Leonardo da Vinci’s codex are probably some of the most famous notebooks in existence, even just the few that still exist are seen almost as works of art and fascinate many people myself included, it is believed that there were many more destroyed. They are simply his records of discovery, development and observation on a wide range of subjects.  Most engineers, inventor, academics, scientists and innovators overtime have keep notebooks of their ideas and findings on the good and not so good paths of discovery they have taken. There in my view some essential aspects of a notebook that are not immediately recognized by people, this is the freeform nature of anyones notebook. It is used exactly as the owner wishes not defined by some external prescribed approach, you can scribble in margins, overlay thoughts on one another and the order [Read More...]

Now I am onto the next none programming project, building a 1917 Sopwith Camel Fighter at 1:16 scale the SF Cable car was a little to easy. The first stage was putting together the Clerget Rotary engine. There are a few interesting things about this design and the implications it causes, the engine operates by rotating around a fixed crankshaft. This is not normal for today’s engines to say the least, if you look at the scale model example I built in the picture here, the propeller turns along with the whole engine and the central crankshaft is fixed. This has the benefit of improving cooling of the nine cylinders which was a problem for engines of the time, however it meant that oil used to lubricate the internals of the engine was thrown outward because of centrifugal force and would leak out of [Read More...]

  This model San Francisco Cable Car was from a OcCre kit and is 1:24 scale. Fairly simple to put together, about the only painful bit during construction were the windows. First the window frames, to which the clear Styrene is attached, did not match the cutouts in the main body of the cable car. The frames we significantly small, which seemed to have been caused by the laser cutting of the wood basically being to high (excessive burning marks could be seen on the sheets). I would recommend inspecting this before buying if you can as I had to build shims to reduce the size of the window cutout and then file and trim everyone individually. The second problem with the windows was the effect of using CA Glue (Cyanoacrylate) in the model, first don’t use it to affix the Styrene to [Read More...]

Firstly this book is a great reference book and is filled with very valuable examples that will save you loads of time in your next application. However it is not for someone who wants to learn Objective-C or how to write a iPhone App, if you want to learn that check-out something like Learning iPhone Programming by Alasdair Allan this will get you the basics of iPhone App construction. However back to this book, it will rapidly shorten your learning curve in some of the more complex areas and give you valuable examples to extend the more run of the mill parts of iOS. It starts by covering some of the basics like Working with Objects, Implementing Controllers and Views also Table Views,  as mentioned these are not tutorial level descriptions and you need to understand the basics of an [Read More...]

In one of my previous blog articles I talked about Software Debt escalating to Technical Bankruptcy, here I will explore more the need for and apparent lack of monitoring of accrued software debt within businesses. The lack of understanding of software debt by business managers, particularly those based on software as their primary product, is a fatal mistake in their business strategy in my view. It is akin to only looking at the sales numbers and not a the operating expense, one day you’ll find yourself paying more for a sale than the revenue from the sale.Recently I used the idiom ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’  to convey this point, I particularly liked it as the original Arabic proverb describes how a camel is loaded beyond its capacity to move, that is exactly what happens with software debt the [Read More...]

It was a fascinating process building this model, the designers of the model held true to almost all of the original design of the Wright Brothers. As I progressed through the building of the model I would compare it to the photo graphs and the literature available, this is why I say the designers appear to have held true. One of the great things that appealed to me about the Model Airways kits was that they left visible the entire construction of the plane. This does present that issue that all my flaws of construction are also visible, so if you decide to take this kind of model on spend time reading the instructions, they are pretty good, and I found that tacking together the pieces before final gluing was very helpful to ensure that correct alignment is achieved. Basically [Read More...]