About This Site

About This Site

Why am I writing this? I am an electrical engineer that likes to optimize designs and understand the basics. (Okay, a geek.) This project uses electrical engineering concepts which are both well-known and seldom-used. Some of these topics are challenging, and I wish to help others by sharing my results. I also want to publish my findings and exchange ideas with other engineers working on coilguns.

This is an engineer's notebook and I invite you to follow along my journey of discovery.

Web Browsers

This site is designed to use CSS and Java. This is written for and tested with modern standards-compliant browsers. You will have no problems with the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox or Opera.

I support MS Internet Explorer version 7 and later. If you have problems using a web browser that is not standards-compliant with the World-Wide Web Consortium, that's too bad. I don't really want to hear about it. On the other hand, I am always grateful for comments about content, magnetic circuits, mathematics and constructive criticism. But on the third hand, if you're unable to browse this far then you haven't read this notice, so you better tell me about the problem so I can fix it.

Tools

These pages were first written using MS FrontPage 98 and tested with Microsoft Internet Explorer v4.0. In December '98, I switched to MS Visual InterDev 6.0 in an attempt to escape the problems with FrontPage 98 naming links in mixed case, even though the target filename was only lower case. My ISP's Linux server would report these links as 404s, requiring manual editing of the HTML to repair the links. In 1999 we switched to Macromedia Dreamweaver, which has a superior user interface for HTML editing. In August 2003 we added IntelliJ IDEA for Java and Javascript editing. In 2004 we upgraded to Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, and later to Dreamweaver 8. In 2008 we purchased Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 and I love it so much that I later got Adobe CS4 Web Premium.

At first, the graphics were created in Paintshop Pro 5.0, and later versions up to Paint Shop Pro XI, after Jasc was acquired by Corel. The animations were produced in Jasc Animation Shop 1.0. From my professional web development in 2007, I discovered Adobe Photoshop CS2 is infinitely superior to PaintShop Pro, and I've been kicking myself for not switching a few years earlier. As of 2011, I'm using Photoshop CS5 and still loving it.

The photographs were taken with a Sony Mavica FD-81 digital camera, and later with a Sony Cybershot P-9, and later still with a Sony Cybershot P-10, then with a Sony Alpha a100 and currently with a Sony Alpha a350.

Some HTML source files were reformatted by HTML Tidy, an open-source beautification project by SourceForge. I recommend Tidy for its syntax error reports and optional fixes.

These web pages were once hosted by The River of Phoenix, Arizona, USA from May 2002 until January 2007. However, they failed to handle e-mail properly for several months and I moved the site to my own web server at the Fisher Plaza Data Center, a top-tier co-location facility.

Awards This Site Has Given To Itself

Netscape animation Top 95% of the Web award This site is Braille captioned for the vision impaired I'd rather be watching TV Bottom 95% of the Web
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