My first attempt at a rolling ball structure, (or 'ball machine' as my 3 ½ year old son calls it) was made from ply wood and galvanised steel wire.  I wanted to experiment with how to make tracks, spirals and switching mechanisms.

I had a scrap of 12mm ply lying around, so I thought this would make a good 'frame'. I fashioned two 'feet' from another scrap and gluing these to one edge, which enabled the board to stand on one edge.

Our family had a wonderful long weekend, over Easter 2010, at Jindabyne, in southern NSW, Australia.

Wandering along the lake foreshore, at Jindabyne, we came across an exhibition of outdoor sculptures. This was the Lakelight Sculpture Exhibition, an annual event at Jindabyne, which I must recommend if you're in the area around Easter.

One of the most memorable sculptures was a youth entry called 'The Marble Maze' by Dylan Brown (who is 13 years old). This was an interactive sculpture of welded wire, funnels, buckets and golf balls. An attached sign invited passers-by to try their hand at climbing up step-ladders and releasing golf-balls into the funnels (with the disclaimer that it wouldn't always do what it was supposed to). The golf balls would go hurtling along the wire tracks of the sculpture, and eventually land with a thud into a bucket at the bottom. Though the occasional ball would be flung off the track in a completely random manner. I was quite fascinated. Our two children, loved it too.

Kinetic Art

Rolling ball sculptures, also known as rolling ball machines, are a type of kinetic art. What's kinetic art? Well the variety of materials, styles and techniques used is endless, but basically kinetic art must have moving parts or depend on motion. The motion can be generated by:

I had added a date field to Drupals user profile, (via the Profile module), but the date is stored as a serialised array.
To extract this I used the following:

// Get $user like this so we load the profile values too
$uid = $GLOBALS['user']->uid;
$user = user_load(array('uid' => $uid));
// Format date
$val = $user->profile_duedate;
$datedue = mktime(0, 0, 0, $val['month'], $val['day'], $val['year']);
$date = format_date($datedue, 'custom', 'l dS F Y');
print $date;


I've just go a new laptop with Windows7 (professional) on it. Now I want to do some Drupal development on this so I want Apache, MySQL and PHP installed. Heres the issues I've had:

Here are some links to iPhone related stuff in Drupal:

• iPhone Themes
• iPhone Project
• iUI
• iUI Framework
• Handsetdetection
• Joe Hewitt @ Ajaxian

These balloon tips are really cool - and they supposedly work on the iPhone. Wonderful!
I'll give the iPhone a test in a minute. Need an extra library (Explorer Canvas) for Internet Explorer thought...

Ahh I just found this. I might give this a go with this site. Though I alsowant to get the theme optimised for the iPhone too.