on this might go in the future? Will Google allow people to develop add-ons in a similar fashion to MSFS?

There are utilities that allow you to plot your location from MSFS in Google Earth and the free Flight Gear using Google Maps data for it’s own multiplayer servers and I’ve always wondered if someone would ever develop an add-on to Flight Simulator 2004 or X to use Google Earth or Maps data as scenery within the game itself. Now it appears there might not be a need. You can find more information and some more screenshots at Marco’s Blog and the Google Earth Blog.

We’ve been working our way through our stash of Wyse 60 terminals in work over the last few years. They used to be used extensively on desktops but have been replaced by PCs over the past 10 years and are now mainly used in a few small areas where only access to our character based ERP is needed. As one would fail we’d just pull one retired from a desk out of storage and replaced the failed unit.

Well, we finally have run out of spares so we decided to trial run some Sun Rays in their place. I picked up 2 refurbished Sun Ray 2FS systems from our Sun dealer and set about getting the things up and running. I decided to setup a small test network with my laptop running the Sun Ray software either under Linux or Solaris, we had a spare SunFire 280R but it was due to go live in about two weeks and didn’t feel like having to rebuild it after I was done testing. I was running Gentoo on my laptop at the time (I switch distros on my laptop wayyy too often) and had a feeling the Sun Ray software wasn’t going to play nice so I decided I’d give Solaris a try.

I grabbed a copy of Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) and set about installing it. To put it quite simply, I was amazed, apart from the usual clunky Solaris installer, everything worked perfectly. I’m used to having to install drivers for wireless and graphics with most Linux distros, but SXCE included everything. Now this may be down to Sun being able to ship binary drivers as part of the standard build, but it still impressed me. The only things that weren’t working were the volume buttons and my fingerprint reader, both of which can be enabled just as easily as in Linux. After playing around for a few hours, even getting Compiz up and running I set about getting the Sun Ray clients setup.

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Just recently, I got my hands on a new Dell Latitude D820 laptop and it took me a few days to get everything migrated from my old laptop. Everything was running fine, including Joost, until that is, I joined my machine to our Active Directory domain at work. Every time I attempted to start Joost, tvprunner.exe would crash with the error: “The exception Breakpoint. A breakpoint has been reached.”

I tried deleting Application Data\Joost and Local Settings\Application Data\Joost but to no avail. I then tried running Joost as another domain user but the same error appeared. What I then tried was logging in as a local user, created during the initial XP install and low and behold, Joost ran just fine. I now just use “Run as…” and use a local account to launch Joost when logged in as a domain user.

This problem seems to be widespread on certain Dell machines, notably on Latitude D820s, three of which I tried myself and others which have also been reported on the Joost forum. However it runs fine as a domain user on both my Dell Precision desktop in work and a Dell XPS laptop I tested on. I haven’t had a chance to try Joost on a non-Dell build of XP on a Latitude yet to figure out if it’s something with the Dell supplied install of XP. Both the Precision desktop and XPS laptop were running standard builds.