The Final Wooden House by Sou Fujimoto must be the epitome of good environmental design, but at the same time it is amazingly impractical unless you’re a Hobbit and live in The Shire!

Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto designed the wooden bungalow to be small and primitive. The design is meant to highlight the versatility of lumber.

In an ordinary wooden architecture, lumber is effectively differentiated according to functions in various localities precisely because it is so versatile. Columns, beams, foundations, exterior walls, interior walls, ceilings, floorings, insulations, furnishings, stairs, window frames, meaning all, says Fujimoto. However, I thought if lumber is indeed so versatile then why not create architecture by one rule that fulfills all of these functions. I envisioned the creation of new spatiality that preserves primitive conditions of a harmonious entity before various functions and roles differentiated.

Using large beams of 350 mm square profile cedar and piled on top of one another, Fujimoto created the walls, ceiling, floors and built in nooks. This leaves no definitive lines between each of the structure’s components, thus blending the entire interior of the space together. The function of the small home is defined by how the user adapts to the wood structure. The house is meant to bring a kind of harmony between the built environment and the way the human body behaves within the space.

I thought of making an ultimate wooden architecture. It was conceived by just mindlessly stacking 350mm square.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

Fujimoto continues, There are no separations of floor, wall, and ceiling here. A place that one thought was a floor becomes a chair, a ceiling, a wall from various positions. The floor levels are relative and spatiality is perceived differently according to one’s position. Here, people are distributed three-dimensionally in the space. This is a place like an amorphous landscape with a new experience of various senses of distances. Inhabitants discover, rather than being prescribed, various functionalities in these convolutions.

Architects: Sou Fujimoto Architects
Location: Kumamoto, Japan
Photographer: Iwan Baan

An accessibility statement makes a good addition to all web sites. It is not only a place to demonstrate that you are taking accessibility seriously, but more importantly, it should provide extra information for visitors to your site — particularly for those people with disabilities who need to know about the accessibility of the information and services you provide — and a mechanism to receive feedback on accessibility.

Under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), a disability is defined as:

A physical or mental impairment that has a long-term or substantial effect on a person’s ability to carry out day to day tasks.

This ranges from people with physical and sensory impairments to people with diabetes, disfigurements, heart disease and epilepsy.

Accessibility, therefore, can be viewed as the “ability to access” the functionality of a system or entity. Furthermore, accessibility is a somewhat general term used to describe the degree to which a product (e.g. device, service and environment) is accessible to as many people as possible. Accessibility is often used to focus on people with disabilities and their right of access to entities, often through use of assistive technology.

A dimension of accessibility is web accessibility. Web accessibility refers to the practice of making websites usable by people of all abilities and disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users can have equal access to information and functionality. In many countries this has led to initiatives, laws and regulations that aim toward providing universal access to the internet.

Digital Web Magazine has a great article on whether accessibility statements are useful, which is well worth a read.

The main points of consideration that can be garnered from the article are as follows:

1. Make the accessibility link prominent and provide it in a consistent location so that website visitors can find it easily.
2. Provide rich content that explains how to use the accessibility features provided, rather than just listing the features themselves.
3. Separate the content into sections and provide headings for each section.
4. Provide contact information in various formats so that website visitors can directly contact the team responsible for accessibility queries.
5. Actively promote feedback from website visitors. Use comments to continually improve the website.
6. Provide a known barriers section which details inaccessible areas of the website along with alternative ways of obtaining the information or services.
7. List technical and conformance information at the end of the accessibility statement. This will allow the information to be readily available, whilst not being placed in a prominent position.

Your accessibility statement will be organic — you may only start with a few lines but as your site develops in terms of accessibility, and your understanding of the accessibility of the site develops, so will your statement. As it can often be created and then forgotten about, it is worthwhile taking time every so often to check through the statement to ensure that it is up-to-date and reflects the work done to enhance the site’s accessibility.

What do we need the skin of a car for? What’s its purpose? Does it need to be made of metal? In reality we don’t. Wouldn’t it be great if we could have a car with a human like skin that covered all the essential mechanical and structural components of the vehicle. These questions were addressed by the BMW Group design team behind the GINA project.

The key to affecting the development of tomorrow’s mobility lies in our readiness to challenge what is established and in the ability to present new options.

The design team was not just interested in answering the question of how the car of the future will look but primarily wished to explore the creative freedom that it has to offer. Both of these aspects are affected by the requirements that future cars are expected to meet. All ideas that the GINA presents were therefore derived from the needs and demands of customers concerning the aesthetic and functional characteristics of their car and their desire to express individuality and lifestyle. The GINA has an almost seamless outer skin, a flexible textile cover that stretches across a moveable substructure. Individual functions are only revealed if and when they are needed.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

GINA produces dramatically different solutions that affect the design and functionality of future cars. The GINA Light Visionary Model is an optical expression of selective, future-oriented concepts which provide an example of the manner and extent of this transformation.

You can see more of the GINA on BMW’s web-tv website.

If you’re looking for a stunningly-designed, futuristic-looking, eco-friendly motor vehicle, you need not look any further than the Aptera Typ-1. Forget the pioneering, yet disastrous, General Motors EV1 or the ‘celebrities favourite’, the Toyota Prius, this car has all the looks and innovative technology to match.

The Aptera Typ-1 is a 2-seat, three wheeled passenger vehicle. It is available in both all-electric and series hybrid configurations, at around £20,000/$30,000. Aerodynamic optimisation using computer-based simulations and light-weight composite construction yields a vehicle which consumes only 80 Wh/mi at 55 mph, about half the energy needed to propel the General Motors EV1. On the battery electric model, this means a 120 mile range on 10 kWh of electricity, or around 340 mpg price equivalent. On the hybrid vehicle, it leads to projections of 130 mpg on gasoline alone, or 300 mpg if plugged in every 120 miles.

Aptera Motors emphasizes that safety was not traded off for efficiency, citing crash test simulations and more recently component crush testing as indicating excellent survivability–on par with more conventional vehicles. However, real-world crash test results are forthcoming.

The Aptera Typ-1 features roof-mounted solar panels, always-on climate control, and keyless ignition and entry. High-drag side mirrors are replaced with rear-view cameras, and an in-car touch screen PC serves as entertainment, navigation, and communication system.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

Take a look at the Aptera Typ-1 Promo Video.

The official website can be found at http://www.aptera.com.

The first step to increasing your site’s visibility on the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN is to help their respective robots crawl and index your site.

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file. Conversely and importantly, webmasters can also notify the search engines about the existence and importance of pages with a sitemap.xml file. (Both files are placed in the root directory of the domain.)

Fortunately for the webmaster, the major search engines provide various tools to help manage both Sitemap and Robot files.

To gain an understanding of both ‘protocols’, I’ll discuss them briefly below.

Sitemaps (Inclusion Protocol)

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

Sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting Sitemaps to a search engine, a webmaster is only helping that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site(s). Using this protocol does not guarantee that web pages will be included in search indexes, nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked in search results.

The following is a cut-down version of the sitemap.xml for this website. WordPress, via a plugin, automatically updates this file each time a new post or page is written.

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-10-08T14:50:16+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>
http://www.simonwhatley.co.uk/big-city-little-people
</loc>
<lastmod>2008-10-08T14:50:16+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

More information about sitemaps can be found on the Sitemaps.org website.

Robots (Exclusion Protocol)

The robot exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorise and archive web sites. The standard complements Sitemaps, a robot inclusion standard for websites.

A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorisation of the site as a whole.

The protocol, however, is purely advisory. It relies on the cooperation of the web robot, so that marking an area of a site out of bounds with robots.txt does not guarantee privacy. Some web site administrators have tried to use the robots file to make private parts of a website invisible to the rest of the world, but the file is necessarily publicly available and its content is easily checked by anyone with a web browser.

For example, the following tells all crawlers not to enter four directories of a website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

Exclusion can also be achieved on a page-level basis using a Meta-tag. This is a tag that would be placed in the HTML head of of a web page. The robots attribute controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not.

A common example could be as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> 
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-GB" xml:lang="en"> 
 <head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> 
	<title>Simon Whatley</title>
	<meta http-equiv="robots" content="index,follow" />
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

A word of caution though, Meta tags are not the best option to prevent search engines from indexing content of your website.

More information about Robots.txt files can be found on the Robotstxt.org website.

Webmaster Tools

The top 3 search providers all have their own webmaster tools admin interface. The Google offering is the most advanced, but it’s good practice to use and submit information to all three.

Links to their services are provided below:

• Google Webmasters
• Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Live Search Webmaster Centre

Ask doesn’t have an interface. However, you can still ping their Submission Service using the URL http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap= in conjunction with your sitemap URL.

Further Information

• Sitemap Generator
• Sitemap 3rd Party porgrams and websites
• Webmaster Toolkit

They’re Not Pets, Susan, says a stern father who has just shot a bumblebee, its wings sparkling in the evening sunlight; a lone office worker, less than an inch high, looks out over the river in his lunch break, Dreaming of Packing it all In; and a tiny couple share a Last Kiss against the soft neon lights of the city at midnight. Mixing sharp humour with a delicious edge of melancholy, Little People in the City brings together the collected photographs of Slinkachu, a street-artist who for several years has been leaving little hand-painted people in the bustling city to fend for themselves, waiting to be discovered.

Oddly enough, even when you know they are just hand-painted figurines, you can’t help but feel that their plights convey something of our own fears about being lost and vulnerable in a big, bad city.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

Slinkachu has a website and a blog.

The book titled Little People in the City: The Street Art of Slinkachu with many more great miniture scenes can be bought from Amazon.

In the early 20th Century, Henry Ford realised a dream and brought the motor vehicle to the masses with the Model-T Ford. Skip forward a hundred years and personalised flight is the new arena. Igarashi Design has introduced a single seat helicopter with war-like looks. In a break away from Moller’s Skycar, the helicopter is more reminiscent of a BMW C1 motorcycle than a flying machine. You’ll need to take pilot training before flying one as only one person can sit and operate this helicopter.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

You can see more of Igarashi Design’s work on the ID Performance website.

Designer Bradford Waugh has certainly thought out of the box with his new bicycle called Nulla. Nulla, the Italian word for nothing, is a minimalist bicycle concept. Waugh named it that way for lack of central hubs or chain-drive, giving it a very minimal visual weight. Ditch that fancy car and buy a stylish bicycle, is what you will say once you have this one with you. With such a clean, simple and sleek look, this bicycle is surely going to change your mind whether to buy a car, or bike or bicycle. This futuristic bicycle provides deep coverage, good appearance and comfort perfect for riding and skating. However, it is not sure whether you will technically be able to ride this bike since the load experienced between the wheels and the frame may be too great.

What is clear, however, is that it has a futuristic appeal that would look great in conjunction with the hugely successful British Olympic Cycling Team.

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

The Rim clock by Australian designer Jansen Lye is a unique timepiece. Nothing irritates more than tampering with something that fundamentally works. But there’s something about Lye’s reinterpretation of the humble clock that, frankly, works. The hour and minute hands have been positioned on the outer edge of the clock face rather than the normal clock look - the hour and minutes hands in center. The unusual features make it a distinctive looking product that imbues style on any space. Its minimalist design that sits well in any environment. From your home, office space to living rooms or kitchen walls. Clearly it will make us all feel like we’re four again as it will take some time before you can read the clock hour and minutes, but it’s visually superb!

(Click on the images to see a larger view)

A common need in SQL is the ability to iterate over a list as if it were an array. In SQL it is not possible to declare arrays, unlike other programming languages such as ColdFusion, ActionScript and Java. Fortunately, there is a way around this problem: use a User-Defined Functions (UDFs) to create a tabular version of the data. Arrays are, after all, essentially tabular data (at their simplest, one dimension level).

A User-Defined Function, is a function provided by the user of a program or environment. In SQL databases, a user-defined function provides a mechanism for extending the functionality of the database server by adding a function that can be evaluated in SQL statements.

The Function Code

Below is the complete function definition:

CREATE FUNCTION dbo.udf_ListToTable
(
	@LIST 		NVARCHAR(4000), 
	@DELIMITER 	NVARCHAR(10) = ','
)
RETURNS @ListTable TABLE 
(
	Item NVARCHAR(200)
)
AS
BEGIN
	DECLARE @LenDel 	INT
	DECLARE @Pos 		INT
	DECLARE @Item 		NVARCHAR(200)
 
	--Get the length of the delimiter, use hack to get around LEN(' ') = 0 issue
	SET @LenDel = LEN(@DELIMITER + '|') - 1 
 
	SET @Pos = CHARINDEX(@DELIMITER, @LIST)
	WHILE @Pos > 0
	BEGIN
		--Get the item
		SET @Item = SUBSTRING(@LIST, 1, @Pos-1)
		--Add it to the table (if not empty string) 
		IF LEN(LTRIM(@Item)) > 0
			INSERT @ListTable (Item) VALUES (LTRIM(@Item))
		--Remove the item from the list
		SET @LIST = STUFF(@LIST, 1, @Pos+@LenDel-1, '')
		--Get the position of the next delimiter
		SET @Pos = CHARINDEX(@DELIMITER, @LIST)		
	END
 
	--Add the last item to the table (if not empty string) 
	IF LEN(LTRIM(@LIST)) > 0
		INSERT @ListTable (Item) VALUES (LTRIM(@LIST))
 
	RETURN 
END
GO

The function simply loops over the list passed into the function. Each list item is then inserted into the variable named @ListTable, which is of type TABLE. The @ListTable variable is then returned out of the function and can be handled the same as any other table.

The Function In Use

A simple demonstration is as follows:

INSERT INTO tableName (column1, column2, column3, column4)
SELECT @variable1, @variable2, myTable.item, GETDATE()
FROM dbo.udf_ListToTable(@list,',') AS myTable

In this example, we insert the same information (@variable1, @variable2) for every instance of an item found in myTable.

This is useful, for example, if you want to apply a setting to a group of users. The group of users could be contained in a list that needs to be parsed as a table, whilst the individual setting details are contained in the other variables.

Download the Code

Download the code, rename the file to .sql and run on your database instance. You will then be able to reference the function in your Stored Procedures.