My second to last dead week

Dead week is wrapping up. The term dead week is such a misnomer. They should call it “undead” week, because everyone on campus is a zombie. I finally put the finishing touches on a little utility that I have had sitting around for a while, believe it or not I actually used it to calculate some storage requirements for a project I had been doing for the capstone project. It calculates the volume of a perfectly horizontal pipe or tank. If you want to know what the volume is for a pipe or tank on an incline go here.

.DXF Skyscrapers

This month I have been working on a library (more like a class) that can output AutoCAD .DXF files. Why would one do this? It turns out that .DXF is a format that most structural analysis programs use to interchange files with each other and, naturally, AutoCAD.

This makes designing cool skyscrapers and bridges much easier than slugging away at AutoCAD for hours. One can picture a design and put together piece wise functions and output a general shape to analyze. The picture below is some skyscrapers that I designed as Ideas for the EERI competition coming up in February. We elected NOT to build them because they were a little complex, not to mention the torsional effects of the furthest building on the right on the image below.

Modeling Software

I just finalized a deal with SC Johnson & Son to develop a modeling tool for them. I can’t really go into any details, but this is the biggest firm that I have ever done business with. It’s always fun to think about all the people who use or are affected by a product that you create. This could potentially make products that millions of people use just a little better, which is a whole new level for me. Very Cool!

Raycaster

I wrote a Wolf3d like raycaster in Javascript using canvas today. It requires a canvas enabled browser such as Firefox or Safari. Hopefully the new version of IE will ship with canvas enabled, because I think that I really could do some cool stuff with canvas once it is fully mainstream.Here is a screenshot of the simulator:

Back By Popular Demand

From time to time I make stuff just for fun or to test out a new technique. I didn’t realize how many of my demo pages actually got looked at. I took a look at my 404 log and was surprised to see that people tried to access The Magic Infinity Ball 417 times in the past week. Also people tried to access The Calorie Calculator 254 times last week.

I’m going to work on migrating the best of my old stuff (as decided by the logs) over to the new design this weekend.

• Random Venture A page that generates random "business speak" mission statements and web 2.0-esque company names. Anyone who deals with these types should get a laugh.
• Band Name Generator This page was cooked up over some beers at a local pub "The Fox And Firkin". We were joking about how random the names of the live bands that played that night seemed to be. There is nothing like coding javascript in notepad with a buzz!

Pardon Our Dust

I’m going to be in the process of updating and modernizing the site for the next week. It’s about time; Leffler Consulting has outgrown the old one.

What you are looking at now is the new layout. I’m playing with the portfolio now; it’s going to be very scripty. I’m violating one of my own rules by putting a site that is in utero online. This works for me, because I’ll be sure to have the motivation to complete it. After all, I don’t get directly paid for my own personal work, so any motivation is good motivation!

Simulator Job

I landed a cool job designing a simulator for an industrial robotic cutting process. The controls and behavior of the cutter apparently take a while to get used to, so the client commissioned Leffler Consulting to design a simulator where new hires can practice before doing the real thing. This should significantly cut the cost of training, because fewer products will be damaged during the learning process.

I’m using my 3D Ray Tracing engine that I coded a few years ago to implement this project. And will have to engineer physical controls that closely approximate the actual robotic cutter controls to plug into any computer. This is going to be a really fun project.

Update (9-12-08): Here is a screenshot of the simulator:

Why I will never offshore.

I keep getting e-mails and even phone calls from “developers” in India to outsource my web development component of my business to them. Many of these contacts make my internal scam alarm go off, but some seem legit. So if you are planning on contacting me about this, don’t bother: I will never outsource my web development.

First, web development is a much needed artistic respite from my other projects. The growing part of my business is technical solutions. These usually are mentally stimulating, but sometimes I yearn for variety. Also, most of these custom solutions require a non disclosure agreement or a security clearance so I can’t ever show them off.

Second, the prices that these off shore companies are offering aren’t that great. I can find more competent work locally for just a little bit more. Sometimes I’ll “outsource” the layout to an artist studying at the university down the street or to a local graphics artist who is trying to improve their portfolio. It’s a good thing, because it saves me time, and the lack of communication barriers gives the client a good result.

Third and most importantly, I feel that off shoring is an evil, counterproductive thing. America can’t compete with polluting sweatshops whose workers live in shanties. Our standard of living, environmental protections, and labor laws are high, as they should be. Every time you send a job overseas you lower the standard of living in America. You send us back in time a little bit.

I think that our recent economic turmoil’s root cause is off shoring. Think about it, how can people in America can afford to buy things if no one has a decent job? The fact is that when adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen in recent years. We as a country are producing less and less. And production, not service is the real driver of economies. That’s why everyone jumped on the housing band wagon. Because for a while it was a place where you could really make some money, a house is something that you can’t effectively offshore. Would be entrepreneurs quit their jobs and became contractors and built houses, while ordinary people bought on interest only loans because their service job’s wages couldn’t afford payments.

Why then would the Banks loan to people who couldn’t pay their mortgages? Huge trade imbalances meant that Asia had to send mass amounts of cash over here to buy bonds. They did this to keep their currencies pegged at a lower rate than what the market would bear. The banks had more buyers for mortgage backed securities then there was, so the standards dropped to fill demand. But I digress.

Corporate America’s chickens are coming home to roost, which is unfortunate because they are such a big part of our economy. But hopefully, jobs will start coming back home. Don’t get me wrong I’m all about free trade, however trade is a two-way street. What we have seen in recent decades is anything but two-way and should be illegal. So India, if you need any web design or customized modeling software feel free to give me a call, otherwise save your breath.

Update (10-15-08): I just inked a deal with a firm in Seattle to simplify their reporting process. Turns out they they were unhappy with their offshore provider...

Testing Testing 123.....

The first entry of my blog, and by my blog I mean this is the beta of my blogging software. The tentative name for this module is Blogstar. Why in the world would one want to reinvent the proverbial blogging wheel? The answer is so that I can seamlessly add blog functionality to a client’s website at a moments notice while keeping the look and feel of their website fully intact. The blog can be hosted on the client’s servers and no external links are nessesary.

Basically how Blogstar works is the user logs into a interface and updates/creates entries. The software then updates the HTML of the specified page between the certain tags. Standardistas may not like the use of proprietary tags, but to me that’s the beauty of HTML versus XHTML. I have more artistic license with a HTML 4.01 transitional doctype. And to me, quickly coding a solution benefits the customer because it keeps their costs down, and makes them happy.