Yes, there’s been nothing on this blog for literally months.  Had you noticed?  I didn’t, not really.

And it wasn’t as if there was nothing happening on this end of the keyboard.  I have been developing the app that I announced some time back.  It has not gone quickly, but most of the blame is on me.  I picked a very data-centric model, and then had to develop all the data!  It’s a conversion utility, and it converts between three different systems, and several different dimensions.

By “dimensions” I mean things like Mass, Length, Time, Temperature, Velocity, and Volume.  Do you want to know how many kilometers per hour there are in five feet per second.  My app can tell you.  I don’t know if you need that particular conversion, but maybe someone does.  It can do it.  I call my app:

Converter Plus

Yes, very boring title, but it’s not a game darnit, so boring isn’t a liability.  You might wonder why the word “Plus” is in there.  And if you do, there’s a reason for it.  The app also does some fraction conversion and calculation.  You know, what fraction corresponds to 15.7843?  Or what decimal corresponds to 2 ⁷/₁₉?

And if you happen to want to actually perform fraction arithmetic, well, my app can do that, too.  It can add, subtract, multiply and divide two fractions!  But, “Why,” you ask, “would I need a fraction calculator in a conversion utility?”  The answer is simple.

When it comes to construction and some other activities, American length measurements, in particular, use fractions.  In the USA pretty much all our rulers, yardsticks, and tape measures are delimited in fractions of an inch.  In particular, even fractions:  One-half; one-quarter; one-quarter and so on down to one-sixteenth.  Occasionally you might find one that goes down to one-thirty-second.  If you have a blueprint or other kind of plan that indicates that something is 12 1/8 inches long, and you’re going to lay 25 of them end-to-end, how long will the resultant length be.  Simply multiply 12 1/8 * 25.  Piece of cake.  However, while in our schools fraction arithmetic is definitely covered, most pupils come away from it hoping to heck they never actually have to do it in the real world because it is seen as quite complicated.  Thus, faced with such a problem in real life, it can be quite a task to get it right.  And the attempt will probably fail the first few tiimes.  But with Converter Plus, it’s a snap!

I’ll be posting more about it soon.  Stay tuned (or subscribe to my RSS feed!).