I love technology (.org)

Using AutoCAD for urban design and traffic engineering schemes, i often find myself creating hatch pattern for different types of paving.

 The pavements in England are often paved with yorkstone paving, with a width of 600mm and alternate lengths of 900mm and 750mm at the kerb line (and lengths of 900mm all the way to the back of the footway).

Here’s what you should add at the end of both your acad.pat and acadiso.pat files. These files are located either in your Program Files/AutoCAD/support folder or in your Documents & Settings/your username/Application Data/Autodesk/AutoCAD/R/enu/support folder.

*YORKSTONE, 600×900 150 bond
90, 0,0, 0,0.6
0, 0,0, 0,0.9, 0.6,-0.6
0, 0.6,0.75, 0,0.9, 0.6,-0.6

Here’s what it looks like:

Additional resources:

“Control hatch origin” http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/autocadtips/AutoCAD_tips_control_hatch_origin.html

“Different flag paving patterns” http://www.acheson-glover.com/community/flag-paving-patterns.asp 

While setting up this blog, i thought it would be interesting to study which designs were the most popular amongst the Top 20 Technorati blogs.

First, i studied the layouts in terms of sidebar & content locations on the page. The top 20 Technorati blogs all fitted within one of the four following categories:

• sidebar on the left, content in the middle, sidebar on the right
• sidebar on the left, content
• content, sidebar on the right
• content, first sidebar on the right, second sidebar on the far right

Check out the graph below for an overview of the Top technorati blog layouts:

While there are two clear favourites in terms of layouts, it is interesting to note that both have the content on the left.

I then looked at the colour scheme used on the page. You can find the analysis on the graph below:

There is no clear favourite colour; however, i found that most technology oriented blogs favoured a blue colour, while gossip and celebrity blogs favoured red or pink (counted as “others”).

What conclusion can you draw from this? Use a layout with the content on the left side of the page, and use the colour scheme you like

Additional resources:

“10 remarkables (and free) Wordpress themes” http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/01/19/10-remarkable-and-free-wordpress-themes/

“blog design for beginners” http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/02/17/blog-design-for-beginners/