The floorplan is now mostly complete except for the complicated east end of the cathedral. I have finished roofing the nave and the west transepts and have built the Bell Harry Tower (although I’m not sure if it’s tall enough). It’s starting to look rather good now!

View looking along the nave towards the Bell Harry Tower:

Overhead view of the whole cathedral:

Vaulting inside the tower:

Since the last set of photos, I have had to rebuild the area that will be underneath the Bell Harry tower (in the middle). The reason for this is that I didn’t take into account where the vaulting in the NW and SW transepts needed to start. I have also built up more of the quire and added more to the east. The floorplan should be fully complete shortly after I get another two 32×32 green baseplates this week.

Quire:

Overhead view:

I started building at the beginning of December last year and have been going since then (so about 2.5 months so far).

The first challenge was to pick a scale that would suit the rather restrictive ‘resolution’ that building with Lego has. Things like arches work best when there are an even number of studs to bridge. I also wanted to ensure that the scale was as precise as possible. In the end, the scale that I chose means that the whole thing fits onto 7×2 32×32 baseplates (or 224 studs long and 64 studs wide). That works out to 1.78m by 0.51m (5′10″ by 1′8″). As a scale ratio, that works out at about 1:93. The Bell Harry tower will be 1m tall (3′2″).

Owing to the size of the model, I made the decision to split it into four parts. The first part forms the west half of the nave and the two west towers. The second part forms the east part of the nave. The third part forms the four transepts, quire and Bell Harry tower. The fourth part forms the eastern end of the cathedral, including the Trinity chapel. While I am trying to make the model as realistic as possible, I have to make a few design liberties. The main omission will be the crypt - without cutting through the baseplates (or building up to ground level), this would be too difficult. Also, I have to use light grey bricks (light bluish grey to be precise!) because any more appropriate colours don’t offer enough choice regarding different bricks (I have tried to use bright colours for bricks that are purely to support my structure, such as to support the floor of the quire). And obviously, Lego doesn’t allow me to embellish the model with all the gargoyles and statues that the real thing has!

I have mostly completed the nave and western towers. I am currently working through the quire and transepts and planning out the floor plan before building upwards.

Here are some photos of the construction so far:

East end of the nave:

Nave vaulting detail:

Lots of bricks!

Building the west end of the nave:

Completed nave and western towers (notice the windows built using lots of transparent 1×1 plates):

Looking down the inside of the nave (the 1×1 round tan plates are the ‘legs’ for pews made with 1×4 panels):

Building arches across a gap of three studs is not easy!:

Prototyping the choir stalls and panelling in the quire. The stalls are built out from the walls using a stack of plates. They are held to the wall using a 1×4 brick with studs on the side and are supported at the other end by a pier with a tile on top.

The quire and west transepts are taking shape:

The whole thing as it was on 18 Jan 2009:

Current latest photo (10 Feb 2009). I am starting to plan out the floor plan of the eastern half of the cathedral. Note the two chapels to the east of the east transepts - they are offset from straight by about 30 degrees and as a result are just sitting on top of a number of tiles. They are held to the baseplate by only three studs.

Further photos as well as larger versions of the above are available from here.

So far I have worked my way through just shy of 12,000-15,000 bricks. I think that the whole structure will require something in the order of 25,000 bricks. I will update my blog with further progress over the next couple of months. Right now I am stalled waiting for another stock of 1×3 bricks

A big thanks to all the folk on BrickLink - they will know who they are by my hoovering up of much of their stock of light grey bricks!

So, in no particular order, here they are:

• Be less lazy (aka. stop putting things off until “later”)
• Get to know some people near where I live (because I just haven’t had time up to now!)
• Build a scale model of Canterbury Cathedral in Lego (this will be the hardest of the lot!)
• Walk the South West Coast Path (I’ve already started on this one having walked from Studland to Swanage yesterday - just another 623 miles to go!
• Explore more of Dorset (it’s a big county and I’ve hardly seen any of it since moving here nearly two years ago)
• Start saving for a deposit towards a house (and hope that the market doesn’t start recovering until the end of 2010!)

We shall see how far I get with these this time next year!

Which is all fine and well, but they have made a slight faux pas with Wales. Along the border with England, Wales is written as “An Bhreatain Bheag” as opposed to the more usual “Cymru”. Turns out that An Bhreatain Bheag is Gaelic for Wales!

If you are bored, you can read it in PDF form here (25MB download).

One of the biggest new things that we’re using is Grails. Grails is a neat web application framework that builds on the well-known enterprise Java stuff like Spring and Hibernate. It also uses the Groovy language.

Obviously jumping into something like this is a huge change. It has meant that we have had to redesign the whole system so that it fits the framework and we’ve had to change the way that some stuff works. It’s not often that you get the opportunity to completely start from scratch to build a new version of software.

One of the reasons why we were able to justify doing this is that Grails is such a brilliant environment for rapidly developing applications. For example, we have been able to pretty much build a system that functions and could be useful within just a few weeks. Obviously there’s still an awful lot of polish needed before it can be put in front of paying customers, but with Grails we’re able to get to that point much more quickly.

Also, from an engineering point of view, Grails is a lot neater to work with. It uses the model-view-controller paradigm from the off and pretty much forces you into sticking with it. This is good engineering practice, particularly as we are able to much more explicitly segregate application logic and view rendering and the domain model.

Another important advantage for us is that we can reuse a significant proportion of our existing code that was written in Java. Groovy code compiles to the same Java bytecode and runs in a normal Java virtual machine. This makes integration of Java and Groovy code a doddle.

Groovy has a huge pile of features that can improve developer productivity. For example, it introduces untyped variables, closures and lists/maps as explicit syntactic entities. It is also totally object oriented - all the primitive types are now used as their class equivalents. It looks a bit strange to be calling a method on a number, but this is now quite useful. Groovy makes querying the database a trivial activity - dynamic finder methods make it quick to write simple queries or you can use a Hibernate query language (HQL) builder to construct an HQL query if you want more complexity.

Untyped variables are useful in some areas. It makes it useful to just define a variable without caring what type it has. Of course, you can still have everything fully typed if you want - static type analysis at compile time really is a good thing and can’t be ignored completely!

We haven’t yet found uses for all the features of Groovy and Grails - stuff like metaprogramming looks like it may be useful but is not yet necessary for anything that we do. Obviously learning a new language and framework means that after a short time you have to go back and refactor some stuff now that you’ve worked out the proper way of doing things, but even so, we have seen a huge gain in productivity.

The downsides? Well, it clearly new to us, so we’ve had to learn it. And this is on-the-job learning too! Some of the documentation is out of date or not quite up to scratch - this is noticeable as Grails is only recently maturing as a quality framework and stuff has changed a lot up to around a year ago. Grails has stabilised nicely though and we are seeing a continual improvement in the quality and availability of the documentation.

One risk that we considered was that Grails and Groovy were relatively new technologies. It’s clearly a risk that stuff might change or that they go out of favour.

All in all, Grails and Groovy appeared at just the right time that we could get started with them. They have proved a godsend to us and may possibly be the enabling technology that allows our business to succeed.

The good news is that my thesis is now finished! It went off to the bookbinders (all 366 pages of it) a couple of weeks ago and I should have a bound copy in my hands in the next couple of weeks. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet that it is finished - I suspect that will only happen when I have a copy of it all bound up! We are hoping to put together two journal papers in the next month or two, mainly covering the empirical experiment and analysis that we did.

The only disappointing aspect of my PhD is that I will have to wait until next July before I can graduate as I missed the deadline for the November graduations by a week. It wasn’t for want of trying though, but I was more concerned about getting everything right rather than rushing it and missing stuff.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get everything tidy and sorted out. Hopefully by the end of the year I can be properly organised and everything will have returned to normality. Not that I’m sure what “normality” is yet!

The game featured chickens, fish, bombs, teleports, masks and shields. The idea was to solve some rather fiendish puzzles to collect all the masks on each of 15 levels and then find the exit door.

I was quite pleased to discover that an XOR remake was created a few years ago by Ovine. This features the exact same15 levels as in the old 8-bit version.

Well, after a few weeks on-and-off, I have just managed to complete all 15 levels!

It is quite satisfying to have completed something that you started 20 years ago and has been nagging ever since!

There’s an interesting page about the history of XOR here.