The Dent-O-Rama Gets Fixed

Last 5 July, a brain-damaged driver of an Isuzu Forward failed to make the 90-plus degree turn shown in the map above and demolished the car's fender. The results of his handiwork (and at the scene of the atrocity itself, thanks to the primitive camera of the Palm Zire 71).

And after a whopping 35,000-peso repair job (thankfully covered by the insurance, and also including this huge dent on the passenger rear quarter panel caused by a bus in Laguna in early June):

Telescope Rebuild!

Actually the basis of this telescope is the second rebuild. My first attempt was black, ugly, and flimsy. Made of 1/2" plywood. The second attempt used 3/4" plywood and was usable. But heavy. I tried building a Bartels style trilateral last year, but it went nowhere. So I went back to the second try, and shortened the mirror box and rocker box.

That made it top-heavy. I've built a lighter upper truss assembly (UTA) out of 1/2" plywood, and reduced the number of trusses to two. I'm using 3/4" diameter steel EMT tubing (used for electrical conduit) because large-diameter aluminum tubing can't be had for love or money. I also enthusiastically had at the mirror box and rocker box with a doorknob hole saw that I borrowed from a friend. Ostensibly to reduce weight, but trouble is, it's still top-heavy and requires 7.5 pounds of counterweighting. The barbell weights can be seen bolted to the bottom of the mirror box in the photo.





But the holes make nice handles, and I enlarged the rocker box a tiny bit (by replacing one side with 1/2" plywood instead of the original 3/4") and now the mirror box can nest inside the rocker box like it should.



















Here are a couple views of the hacksaw curved spider, held together with copious amounts of epoxy. Ugly ain't it.

And the focuser board. Another wonder of ugly carpentry. There actually are splinters visible in the photo.


View "down the barrel" with a gratuitious reflection of me and the camera:

Views of the upper truss assembly before slopping wall putty over everything to hide the multitude of construction sins:

































And afterward. It will have to be sanded and painted.

Stone Age .NET Development

The screenshot shows how to send an MMS to the Web Services (Apache AXIS) based MMS gateway of a certain large Malaysian cellco.

And also shows how to do .NET/C# development in "poverty mode."

What is noteworthy is that the MM7Service.cs stub was created with Microsoft .NET Framework SDK 1.1 wsdl utility (the Mono equivalent croaks on the malformed WSDL produced by Apache AXIS) and the MM7Service.dll was also created using the Microsoft csc compiler.

The other files (which invoke various MMS methods) can compile with either csc or the Mono msc compiler. And as you can see, it all works perfectly.

Mono is really making a believer out of me.

As an aside, devouring web services in C# is so trivially simple, it makes my efforts in Perl SOAP::Lite absolutely laughable. Why do I tolerate such jumping through hoops anyway?