The Equation of Time podcast

Posted on January 5, 02009
Filed Under Astronomy, Horology, Journal, Physics | Leave a Comment

365-days-of-astronomy

To understand historical dating you need to understand calendar systems, and to understand those you need some basic astronomy. I find it a fascinating and pervasive subject that rewards you with a deeper understanding of the world around you. This year I hope to share some of what I've learned as part of the International Year of Astronomy.

The first thing I've put together is a short podcast about the enigmatic 'Equation of Time'. You'll be able to hear it on Sunday 25th January as part of the IYA's 365 Days of Astronomy daily podcast. As a Scotsman I was quite pleased by the synchronicity of the broadcast date as this also marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of our national poet Robert Burns.

10 years as a Flash Developer

Posted on January 2, 02009
Filed Under Flash, Journal | Leave a Comment

Today marks my 10 year anniversary as a Flash Developer.

It's hard to believe how much has happened since I moved to London in January 1999. I took a job building Flash websites for database developer ProSys. Funnily enough you can still see the web site I built for them. Other than removing the news section, it hasn't changed.

I'd built websites before but had never used Flash. To be fair not many people had back then, but it looked like fun; which as I've mentioned before is my Achilles heel! ProSys were very keen to innovate but there's only so much you could do with Flash 3; Actionscript was still a few years away. We did find though that you could get javascript and VBscript to talk to Flash via FSCommand and use that to set the frame of a MovieClip. Naturally I built a clock.

The most rewarding part of the journey has been the wonderful people I've met through the Flash community. Jensa and Marc, John and Pete, Seb, Aral and Tom, Simon, Chee and Ant. The list is a long and happy one. Thank you all for 10 years of innovation, inspiration and fun!

2008 epilogue

Posted on December 28, 02008
Filed Under Journal | Leave a Comment

2008 has been a bittersweet year. Turning 40 turned out to be far more fun than it had any right to be - an old friend got married a few days later, so it pretty much turned into a school reunion. Lots of fun.

What did catch me out this year was the death (often untimely) of a great many people who's work I admired. I don't want to get all morbid but they have all influenced me and I wanted to recognise them. If you encounter a name you don't recognise then please check them out. They'll probably make you think or make you smile, and the best one's will do both.

Arthur C. Clarke (science fiction writer), Gary Gygax (game designer), Humphrey Lyttelton (Jazz trumpetor and radio broadcaster), Lance Latham (programmer, horologist and author), John Wheeler (physicist), George Carlin (stand up), Stan Winston (visual effects designer), Erick Wujcik (game designer), Randy Pausch (computer scientist), Ken Campbell (Fortean theatre director), Geoffrey Perkins (radio producer), Levi Stubbs (vocalist), Mitch Mitchell (drummer), Oliver Postgate (animator), Bob Spiers (director)

AS3 infinite timeline: Proof of concept

Posted on December 20, 02008
Filed Under Chronometry, Journal | Leave a Comment

The most import interface element of the Computus Engine will be the perpetual timeline. I want it to be infinitely zoomable from the smallest chronon out to the billions of year since the Big Bang. What's more I wanted to at least prove this was possible by the end of the first year. I admit posting it at the end of December is really cutting it fine but thanks to 2008 being one second longer than usual, I made it!

Infinite Timeline demo
The demo above is a little clunky, it's not interactive and it loses a few labels after it's been running for a while. It does however prove the infinite zooming concept works for time. All you need to do is supply a start and an end value (they can be Dates or raw millisecond offsets) to the timeline and it'll render the rest. Period rendering in the demo is limited from seconds up to millennia.

For the demo I'm applying a multiplier to the start and end values every frame. This is a really hacky way of getting animation but it's fine for this. There's very little in the way of optimisation yet other than a bit of object pooling on the labels and it's still running pretty well. I have a ton of ideas for future versions that will improve performance.

At times it felt like it's been slow going but I'm glad to have something to show for the end of the year. A lot of what you see makes use of the preparatory work I've written about over the course of the year. The UI components for example all extend the BaseComponent class, and the Date class is used extensively to manage period transitions.

Full Screen Preview
The last problem I needed to overcome before I could demo anything was how do I demo a timeline (which needs to be as wide as possible) inside a journal entry which is only 470 pixels wide. The new full screen preview app above is my proposed solution. This is a light little preloader movie that will load any demo on request and preview it in full screen. When you're finished hit ESCAPE and you will return to the journal. I'll write a bit more about this in a future post but I've tested it for a few weeks and it seems to work well.

Antikythera mechanism reconstruction

Posted on December 13, 02008
Filed Under Archeology, Astronomy, History, Horology, Inspiration | Leave a Comment

A few months ago I covered the Antikythera mechanism, the 2000 year old clockwork calendar and astronomical device found in the Mediteranean. In the video below former Science Museum curator Michael Wright demonstrates the first fully complete reconstruction of the mechanism.

The video was shot by New Scientist and Nature journalist Jo Marchant who has just finished a book about the Antikythera mechanism called Decoding the Heavens.