Mauve Internet over in Chichester is growing, and is looking for a Junior Python Developer. If you know anyone who might be interested, please forward the link to them.
These entries are linkdumps – stuff I find interesting, but no substantive new content.
Matt Jones on the advantages of “Good Enough” in location-based services. (via)
I think lifestreaming might have something to learn from this approach.
I’ve added Chris Dean to the list of web developers in Hampshire. I also updated the OPML summary.
Serpentine Wooden Clock
The High End
The genuine article – beautiful, fluid designs at scary, scary prices. I can’t help feeling that, despite being protected by varnish, the gears of these clocks will wear horribly. Brass gears laminated with wooden faces might be a nice compromise.
In Kit Form
A round up of commercially-available wooden clock kits, plus some experiences building the Ascent Kit. Looking at the site, I’m assuming the pieces are made on some kind of CNC machine, but I’m wondering if a desktop laser cutter could do the same job.
Just the Plans
Brian Law offers his clock designs as free downloads.
The Harmonium
The Harmonium
“First, the machine will produce various sine waves for you on paper after you set values for the amplitude and phase angle. Second, in a reversal of this process, you can trace a curve and use Fourier analysis to extract the phase and amplitude of the curve. All of this is done mechanically.”
The design is an interesting amalgam – open-grain wood and Victorian brass that reminds me of the Difference Engine, mid-20th-century faux-bakelite dials that look like they’ve been salvaged from a WWII-era fire-control computer, and late-20th-century perspex.
The Curta
The Curta
Parts of the Curta, a mechanical four-function pocket calculator capable of manipulating 15-digit numbers, were patented by Curt Herzstark in 1938. He completed the engineering plans while imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp.
There are 605 components in that little pepper mill, but that doesn’t quite compare with the mechanical computers that stop the glass of the Hale Telescope from slumping:
First light on a large telescope is the beginning of a process of adjustment that may continue for years. Although glass is brittle, it is actually a supercooled liquid. Glass is physically similar to Jell-O. Glass can flop, tremble, and shudder. As a large mirror moves through varying angles, it buckles and droops. The Hale Telescope’s mirror is rubbery. You could push down firmly on it with your thumb and throw the stars out of focus.
[...]
Bruce Rule then tested the glass for signs of slumpage and found that the glass behaved somewhat in the manner of uncured latex rubber – when the opticians leaned the mirror at an angle, the glass would droop and not return to normal shape for quite a while. [He] extracted the mirror-support machines from their pockets in the glass and rebuilt the machines. Rule’s thirty-six mirror-support machines work passively, by means of levers and lead weights. The levers barely move, yet they exert three-dimensional forces throughout the glass, which, in places, reach stresses of up to twelve hundred pounds.
[...]
Each unit, which resembles a piston inserted in the glass, contains an uncounted number of parts. Rule said, “I think that between six hundred and one thousand parts in each unit is a reasonable number.” Since there are thirty-six mirror support units, that would mean that the Hale mirror is held up by as many as thirty-six thousand pieces of metal, most of which move, if only slightly.
[...]
The support units are, in fact, mechanical computers. They react to forces in the mirror and apply corrective action. Rule said “I never recommended that this type of system be tried again.” Virtually everybody at Caltech understands electronic computers, but nobody at Caltech understands mechanical computers, and consequently nobody dares to monkey with Bruce Rule’s support units. Since 1948, there has been one attempt to oil them. The lead weights on the units are adjustable, but nobody wants to adjust them. [The] feeling around Caltech is that anybody who tries to open Rule’s units to see what is inside will get himself fired.
[...]
Once in a while these days, the stars on the video screen turn into hollow triangles – the support units have become stuck. The astronomer turns to Juan Carrasco and says, “The mirror needs exercise.” Juan then slews the telescope from horizon to horizon, from north to south, from east to west, until the stars turn back into points. The nightmare of the engineers is that one night the stars will turn into triangles, Juan will exercise the mirror, and the triangles will get bigger.
- First Light by Richard Preston
Of course, if the Curta is either too modern for you, or perhaps not modern enough, you could always try to track down one of these hybrid oddities.
Glass Seismograph
Seismic Glass
A working glass seismograph: “This is a functional glass seismograph for measuring earthquakes. It stands about 40″ tall, and is about 48″ wide installed. It measures vibrations along the x and y axes (side to side), as well as the z axis (up and down), on three helicorders. Ideally, it should be bolted into bedrock for accuracy”
(check out the glass spinning wheel, too)
I’m taking some time to tidy things up around here, so I’m coalescing a bunch of one-liners into a single post:
- Smashing Magazine generates linkdump posts faster than I can digest them. This one from April 2008 on creative web form design is one of their best. Lots of inspiration there.
- O’Reilly Radar’s Marc Hedlund on Code Review Software.
- . If you’re concerned with database scaling and used to thinking in terms of ACID, there’s a lot to mull over here.
- Design Principles and Design Patterns is the clearest description of object composition I’ve ever read. Rather than the standard, 15-year-old “Fido’s a Dog, Dogs are Mammals, Mammals are Animals” object hierarchies you get in Introductory OO texts, it’s a short, readable explanation of how to design objects that are maintainable, extensible and loosely coupled. Really really good stuff.
- A Neat Approach to Narrow Windows. Concept 64’s clever way to deal with varying page widths is firmly grounded in usability. If the page width is >800 pixels, the navigation links style themselves as a left-hand navigation menu. As the page width drops below 800 pixels the navigation links restyle themselves as tabs. Easy to do in Javascript by swapping CSS rules around, but a lot of thought has obviously gone into the design here. [It looks like the site's been taken down (wayback link, no javascript). I'm keeping the link because I hope it comes back at some point.]
- Peterbe’s experiences at the 2006 Google London Automation Test Conference. And… wow, I’m back to 2006 already. I sure don’t post much. Anyway, unit testing is one of those things that I desperately want to use in commercial projects, but when you say to management “I want to spend two weeks writing code that won’t make it into the final application” they get a funny look in their eye. Much the same thing happens when I start talking about user stories. Or the separation of presentation and business logic. Not that I’m bitter, or anything.
Luther Bible via Robot Arm
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG. This is gorgeous. A robotic scribe. Link (via).
They really need a bunch of these working silently by candlelight for the full effect.
The choice of Luther’s Bible for this project is interesting, as its importance is due to its content (the first translation into German, akin to the King James Bible in English) rather than the technology used to print it. The obvious choice for a project that showcases printing would have been Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, or even a genuine hand-lettered Bible… I wish I could read enough of the German to figure out what the impetus behind the project was.
Paint with embedded usability features. Neat.
This paint insures you get it right the first time: it goes on pink, but dries white. As long as the ceiling’s solid pink when you’re done, you know you’ve done a great job!
I assume the magic ingredient is a dye that breaks down in the presence of air or light.
Not a Nanoguitar
A nanoguitar, devised at Cornell years ago, has been “played” for the first time by shooting laser light at the silicon “strings.” A newer version of the guitar [...] twangs at a frequency of 40 megahertz, some 17 octaves (or a factor of 130,000) higher than a normal guitar.
Plus a better article, courtesy of Google. Although pumping a “string” up to radio frequencies with laser light seems like an intriguing alternative to quartz, I wonder if the most interesting thing here is the showmanship behind the project – a nanoscale silicon rod vibrating at 40Mhz ain’t that interesting, but dress it up as the world’s smallest guitar (a flying V, no less!) are you’re going to get a lot more press attention (and, presumably, funding).