In the last couple of days, I’ve been looking over a new discovery of mine: Open Flash Charts.

Open Flash Charts is a project which seems to have been going since last year producing, as the name implies, [free] open-source flash chart software. OFC allows you to visualise your data on your website or in your web-oriented applications with fancy mouse-over effects, interactivity and animations. It caters for many types of chart including variations of bar, line and pie charts.

As the project creater like to point out, closed-source software for the same purpose typically costs thousands so the ‘free’ part is a real bonus here.

Below I’ve visualised the Halifax and Nationwide house price data to date as an example:

This really is the simplest stock setup of a chart, apart from having two lines, it is essentially running the out-of-the-box settings. The chart is called from a ‘flat’ data file in this case but the php-driven design allows for data to be pulled directly from a database to generate a chart which updates in real time.

The folks at Mozilla want to create a new Guinness world record. They want to see how many people will download the new Firefox 3 Browser (now with “Awesome-bar”) in 24 hrs.

As of writing the total download for ‘Download Day’ stand at over 1,400,000.

If you want to be part of this world record, all you have to do is download one complete copy of Firefox 3 from the link below.

If you want to take part, you’ve got until 1200 UTC (GMT) tommorrow (18th July) to get your download done. Don’t forget to print your certificate after the download

While looking around the web for construction tips for serpentine solar collectors (flat panel type where the pipe takes an s-route across the collector), I discovered this website with photos from Slovenia.

In Slovenia, they have this quaint little concept called ‘communities’. These ‘communities’ get together and accomplish things that an individual with a credit card might struggle with</sarcasm>

The Slovenian economy ministry and civil engineering institute (ZRMK) appear to offer tools and expertise to enable community construction of flat-panel solar water heaters. The project supplies a pre-formed pipe bending table and an asbestos(!)-topped brazing table. There is also a contraption for holding formed pipes against the collector plates for brazing/welding.

The copper pipe, supplied in rolls, is bent around the track to give it it’s serpentine shape. Brazing paste (a meltable alloy) is then applied to one side of the pipe. The pipe is layed onto the copper collector sheets and held down with the spring-loaded contraption atop the asbestos table. It appears that butane torches are then used to melt the flux/paste and braze the pipe to the copper panels. The panels are then very carefully washed and it appears that another layer of copper (foil?) is attached to the other side to form a plate-copper-foil sandwich.

It’s less clear as to what happens next but it looks like the collectors are given a matt-black coating to finalise the construction. It then seems that rather than add the panels into a individual units, the Slovenians instead set about stripping a large area of tiles from their roof. They build a box into this tile-less section which is then used to directly hold the solar water panels and the glazing is mounted straight over the box (all this is my deduction from the photographs - it may be wrong)

If you’re a resident of the UK who has adopted (or been forced to adopt) the all-singing, all-dancing and often non-working DVB-T digital television standard, you’ll have probably spent some time cursing your TV aerial or the trees between it and the transmitter. I don’t have any such issues myself, being no great fan of modern television programming but members of my family still insist on vegetating in front of the inane spectacle for hours on end, becoming disconsolate when the ‘entertainment’ carried over the air by UHF radio waves and an MPEG-2 stream is interrupted.

Looking around for an alternative, I saw a revised design of an old antenna design in the web technical digests, namely the Gray-Hoverman antenna. Based on the Hoverman antenna of the 1960s, the now computer modeled design is said to outperform other commercial antennas for limited line of sight applications over long distances.

I’m going to try to evaluate whether the Gray-Hoverman would be useful for UK DVB-T and I’m considering making one myself.

The design is licensed under the GPL v3

Philips has two nicely specified webcams on the market at the moment, the SPC-1000NC and the SPC-1300NC, both 1.3 megapixel (1280×1024 native resolution) devices.

Now, as many amateur astrophotographers will tell you, the earlier Philips Toucam models had lenses which unscrewed from a M12.5×0.5 thread allowing the easy fitment of a telescope adapter. Alternatively, ‘Micro Video’ lenses of different focal lengths could be fitted to the webcam.

The SPC-1000NC/SPC-1300NC may be a different issue as I’ve read an old post from the QCIUAG via a german astrophotography forum indicating the lens on these camera’s VGA sibling is captive (no M12.5×0.5 thread )

I’d be really grateful if anyone passing this way who knows with certainty whether the lenses can be removed or not post in the comments section below and let me know.

It would also be handy to know if the webcams are permanently attached to their bases or wether they have a normal tripod thread.

I just picked up this story over at Arstechnica.

Apparently, web metrics firm Xiti has found that 28% of the web browser market in Europe is now running Mozilla Firefox. Firefox is an alternative to Microsoft’s operating system tied Internet Explorer product. Firefox offers improved security, performance and extendability over IE and the fact that it is free, open-source software has undoubtedly helped in it’s adoption. IE, fairly or not, has gained a bit of a reputation for having vulnerabilities and exploits. Firefox also has these but enthusiastic developers tend to produce patches with all haste.

It probably also helps Firefox’s position that, unlike IE which is only available for Windows (it is discontinued for Mac), Firefox will run on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD and soon a range of handhelds.

It will be interesting to see if the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.0 increases the Mozilla market share still further.

For the record, I believe delusionofgrandeur.co.uk looks considerably smarter in Gecko (Firefox’s render engine) than in IE. You can download Firefox for free HERE.