About

This site was set up by Andy Collins a thirty-something software engineer with too much time on his hands. There is the hope that it might have some information someone else finds useful.

Whilst I've been building and racing "Random Orbit", I've made many good friends and been given a great deal of good advice. I've also surfed around a fair bit looking for clues.

Here are some of the places I've found and people I've met.

Links

Hovercraft links.

The Hovercraft Club of Great Britain(HCGB). The governing body for hovercrafting in the UK. The site has some information about the history of hovercraft, membership details and the bulletin board is a useful place to ask questions.

Ed Hurn's Race Reports. Ed has been keeping this meeting by meeting race report site for a few years now. He started in Juniors, did rather well at that and is now proving to be handy in F1

Overdraft team's web site. Here you will find a good write up on how to hoverize the Yamaha TZR engine.

Composite materials. Not directly about hovercraft, this site is a mine of information about various composites, their properties and use. Worth a look just for curiosities sake!

Web tools

In building this site, a variety of different tools were used. Here is a list.

Ultra Edit This is undoubtedly the best text editor I've come across. It features syntax highlighting that recognises the most popular languages (C & HTML included) but can can be expanded to cope with any other you choose. Far too many features to deal with here but truly brilliant. Sadly only for Windows:-(

Htmlpp A very nifty file pre-processor. Again, far too many features to name, but includes variable definition and include files so that you can write some code once and use it many times. Makes web page writing a lot easier.

HTML Tidy A neat program to make sure your HTML is compliant with the various standards, which will improve the chances that it will look OK in a variety of browsers. This is now shipped with Ultra Edit.

Quanta Plus. Quanta is a very nice Web site creation tool. It has a good collection of features and great on-line manuals. This site was built largely using Quanta, need I say more ;-)

The Gimp. The Gnu Image Manipulation Program or GIMP is one of the best graphics editors anywhere and it's free!. It has a huge feature list including a scripting language to automate those repetitive tasks and a good community to support it

Xenu's link sleuth. A nice tool for check that a sites links are still valid.

(c)2003 Andy Collins. If you find any errors please email.