Software, Sawdust & Sparks

House Design

2011-07-01T00:11:00.017-04:00

It seems that about every year or so I start designing houses. Recently it's because I don't really like the house I currently have; it's too expensive to heat and cool and it's a boring ranch house.

If I were to build a new house, I would probably go with a Victorian inspired straw-bale construction house. Straw bale because for about the same price per square foot of a "normal" balloon frame house you can build a super-insulated house. Victorian style because they are so much more interesting than the cookie cutter houses of today.

Here is a video of two of this year's house design crop. And yep the first house is complete crap and the second has the worlds most needlessly complex roof. I guess I'll be sticking with software and not real-world architecture for the foreseeable future.

This is my first video production, and yes I know you can tell that. The music in the background is the first 40 seconds or so of my prime melody described in an earlier post.

Here are some pictures of some of the rest of this particular crop.

I may not have come up with a great house design yet, but I did get a lot more proficient with Sketch Up.

I also did a lot of thinking about why we formally design things instead of just diving right in.

Only two reasons that I can think of:

- The design must understood by someone else. Either because they will be involved in making it or they need to understand what will be built in order to approve it.

- It's less expensive to change the design than to change the object being built.

Nuts!

2011-01-25T21:28:00.007-05:00

As my reader keeps reminding me, I haven't done an update for a while.

So I'll start with a random update I though of back a couple of months ago..........

If you'll remember back last year a bunch of the "we-are-all-going-to-die-because-of-global-warming" crowd was proclaiming immanent disaster because there seemed to be a lack of acorns on the oak trees.

To them I have but one word: NUTS!

Gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of nuts. Acorns to be more specific. Pin Oak acorns to be more precise. About 14 gallons on this particular cleaning of the patio.

These are shots from 28-0ct-2010 of my patio. This was the second time I'd cleaned it off. I had to clean it off a third time and got even more acorns.

I only bothered to clean off the patio because I was hauling and stacking firewood and had to walk across the patio. I learned when I first moved in that walking on a layer of Pin Oak acorns over brick is pretty close to walking on a layer of marbles over brick...with pretty predictable results.

Oh, and for all you global-warming fans:

We know a lot less than we think we know; especially about how climate works.
Mass hysteria that turns out to be nothing discredits the proclaimers (e.g. the boy who cried wolf)
Water is more of a greenhouse gas than CO₂ is; but it's pretty hard to convince Joe Average that water is a threat.
Without the CO₂ scare Al Gore would be known for what he really is: a failed politician.

Pedals, Plumbing, Pucks and Pickets

2010-05-09T20:41:00.009-04:00

So, as my friend Todd keeps mentioning it's been a while since I've updated this.

I started at least two, if not more, updates but never quite seemed to get enough of them done to bother publishing.

Today I've been working on brackets to replace the pieces of plywood on the big arbor/trellis I built my Mom last year. Gaps are opening up at the bottom of the joints between the sections. I'm guessing that the force of the arch is pushing the posts out allowing the joint to open up. It's not really a structural problem; my nephew was doing chin-ups on one of the cross braces at Easter and he's pretty good sized. I'd guess he weighs around 180 pounds. But it looks bad and it might be a problem in a few years.

To make the brackets I'm cutting a pattern out of 1/16th thick steel plate with a jigsaw for the ones on the outside faces. The ones on the inside of the trellis will be steel strap that has holes every 3/4 of an inch. It's about an inch and a half wide. The entire bracket is a bit over 8 inches long. It's six inches from center of the hole to the center of the other hole.

The black/blue color is from tempering them with a hand-held MAP gas torch (like a propane torch, but a bit hotter). I glued a paper template on them to show where to drill/cut and using the torch was easier than trying to sand off all of the paper. And I like playing with fire.

After I cut them out and filed/ground (most) of the oopses and rough edges off I took a ball-peen hammer and hammered the back of the bracket to make a convex front. It also makes them curve the long way, but a couple of smacks with a rubber mallet flattens them back out. The curve adds both strength and texture to hide the imperfections. (Or at least a little bit of the imperfections).

I finally started riding my bicycle to work. It's about 6 miles one-way. Rode Tuesday through Friday last week but I'm probably going to wimp out tomorrow as the temperature forecast is 35F in the morning. That wouldn't be so bad, but I have a down-hill about 1/4 mile from my house and that's pretty cold when you add a 30 MPH wind-chill on top of it. I've also a part of a program to finish writing before I can leave work tomorrow; so I might be staying a wee bit late. (No headlight on the bicycle.)

Two weekends ago I got the lovely task of replacing a septic line (hence the Plumbing in the title.) I had rescue rooter come out, but they couldn't get the snake to go all the way through. I was pretty sure that it was tree roots in the line. And it was, but the line was also slightly smashed. Which is what let the tree roots in in the first place.

The line sits directly on the gas-main for my road. They didn't fill under the septic line where it went over the gas main and smashed the septic line when they back-filled. The smashed part was too narrow for the head on the snake. So I got to dig it all up (by hand) and replace it and back fill. Luckily it wasn't too far down and a bit less than 25 feet. (I've hand dug about 535 feet of drainage tile on my property so far...I've a60 foot (or so) ditch open right now that I should finish.)

The night before I started digging septic lines was the final playoff for the Hockey team I play on. We finally made it to the finals. The last time we made it that far was nine years ago. I had a good game, but unfortunately the rest of the team didn't.

I also finally got the picket fence I started last year cut out, put together, stained and put in place. The jig I used to make it looked pretty cool. Something about all the repeated elements. The fence has been up since March.

Behind Again....

2009-12-05T23:06:00.005-05:00

Well I'm really behind in posting again.

So I survived the Hilly Hundred. Had to walk part of 2 hills both days, but not bad for only riding about 12 times this year.

Up until Thanksgiving I spent a lot of time dealing with leaves. What I like to do is run them all through the chipper/shredder to grind them up really fine so that they don't blow all over the yard and they decompose faster. I use them in the flowerbeds and in the garden as mulch. Of course this entailed fixing the chipper/shredder first. (I broke it earlier in the year.)

Last year I just built a "box" out of straw bales to catch them as they exited the shredder. I then raked them into a garbage can and dumped them into the shredder. I did that for about two garbage cans full this year and decided it was too much of a pain.

So I built a ramp out of 2x12s and a mostly straw-bail box. I thought I would have to stand on the ramp and rake the leaves up into the shredder. This turned out to be unnecessary and it was still a bit of a pain emptying the "box". It also wasn't very mobile so I ended up moving a lot of leaves a fairly long distance to shred them.

The next go-round I build a light(er) weight ramp and built a box on top of my small trailer. This worked pretty well after a few tweaks to allow air-flow through the trailer. This was much more mobile, so I spent less time raking leaves long distances. Unfortunately I broke the chipper/shredder again. Luckily I was mostly done. The last few batches of leaves just got put directly in the garden.

I hosted Thanksgiving for my family for the third year in a row. I cooked turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes for 11. They bring side dishes and I usually con my mom into making the gravy. Nothing got burnt. Nothing was under-cooked and nobody got sick so it must have been a success.

Crazy Months and the "Forever Bookcase"

2009-10-12T22:09:00.014-04:00

Well, it's been another crazy month. I keep telling myself I need to do shorter entries more often but I never seem to get around to doing them.

But since the last entry I've:

Designed and built, and re-built and re-built part of a Lego castle.
Melted down an additional 5 gallon bucket of smashed aluminum pop cans
Been "best man" in a wedding for the (at least) third time
Took a week of "Vacation" and painted the outside of the house, which entailed:

Take down about 180 feet of gutter
Power wash 80 feet of wall, 180 feet of fascia, 180 feet of sofitt and a 16 x 16(ish) brick patio
Replace 30 feet of rotted fascia board
Paint all 180 feet of fascia board (twice)
Put up about 144 feet of aluminum fascia cover (I didn't find it until I was doing the back of the house)
Put up 180 feet of gutter
Paint 80 feet of wall
Add vents to 60 feet of sofitt (drill holes and add covers)
Put up 180 feet of gutter, downspouts and gutter guard

Cleaned the house, mowed the lawn & weeded the garden so I could host a bonfire
Hosted a (pretty lame) bonfire (The fire was great; attendance was lousy)
Moved the Westerville Band Website to a new host
Wrote a couple of Java programs for fun (more music stuff and some 3d modeling to 2d pattern stuff)
Played "taxi" (Picked up and dropped off various people from the airport)
Started a new hockey season
Tried to get in shape for the bike ride (Hilly Hundred) I'm going on at the end of the month.
Had both the front and rear brake lines of my truck blow out on the way to get it fixed
Upgraded my home backup to a terabyte drive
Upgrading my laptop to Snow Leopard
Played tech support for my sister and my neighbors. (Install a zillion software updates and answer the usual how do I... questions)

Toss in reading 15 or so books (I went on a bit of a reading binge for a while), some visits to the old-folks to catch up with my aunt and cousin, dinner with friends, taking care of cats for friends who were on vacation the usual 40+ hours of work a week, band practice, a couple of band concerts, church meetings, watching more movies than I have for about a year, finding several new video podcasts to watch and it all adds up to a pretty busy couple of months.

House before and after. I guess it did really need some paint.

Oh, and I finally finished a bookcase for my friend Jeff (who was the one who got married).

And no, the title isn't a comment on how long it will last.

It is a comment on how long it took me to finish it. Don't ever tell me that you're not in a hurry. 'Cause if you're not in a hurry, I'm not either.

If it weren't for deadlines, ain't nothin' ever would get done.

Jeff requested the book case about 7-8 months before he moved into his house. He's lived there about 4 years.

It's basically two 33 inch cases with a 36 inch cabinet between them and adjustable shelves above the cabinet. It's all just pine; construction lumber from the local "big box" store. The sides are 2 x 6s planed down to 1" (actual thickness) and joined into boards. The 2 x 6s were left over from a project that didn't work. Here's a shot of the second (right-hand) case half-painted in 2007. I think this got delivered sometime in late 2007 or 2008.

The shelves sit up pretty high, because there is a heating/cooling vent on the floor under the left-hand shelf. The bottom of the shelf acts as a duct extension. The hole in the bottom center of the shelf is for a vent cover.

The whole case is about 9 feet long and is fastened together to look like one unit, but can be disassembled and moved if necessary.

The shelves bolt to the cabinet so the base looks like one unit and the top sits over the top of the side cases and make them look like they are one unit. We decided to add lights in the center (at the last minute so to speak), so you can use that as a display case. Here is a shot of the cabinet, around December 2009. I was pretty proud that the doors came out with a nice even gap all the way around. I only had to do a little bit of planing to get them to open and close nicely.

Here is a shot of the completed bookcase.

Sparks!

2009-08-08T00:08:00.010-04:00

I've got two full trash bags of smashed aluminum cans floating around and I'm and starting on a third. I know I could haul them to a recycling center, but I never seem to get around to doing it. So instead I decided that I should melt them down and cast them into something useful. Besides, I've always liked playing with fire.

I started doing some preliminary research on smelting/casting aluminum a couple of years ago. The first few websites I found went on at great lengths on how to build a furnace etc. etc. I was wondering where I could buy a crucible, fire brick, refractory cement, green sand and all the rest of the "stuff." A couple of months ago I ran across another web site that basically said "Start simple. Charcoal, an old stainless steel pan and a hole-in-the ground with a forced draft will work." I saw another site about the same time where the guy was using two old coffee cans as a furnace. So I decided to start simple.

I have regular bricks and crushed limestone gravel from building garden paths (see a couple of posts ago). I also had a pretty big ceramic flower pot. I did have to do a hasty transplant of the plant into a bigger plastic flower pot, but it needed replanted anyway.

So I created an air passage with bricks that have holes in them, set the flower pot on top, built a brick box around the flowerpot and filled it with gravel. Oh and I set the whole thing on a 2 foot by 2 foot concrete paver from a sidewalk that I removed. (You can see another paver sitting beside it.)

I also needed a lid. There were also some round concrete "stepping stones" through one of the flower beds. They usually sink under the dirt anyway and there aren't enough of them to make a useful path so I thought I'd use one of them as a lid.

However, the lid needs a vent or the charcoal won't burn. So I drilled a series of holes in the stepping stone with a masonry bit and then chiseled out between them -- or I tried to chisel out between them. I got halfway through the top side, flipped the stepping stone over and was about a quarter of the way through the back side when I hit it a liiiitle too hard and split the first one into three pieces. I think the real problem was that I left it on some scrap 4x4 that I had used to prop it up when I was drilling the holes. I think I would have been OK if I would have just put it right on the floor when I was chiseling.

Luckily I have more stepping stones.

On the second try I put one hole in the (approximate) center of the stepping stone, put a nail through a board to spin the stepping stone around and then put the whole thing on the drill press, instead of using a hand drill and eye balling it like I did the first time.

Theoretically this would make a perfect circle of holes around the pivot. That is if the pivot axle (the nail) wasn't smaller than the pivot hole and the drill press chuck wasn't welded on crooked by a previous owner (can't expect much from a $20 drill press), and the masonry bit wouldn't deflect off of the gravel in the concrete. But it was close enough.

I chiseled it on the shop floor the second time and it worked.

The blower is from an exhaust fan that was in the ceiling of my workshop before I replaced the drop-ceiling with drywall. I wired a three prong cord to it several years ago to use it to re-distribute heat from my fireplace insert. It was only marginal in that task but works quite well as a forced air draft.

I was worried that both the flower pot and the lid would crack from water turning to steam while in use. To try to prevent this I built a couple of twig fires in the "furnace" to try to slowly dry out the flower pot and the lid out. The lid held up quite well. The flowerpot wasn't so fortunate.

I actually have a couple of burnt doughnut shapes in the lawn where I absentmindedly put the lid down on the grass after taking off of the top of the furnace.

It took me a week or so to get to this point because of various other projects, company visiting and rain. Hot ceramic/concrete and water don't mix gracefully. I'm not fond of picking shrapnel out of myself so I waited for a day with no rain.

So on the appointed day I started a small fire in the flowerpot with paper and twigs and three or for pieces of charcoal. I let that burn down to just charcoal while I hooked up the blower, dug out the face shield and welding gauntlets and set up a splatter screen.

Then I stuck my crucible in the furnace and put charcoal all around it. That was actually a mistake. The charcoal needs to be around the bottom of the crucible where the aluminum is.

I didn't think that it was going to get hot enough to melt the aluminum at first. But that was mostly due to only a little bit of the charcoal burning. After I got the rest of the charcoal going it got plenty hot enough.

My crucible is a stainless steel kitchen tool holder I found at my local we-sell-everything store. It was about $8. I drilled two holes in the sides toward the top so I can put a wire handle on it to pour. I also bought a stainless steel slotted spoon with a long handle to skim off the slag. It was $3 or $4 dollars. That's all I bought for this project other than the charcoal.

I still don't have any green sand to do any real casting yet, but I was just trying to smelt the aluminum down into ingots. Lots of sites say to use an old, steel muffin pan to make ingots. I only have one muffin pan and it's a pretty good pan. So instead I cut the tops off of four aluminum pop cans and put them in a box surrounded with sand.

That worked OK except that I over-filled the first one and it instantly melted the top of the can and ran across the sand and into the grass. No great loss. I've an acre and a third of grass. One little bit I won't have to mow. Though it does make for an interesting "ingot".

The can that I didn't over-fill came out OK. The can on the left above has slag that I scraped off the top of the melt the can on the far right only has a drop or two of aluminum in it.

I did get a lot of slag. About 50 to 60% of the volume is slag. I think a lot of it was because I was melting pop cans. Before you get a pool of aluminum going most of the can just oxidizes. After you have a pool of aluminum to push them into, you seem to get less slag. And the vinyl burning off the cans does stink. I stayed out of the smoke as much as I could.

I got about a pop-can full of aluminum all told. That was basically one 5-gallon bucket full of smashed pop cans and 1 aluminum gutter nail. Next time I'll start with one of the "ingots" from this time, so I expect to get less slag. I'll probably just be doing ingots again next time. The time after that I'll probably try some real casting.

Updated Picture

2009-07-24T22:56:00.006-04:00

I updated my profile picture. Something about a jester behind the arbalest just hit my funny bone.

I was at the store doing my weekly grocery shopping earlier this week. As usual I stopped by the Lego section to see what was on sale. I shop at one of those big we-sell-everything stores because I only have to go to one store and they're the only place around here that sells groceries without one of those %&@@&*! loyalty cards. I dislike the idea of someone tracking what I buy, and I'm not going to pay twice as much because I don't want someone tracking what I buy. (And yes, I know I'm paranoid; but am I paranoid enough?)

Anyway I had to buy set 7079 "Drawbridge Defense" because of the jester mini-fig. I attempt to juggle and made a jester costume for Halloween several years ago. Though my good one is red, white and black rather than the red and blue in the Lego set.

In 1994 friends of mine and I won the costume contest at the Hilly Hundred bicycle ride in Bloomington Indiana. He and I were jesters and his wife was a mime. You might say we had one mime between the two of us. We won mostly because he and I wore our costumes all day and juggled at every rest stop. We never have figured out how to pass objects between each other, but we do a pretty good side-by-side juggle where he's the right arm and I'm the left. That jester costume is yellow orange and green.

I also bought set 8942 "Bionicle Jetrax T6" while I was at the store because it was about 1/2 price and I didn't have any Bionicle sets.

Oh, did I mention I have about 30,000 Legos?

I have about 30,000 Legos. That's not really very many as you can see by the picture to the right. They are more impressive dumped into one big pile, but they take about 40-50 hours to sort back out by size/shape.

To really do anything interesting you need between 250,000 and 500,000 blocks.

Tons of Work && Musical Stuff

2009-07-15T21:46:00.020-04:00

Well I've been doing tons of work in the garden...quite literally. This is a shot looking north of the new garden path that runs magnetic north and south. The main path runs magnetic east and west from the gate to a chair I made that sits at the west end of the garden. I put the "magnetic" in there because the compass rose visible in the next photo points (nearly) true north.

This part of the path has one ton (2000 pounds) of gravel plus several hundred pounds of brick edging. I need another ton or so to finish the part of the path south of the compass rose and to finish filling up between the bricks. I neglected to go get a shot of the completed path and it's dark out now (and it's just a path...not terribly exciting, but a lot of work none-the-less.)

I tried, and failed, to complete this before I hosted a cook-out a couple of weeks ago. I dumped the first wheelbarrow full of gravel (yes that black one in the second picture) into the path and then stepped down on it and proceeded to sink past my ankles in mud THROUGH the gravel. I decided to wait a couple of days for it to dry out. A friend of mine was making fun of the amount of gravel I put down. His paths have about an inch-and-a-half of gravel. Mine has about 8 inches. But mine also act as drainage ditches. I put about 6 inches of gravel down, cover it with landscaping cloth to keep the dirt from sifting down through (or slowing it down a bit anyway) and then top with another two inches of gravel. Seems to work pretty well. I've about 80 feet of paths in the garden done this way.

The cookout went pretty well, but did lead to another project. Their are a bunch of children in our church group; somewhere around 24. About 12 or so showed up for the cookout. (My house is very popular with the under-12 crowd as I have about 30,000 Lego blocks that I put in one room. The Legos are supposed to stay in that room and do for the most part.)

Anyway one of the girls who is about 6, found a "flute" (for lack of a better description) that I made many years ago out of a piece of 1/2 inch copper pipe and an end cap (second from right in the picture). She said that she always wanted a flute and wanted to take it home. I told her that, no she couldn't have that one, but I would make her one. So I went and bought 20' of 1/2 PVC schedule 40 pipe and a 5/8 inch dowel and made three "G" flutes plus some experiments with whistles. I had to make three because she has a little sister and of course I need one too.

I've still a lot of PVC to play with (especially since I bought 10 feet of 1 inch a few days later). I've another project on the to-do list that involves lots of PVC and noise. The red thing on the right is a PVC and fiberglass slide trumpet I made for an engineering competition in 1995. It's also popular with the kids, but not with the neighbors. (Yes, that bell was made with a program I wrote to figure out how to stack cones into bell shapes.)

I found "recipies" for flutes on Pete Kosel's web site. I mostly followed them except I couldn't find my 7/16ths drill bit so I used a 11/32 instead.

The other "musical" projects that I have been working on (after it gets too dark to work outside, as mentioned in the previous post) all involve playing with the prime and Fibonacci sequence.

It started by thinking about sine waves with frequency and amplitude related to the sequence (prime or fib) as harmonic overtones. I started just by graphing them in a spreadsheet. Turns out the Fibonacci sequence(left) has a slightly modulated sine wave while the prime sequence (right) has a more triangular/saw tooth wave. The various lines are as you add more and more component sine waves in. I'd have to go look to see exactly what I used as frequency and amplitude in these graphs, but it's along the lines of frequency = sequence and amplitude = 1/sequence. (So for the first prime 2, frequency = 2 and amplitude = 1/2)

I want to (but haven't got around to yet) write a MIDI instrument file using FM synthesis and the sequences as a basis.

What I have gotten around to is making MIDI sequences out of the prime and Fibonacci sequences.

I initially started with hand-entered drum sequences using GarageBand. That was a pain. But it did sound sorta promising. I then wrote a Java program that can produce MIDI sequences of any length using arbitrary sections of the prime, Fibonacci or any other sequence you want to program.

I also found that GarageBand doesn't handle 30,000 note sequences very gracefully. I found that out by producing sequences to where they repeat, without paying much attention to the fact that sequences of prime numbers don't repeat for a very, very long time even if you're only using the first 6 primes. In fact it doesn't repeat for 30,030 notes. I've since trimmed them down to 600 notes (about 2.5 minutes).

What I did to turn a sequence into a "song":

Say you have a trigger sequence: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 (the first 6 prime numbers).
And you have a note sequence: C, E, G, C (C major cord).

If you think of a song as a numbered collection of 8th notes, when you get to an 8th note number that divides evenly into one of your trigger sequence, you play the corresponding note from your note sequence.

So at note zero (yes, I started counting at zero, I'm a computer geek after all) all the notes play.
At note 1 no notes play.
At note 2 the low C plays.
At note 3 the E plays.
At note 4 the low C plays again (4/2 = 2 with no remainder (modulus 0))
At note 5 the G plays
At note 6 the low C plays and the E plays
At note 7 the upper C plays.
At note 8 the low C plays.
At note 9 the E plays
At 10 the low C and the G plays
At 11 the upper C plays
At 12 the low C plays and the E plays
At 13 the upper C plays
...
At 17 -- Wait! We're out of notes! Well not really. At that point the notes wrap around again (modulus note number) and everything divisible by 17 will have a low C play. Everything divisible by 19 will have the E play and everything divisible by 23 will have the G play etc.

Having the notes wrap that way keeps the "song" in the same key and adds some interesting rhythms, but not enough on it's own. I also set a maximum note length (usually one whole note or 8 in our example) and modulus the number in the sequence by the max note length +1 to get the actual note length.

The upshot of this is that the low C is 1/8th long, the E is 1/4, the G is 3/8 (or a dotted 1/4) etc. But when you're using the first 120 primes (as I've been doing) you get some interesting rhythms like 1/8th followed immediately by 1/4 note, Some half note cords and arpeggios etc.

I actually used a much larger note sequence too, several C major cords in different octaves, some tone clusters (F, G, A), some extra C's in multiple octaves and also added a drum beat using the start of the prime sequence.

I dumped all that into GarageBand, slid the drums around until I got the drum sounds I wanted, added track reverb and some echo, switched the "melody" to acoustic guitar tossed in a LOT of reverb (60% or so) and some echo (12%), and viola: instant yuppie wall-paper music. (That's "New Age" or anything produced by Wyndam Hill for the uninitiated.)

The reverb and echo make a big difference. The start and end are lame, but in the middle it sounds pretty decent. Not bad for a bunch of prime numbers. Fibonacci doesn't sound as "good." But that may be that I've been on a prime number kick for the last couple of rounds.

I'd let you hear all this (I made a MP3 file) but I don't have anyplace to host it yet. (It's kinda stupid that I can upload a video but not an MP3...go figure.) And since it's now officially tomorrow, I should probably head toward bed.

Two Trellises

2009-06-21T23:08:00.014-04:00

Well I've been working in the garden and building "outside" stuff for the last few weeks.

First I planted the garden and built a quick-and-dirty PVC trellis for my garden. It has gourds planted on one side and cucumbers on the other. Hopefully by the end of summer they will have enveloped the whole thing. I didn't spend a lot of time building it because I wanted to see how well it works before I spend hours making a nice looking one. And yes this is a long distance shot because not much was up yet except for the weeds.

Then I built a trellis/arbor for my yard. It's about 20 feet long and currently has 250 feet of cable for the plants to grow on. (You can't really see it in the picture, because most of it hadn't been strung when I took the photo.) I still have to wire the center section (another 200 or so feet of wire). I actually wrote a Java program to do the "wire diagram" (well list of points) and to figure out how much wire I need for a particular pattern. (Lots for anything interesting.) It also draws the pattern on the screen so that I can play around and see which one looks best.

Between times (i.e. when it was too dark to see outside) I turned a couple of finials for the top of my fence posts. (Among other things I'll write about in another post.) My garden actually has two sets of fences and posts. I fenced the garden with wire fencing to keep the deer out and then planted flower beds around the edges. The deer kept eating the flowers so I put cheap plastic fence around the flower beds. These finials go on the round metal corner posts on the "flower" fences. Once I finish them that is.

I spent this weekend building a trellis for my Mom & Dad, with lots of help from my older brother Mike. I was glad Mike stopped by to help as everything came out much nicer that it would of if I had done it myself. This replaced a trellis that Dad built that everyone kept banging their heads on (and it was also ugly...Dad's not much of a carpenter).

This would have been easier if I would have had more time. Mike had made a drawing that Mom was supposed to mail and forgot (they live an hour away). So I basically built 6 foot arch sections that could be assembled as needed. In one night. I made enough arch and spindles (across the tops) for a 24 foot span, but we only needed an 18 foot span.

And yes I did write a Java program to figure out the arch segments too. It's not too tricky to cut an arch out of a section of board, but it is pretty tricky to visualize the height gain over the span. I wanted to make sure that it would be tall enough, even with 3 feet of the 10 foot 4x4s in the ground for everyone to walk under. The ground slopes down to the right in the picture so the side on the left is almost exactly 6 feet from bottom of the arch to the ground. These arch segments had an 14 to 16 inch rise in the middle over an 18 foot span. That works out to about a 29 foot radius for the circle this is (nominally) a section of.

I was originally going to do mortises and floating tenons to join the arch sections, but didn't have time. Instead we just used to pieces of plywood to join them; one on each side. To make the front ones look a little better I took a hole saw an cut off the corners on the outside pieces. Gravity should hold it together pretty well as long as the posts don't spread apart too far.

Like most projects it didn't come out as well as I hoped, but better than I expected.

Well off to bed...this week is going to be extremely busy too as I'm hosting a cookout next weekend. Lots of weeding and cleaning to do. Turning finials, cutting arches and ripping spindles creates lots of saw dust. And my shop is in the house...with no dust collection...and I'm not much of a housekeeper either.

Life's been Crazy

2009-05-15T07:29:00.008-04:00

Since the last post, lots has happened. I hosted a big cookout and bonfire, Thanksgiving for my family and then the whole Christmas/New Year's deals, making presents for friends & family, multiple band-concerts, hockey games and other miscellaneous schtuff. Oh yeah, and three new jobs.

OK so it really a contracting company making a new division and moving me into it and then the company I'm now working at exercising their right-to-hire clause. But it was still a lot of annoying paperwork to fill out.

The new(ish) job is lots more work for less pay and no overtime. But I still prefer it anyway as I get to really program most of the time instead of cleaning up after incontinent¹ programmers.

Well time to trot off to work so that I can get home early. I'm getting ready to plant my garden today and tomorrow, and then go help friends till and plant their garden.

And I'm still working on the sparks part of the title...

¹No not incompetent (though they are that) but incontinent. Crapping all over the place.

Pile 'O Work

2008-09-16T23:05:00.034-04:00

Well I've been a bit busy at home the last month with cookouts and getting ready for winter.

Cutting, hauling and splitting fire wood has been one of the most time consuming things. The wood doesn't cost me anything other than the time to go cut haul etc. And it's more productive than going to the gym.

If you want to understand how wood feels and works split a cord or two by hand.

This load was huge pieces; 8 made a pickup truck full. Each piece was between 200 and 400 pounds. We used a front-end loader to load the truck.

This is all maple, oak and hickory. All of the trees had a hollow spot (or two). It's really a bit of a shame to burn the maple as it's nicely spalted.

I also have been building a round patio table. This table is build out of wood that was fake ceiling beams in a room I remodeled a couple of years ago.

The legs are, for now, 3 slabs of plywood hinged together so that they can be folded up. The top is about 60 inches around. Eventually I'd like to do some carving on the top and something better for the legs. I got it to this point so I could use it for a cookout.

The Tale of the Extra Semi-Colon

2008-08-14T11:00:00.010-04:00

Jeff Atwood in his blog "Coding Horror" had a post recently titled "On Our Project, We're Always 90% Done"

This brings up another pet peeve of mine, the dreaded question "What percent complete is that?"

Software (or parts of software) are either done or in progress. Percent complete is worthless.

Let me tell you the tale of the extra semi-colon.

Long ago in a computer lab far away, a novice C programmer (me) was writing his second C program.

I had a program that looped over all the pixels in an image to do some filter function. The only problem was that the loop wasn't working. It was only executing once.

I made one of the two classic non-pointer C errors¹, I had put an extra semi-colon at the end of a for statement like:

for (int i=0; i < 300; i++);
{
//loop body
}

To fix it all I had to do was delete one semi-colon. It only took 3 days for me to find the extra semi-colon. I probably spent about an hour writing the original code.

My question to you is: What percent complete was the code?

My second question is: Does it matter if it's "99%" complete if it doesn't work?

I would argue that the code was actually more than 100% complete. After all to fix it I deleted one character.

The only percent complete that makes sense to me is the number of features complete versus the number of features in the specification. Anything else is pulling a number out of thin air (or other, less pleasant places.)

My answer to "When will that be done?" is "When it's done."

¹The other classic mistake is accidentally doing an assignment instead of an equality test. e.g. if (a=10) rather than if (a == 10). I did that a couple of days later. But it only took 4 hours to find.

A Call for Building Codes

2008-08-04T16:27:00.010-04:00

I've been looking at a lot of very poorly written software lately and trying to figure out how to improve the process so that the problems I see don't happen again. The biggest class of problems are those things that are missing in the code, like reasonable logging. I've come to the conclusion that the software industry is missing something. That something is analogous to "The Building Code" in construction.

When we develop a piece of software, we go gather requirements from the users and start hammering out code. Everything is cool, right?

Not quite. There are many requirements the users know nothing about.

"Requirements the users know nothing about?"

Yep. Lots and lots of 'em. Let's jump into analogy to illustrate.

Suppose you are building a house. You decide you want a 4 bedroom 2-and-a-half bath ranch style house. You go to an architect, and he draws up a floor plan you really like, on a budget that, while more than you want to pay, you can live with.

As you examine the drawings you notice that there are a couple of pipes coming out of the main sewer lines and poking up through the roof. You didn't specify those! You ask the architect about them, and he replies, "Those are the stack vents; they're required by code." As you look closer, you notice more and more stuff, that you didn't request. Like electrical outlets every two feet along the kitchen counter top and every 12 feet around the perimeters of rooms. Like exhaust fans in bathrooms. Like windows big enough to exit through in bedrooms. Every time you question something you get the same answer "That's required by code."

You exclaim "What is this building code? Why do I have to follow it? It's making my house more expensive!"

The building code is a set of rules that new buildings must follow to insure that the building is durable and safe to inhabit. Some of the building code is there to insure that if the building does catch fire you can get out. Other parts of the building code are to prevent the house from catching fire in the first place. And yes, doing things according to code will make your house more expensive in the short term. However, if followed, it should keep the house from falling down in the first storm which would be much more expensive and potentially fatal.

Like building a house, there are many things that should be done in a production program that the user doesn't see, and doesn’t really care about. For instance:

Logging: Most programs in an IT environment should have configurable logging. The end users don't care (and won't specify that it be done), but the folks maintaining the system will need it to find the bugs that will appear.

Parameterization: If I had a nickel for every piece of code that had something hard-coded that should have been in a configuration somewhere I would have been able to retire in comfort some years ago. I've had numerous "programmers" argue that hard-coding it was "easier". And indeed it is as long as nothing ever changes. But since the only constant is change, hard-coding makes life much harder in the long run. I've seen one application that could not be sold, or even safely moved to a new environment because host names, user names, passwords, email address and, yes, even IP numbers were hard-coded into the application.

"But isn't this all common sense?" you ask, "Won't experienced people know all this stuff?"

Yes on both counts. But, unfortunately many people have no common sense and most IT organizations are not comprised of experienced, well trained people. And, since many of the "programmers" are sea-gull consultants¹, even if they have years of experience as consultants, they never live with the poor design decisions they make and therefore never learn from their mistakes.

Building codes would be unnecessary if everyone in construction was an honest trained architect/engineer (or even if they were under the direct supervision of an honest trained architect/engineer), but that isn't the case. There are many ignorant people as well as shysters and con-men posing as contractors. And there are many more posing as "IT professionals". The building code (and the permitting process in most places) catch many of the short-cuts and ignorance in building. We could use the same protection in IT.

Another reason that building codes are a good analogy is that they vary depending on the type of building. A dog house doesn't have the same codes² that a high-rise apartment building does.

In software we need the same flexibility. A three line shell script doesn't have the same requirements that a million line, three tier web application does.

"But my organization has these standards."

Great! However the rest of us may not. Actually that is how the building code evolved too. Each individual town/township/county/parish had, and usually still has, their own building code. But a larger common building code has since evolved from those smaller codes, taking the most sensible ideas from them. Most local codes are now based off of the standard building code (at least where I live).³

One of the other issues that comes up is the enforcement of the standards.

I'm currently working on a project where the standards are usually completely ignored. The reason is that the same group writing the software is responsible for monitoring the compliance with the standards, but there is no reason for them to comply. There are no consequences for non-compliance.

In this case we need an organization that does not report to the same management chain that reviews the code for compliance. An organization that has the power to send the code back to development.

I think, as an industry, we need to start laying down those common standards and the class of program they apply too in some formal way. That way we don't all have to re-invent the wheel.

What do you think?

¹Sea-Gull Consultant: A consultant that flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps all over the place and then flies on to the next engagement and does the same thing.

²Or any building code requirements. Usually small (under 100 ft²) without plumbing or electricity are exempt from the building codes. And your dog probably isn't too picky either.

³My local county has adopted the "International 2006 Building Code."

Introduction

2008-08-01T14:22:00.011-04:00

Well, let's kick off this thing with a random rumbling about what is going to appear on this blog.

I'm gonna talk about software and the stupidity found in corporate America when writing it. Woodworking (the sawdust part of the title) and other projects I'm doing. Those projects could range from making camping gear to planting something out in the garden to writing a bizarre program.

I've done things like:

A program that lays text out in spirals
A trumpet out of PVC & fiberglass
A program for making molds for fiberglass trumpet bells
A kayak out of 365 Mt. Dew cans, some plywood, PVC, plastic and duct tape
A 6 foot (about 2 meter) compass rose for the garden
A partial suit of armor out of pop (soda) cans and cardboard
Create a recipe for jalapeno cheese zucchini bread

You just never know what I might try next.

So where to the sparks come in?

Glad you asked.

I'm sure some of the things I have to say about how Software is currently written is going to cause a few sparks to fly, especially if anyone in my management chain happens to read what I think about how they allow programs to be written. I'm also contemplating another hobby (like I really need one) that will involve lots of fire, heat and sparks. But I'll save telling you what it is when (and if) I get around to doing it.