Trevor Peacock

When you declare war on the neighbouring dorm, make sure you have a weapon of mass hydration!

At short notice today we decided to build a machine to launch water balloons at the neighbouring building. With the aid of Levi, we designed, acquired parts, and assembled in a few hours a lethal water balloon launching sling shot.

The weapon consisted of the following parts:

• 4 metres of bungee cord @ 1.25/mtr
• 2 sections of scrap wood @ $1 ea
• 4 180mm long 10mm dia bolts, and nuts to match @ ~ $2 ea
• left over piece of shade cloth

and of course 1200 water balloons @ $2 per 200.

We eventually got the weapon capable of firing water balloons from the upstairs balcony, over the neighbouring building, and into the car park on the other side.

The construction:

• A frame was made with the wood, cut so we could place one piece on either side of the railing on the balcony. Held together with the bolts, formed the frame and supports for our catapult.
• two holes in each of the supports to feed the elastic cord through
• A roughly 200×120mm square of shade cloth, a few layers thick, with small holes placed in the corners to run the cord through
• The cord threaded through the holes in the supports with the shade cloth pocket threaded onto the cord between the supports
• Attach the supports about 1m apart

A few lessons learned:

• Water balloons burst very easily, if the sling is too tight, and places too much force on the balloon, it will burst on launch.
• the elastic we bought was probably too heavy (it was about 10mm dia), and put too much force on the balloon.
• To counter this, we found placing the supports only 1m apart, rather than keeping it tight at 2m worked better. It accelerated the balloons more gently.
• A single piece of elastic, or much smaller gauge elastic would have worked better. Weaker elastic with a longer stretching distance would give the balloon a much gentler acceleration, hopefully allowing a more powerful, or longer throw
• I don’t recommend putting anything other than water balloons in the sling. Balloons don’t do too much damage. With this sort of power, they do hurt if they hit you, but anything more solid would be downright dangerous.

Elsbeth, Sarah, Rob, Sarah and Carey, preparing amunition.

What a way to waste an afternoon. Enjoy kids.

Spending most of my time working on our ITC307 project, and doing assignments due early next term.
Being able to find a bit of time now, i have been keeping up with reading, came across phpinsider.com, which has a dedicated Smarty forum. Spent a while looking to see if anyone else has been using smarty for generating SQL queries. There were a few mentions, but as far as i could tell, nothing on the scale of what we were using.
Have had gaim connected to irc.au.freenode.net for the last few days, to the tapestry, debian, and smarty channels, just watching whats going on, thought i might learn something, but nothing major yet, only a few small things.

Installed beagle and got it working. Have been interested in the idea ever since i read about a concept of dashboard. To be really useful i need to set it to index all the data on my server and other HDD, rather than just my home folder.

Been a while since my last post. Finished an assignment on tapestry (Jakarta, not weaving). There is a report on generating a sample app if anyone is interested. If there is anyone else out there learning tapestry, let me know, its hard to find resources.

Started implementing security into timeshare, its an uphill task, so many things to be redone/fixed to work with the new changes. Hopefully a chance to fix old bugs, but probably an opportunity to generate new ones.

Bought a cheap KVM switch box (finally), and as a result have started using my Linux box much more (I don’t have to crawl around to swap cables any more). Have moved my php editing environment across, and moved GAIM across. Not game to move my mail (thunderbird) across yet, think I’ll set up a dedicated hard drive for my home directory first.

Few interesting finds recently. PostSecret is a rather interesting project. Also Katrina has started a new comic.
Have started using GIM (Googles new Instance Messaging service). Installed the client and had a quick (30 sec) look, but have been otherwise running it under GAIM (username: trevor_peacock at you-know-where).

Next few days: gotta get over this cold, knock over the last few assignments for this term, and make arrangements for the holidays. Fun fun…

Made it to brunch today, for the first time in a long time. Spent most of the day looking at tapestry. Also got TeamTalk working between here and home. Remains to be seen how well it will work. Runs quite quickly, there is only one hop copared to two when i talk to Alan, so it runs a little smoother. As long as i’m not using the modem for anything else on this end, it could almost replace the phone.