www.glassblower.info blog

When I was looking at the home page of www.glassblower.info, I noticed the date range of the visitor counter, a print-screen is shown here:

What caught my eye was the 2002 date — now that we’re into the new year of 2012, that’s ten years ago!

So, I went back looking through some old paperwork I had saved about the original setup of www.glassblower.info and wanted to share some fun facts:

• The Apache (web server software) log files indeed started on April 11, 2002 (as shown in the counter above)
• During the first few months, as the first dozen web pages were setup, the average number of visitors per day was in the single digits.
• Those first few months were spent on a static public IP address, but without a domain name (none had been chosen yet).
• The domain name glassblower.info was first registered the late evening (9:17 P.M. Eastern) of July 9, 2002 using an inexpensive registrar named “$10 domains” which does not even exist any more. Yeah, I’ve always been a “night owl”.
• At that time, I believe Network Solutions was charging $35 per year for domain name registrations, so by comparison, the $18 I paid for the first two years ($9 per year) of domain name registration, using $10 Domains, was comparatively quite a bargain.
• Due to the evening registration, whois records show the official registration at 01:17:57 UTC on July 10, 2002 (the next calendar date).
• Want to know something really interesting about that date? If you look at my recent blog about how I got started in glassblowing, you’ll see my first hands-on glassblowing experience was at Wheaton Village (now WheatonArts) on July 10, 2000 — EXACTLY TWO YEARS TO THE DAY before the registration of this domain name!
• If you are not familiar with the “Internet Archive Wayback Machine“, please take the time to visit it at http://www.archive.org.
• The Wayback Machine stores contemporaneous copies of websites at various points in time. As of today (January 7, 2012), the Wayback Machines stores 167 captures (copies) of www.glassblower.info!
• It’s been fun to use the Wayback Machine to see what various websites looked like in the past — as you would expect: typically much smaller, with dated (or no) menu structures, no Flash animation, etc.
• The first Wayback Machine copy of www.glassblower.info was recorded on August 11, 2002 — just one month after the domain name was registered!
• That August 11, 2002 version of www.glassblower.info had a total of only 12 hyperlinks! (12 web pages linked to the home page), below is a copy of the top of the web page:

• I looked a lot younger back then!
• I wanted to mention the four generation of hardware used over the last ten years to power www.glassblower.info:
  • The first (2002) hosting platform was a Cobalt RaQ 4r (“R” for RAID1 disk drives). It had a single AMD K6 450 MHz processor, but was plenty powerful to run multiple website, host DNS, and also emails, for one or several small companies. Sun acquired Cobalt in December 2000, but because of the bursting of the “Internet Bubble”, Sun retired the Cobalt products December 2003.
  • Next was an inexpensive spare HP Pavilion desktop PC running Linux (CentOS). This was single processor and non-RAID, and was plenty fast enough to run www.glassblower.info.
  • The next big jump, circa mid-2006 was to a Dell PowerEdge 6400 which had quad Intel P3 Xeon processors running at 700 MHz and with six disk drives (three RAID1 pairs of 18GB, 36GB, and 73GB SCSI). Mid-2006 is also when I took my PHP and MySQL class, and added those technologies, which is especially visible in the Glassblower.info Geographical Super-Search.
  • The current website (starting from 2009) runs on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 which has dual Intel 3.06 GHz processors, RAID10 with 292 GB usable GB (584 GB native) with a hot spare drive (in case of drive failure).

I started work on a custom 6-sided steel glassblowing mold, based on a pyramid (faceted cone).

In the process I uncovered a quick and easy math-based craft project which you may find suitable for your elementary school (or older) children. My brother’s kids seemed to enjoy this project yesterday during Thanksgiving.

Basically, with only a protractor, scissors or paper cutter, ruler, and a few pieces of tape, you and your kids can create n-sided pyramids. In other words, 3, 4, 5, or 6-sided pyramids that are fun to make, and if decorated, can make some really nice paper hats, kind of like Wizard Hats! As well as perhaps teaching a little bit of math along the way!

This project started from the wonderful online article Compound Angles – Calculations and Jig for Making for N-sided Pyramids by Tony Beugelsdijk of the Albuquerque Woodworkers Association. I have an extra copy of that PDF stored
here (if you have a problem with the first link).

There is some really interesting math — algebra and trigonometry — which I’ll go over at the end of the article, if you are interested, but for now, here is a summary table if your goal is to have some math-based fun with a kids craft project, and make some hats!

I’m going to make the last one — a 5-sided hat which is 4 inches on each side and 11 inches tall.

1. Start with the protractor on the corner of a piece of standard letter-size paper, and place a dot at 10 degrees.
   
   
2. Draw a 5-inch line along the dot to the corner of the paper
   
   
3. Draw another line from the point where you ended to the other corner of the paper.
   
   
4. You will need to hold a stack of 5 pieces of paper, and cut out the isosceles triangles you just drew. This step is especially easy with a paper cutter
   
   
5. You will then hopefully have five identical triangles
   
   
6. Which you need to tape together their long sides.
   
   
7. Now (while flat) would be a good time to decorate the sides!
   
   
8. Tape the final edges together, you’ve got a beautiful hat!
   
   

If you would prefer a flat-topped hat, you could create a truncated pyramid (Pyramidal Frustum), using sides which look more like this (for a 6-sided two-inch-to-four-inch truncated pyramid).

How are the angles in the table above calculated? Glad you asked! Tony Beugelsdijk’s article gives worked-through examples of the math, and from those, I created this Excel spreadsheet (also available in Excel 97-2003 format) which looks like this (from the last example in the table, and the hat we made above):

In Excel 2007, typing the keyboard shortcut (toggle) ctrl+` (that is the “Grave Accent” key which is above the tab key), shows the formulas:

A1: n
B1: 5
C1: number of sides

A2: h
B2: 13.6
C2: vertical height of pyramid (not length of side)

A3: a
B3: 5
C3: base length

A4: Theta θ
B4: =ATAN(SQRT((2*h/a)^2+k^2))*(180/PI())
C4: or
D4: =90-theta
E4: degrees

A5: Phi Φ
B5: =ATAN((2*h)/(a*k))*(180/PI())
C5: first angle to be cut on the table saw

A6: b
B6: =SQRT(h^2+(a*k/2)^2)
C6: lenth of side (face altitude), this is a piece of legal-size paper

A7: k
B7: =TAN(PI()/2-PI()/n)
C7: used in various calculations