I have two projects right now; everything else is in cold-storage.

Most of my creative energy is going to the chandelier project. It is both complex and ambitious, so I’m running into a lot of obstacles; nothing is going as smoothly as I’d hoped it might. A month in, all I have to show for my effort is one test board, which sort of blinks but doesn’t really work yet, and a stack of sandblasted glass cylinders. Oh, well: part of the point was to stretch my skills, and I’m certainly doing that. This is a whole new level of electronics complexity, and there’s a lot of straight-up fabrication work, too.

I bought a drill press today: a 12-speed, heavy-duty, floor-standing drill press with a 3/4 horsepower motor. It’s a big old tank of a machine, likely as old as I am. I then built a jig out of plywood, ABS pipe, and a bucket. The goal is to bore a hole into the end of each of seven glass vases, which I can then use to hang them (upside down) and which will provide airflow to cool the electronics inside.

Once set up, I added a small fountain pump and a lot of water, for cooling. As I drill out the end of the glass, the fountain keeps fresh water circulating over the cutting area, and if I drill slowly enough the glass stays cool and doesn’t crack. It’s a slow process, but I hope I can have half of the cylinders done by the end of the day tomorrow.

The other project is my ongoing development of the Radian language. I don’t really talk about it here, because it has its own blog, but I’m still working hard and am increasingly pushing it up into “useful tool” territory. Recent work has focused on the string library, and I’m currently deep in Unicode territory building the uppercase, lowercase, and case-insensitive transformations.

I’m increasingly thinking about the human end of this problem: I’m now in the zone where advanced curious users could probably make something of the tool. In addition to all of its internal data management, it can read and write files and manipulate text – that’s a good start. Somehow I need to find the people who want this thing, and then I need to have a good experience ready when I manage to pique their curiosity: documentation, examples, a good installer. I think I need to decide what point I’m going to call “good enough”, in terms of basic built-in features, and when I reach it I should redirect my efforts toward documentation and recruitment.

I can stand to spend some time doing optimization work, anyway: there’s a lot of room for intelligence in the Radian semantic model which I have taken almost no time to exploit.