Welcome
Willkommen
Bienvenu

Welcome to Oliver Walter's web page.

• I am an engineer and technical translator; I translate technical texts from German or French into English. Click on this link to see my translator profile at ProZ.com:
  
  
  
  My ProZ.com profile
  
  

Your computer's IP address is:

You can click on this image to go to a page where you can input an IP address and it will inform you where that address is registered.

• Cheap international telephone calls from the UK.
  This page is a list of access codes which you can use to make cheap phone calls from the UK. You dial an access number to start the process and the cost to you is the cost of the call to that access number (this is a service charge plus an access charge - see below). They all work like this:
  1. You dial the access number - that determines the per-minute cost of the call.
  2. You hear a recorded message telling you what to do (charging has started, so you'll always pay something, even if the call is unsuccessful). You always need to dial the full number, e.g. 0049xxxx for Germany, which you can do without waiting for the end of the message.
  3. At the end of the number, you press the hash key (#) or perhaps another one such as the star key, depending on which service you use.
  4. From that moment, the call proceeds like a normal phone call.
  
  NOTE: The cost of the call is the sum of two components. One is the Service Charge: the rate charged by the company that provides the cheap phoning service; the other is the Access Charge: the rate charged by your telephone company (e.g. BT, VirginMedia, Talktalk, EE) which may be greater than the service charge. Click the hyperlink for more information about this, or here for the Access Rates of some named phone companies. This page can calculate the total cost of a phone call using cheapcalls.
  
  The listed countries are those that are likely to be of interest to me and the people I know. For the full lists of available destinations, click on the links at the tops of the columns on the page. To see the full lists you usually need to click on a link called something like "Rates" or "Destinations" on the home page of the web site.
  
  
• Explanations and hopes about the Internet;
  a page of questions and answers for young people by the inventor of the "World-Wide Web", Tim Berners-Lee
  
  
• Article in The Register on 12 April 2006
  about Prof. Steve Jones' talk about evolution and creationism, given at the Royal Society on 11 April
  
  
• The Royal Society's archive of downloadable podcasts of lectures (some sound-only, some video and sound).
  These include Steve Jones on evolution (16 May 2008), Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web (22 Sep 2003, to watch, not download), Bill Bryson on "nearly everything" (13 May 2008) and over fifty more.
  
  
• The Institution of Engineering and Technology (formerly the IEE and the IIE)
  
  
• The Chartered Institute of Linguists
  
  
• The Institute of Translation and Interpreting
  
  
• Physics jokes (with explanations)
  Physics jokes
  Physics jokes (and some illustrations)
  These are some web pages containing lots of jokes of various types. Some can only be appreciated by people who have at least a little understanding of physics. Examples:
  
  
  
  1. Q: What do you call the sum of the diagonal elements of the tensor of inertia? A: The spur of the moment.
     
  2. CAUTION: The Mass of This Product Contains the Energy Equivalent of 85 Million Tons of TNT per Net Ounce of Weight.
  3. Two atoms were walking down the street. One turns to the other and says,
     "Oh, no! I think I'm an ion!"
     The other responds, "Are you sure?"
     "Yes, I'm positive!"
  
  
• Music jokes
  This is a large web page containing many jokes about musical instruments and their players. Examples:
  
  
  
  1. How do you tell the difference between a violinist and a dog?
     The dog knows when to stop scratching.
  2. How many clarinetists does it take to change a lightbulb?
     Only one, but he'll go through a whole box of bulbs before he finds just the right one.
     
  3. Small wonder we have so much trouble with air pollution in the world when so much of it has passed through saxophones.
  4. What is a gentleman?
     Somebody who knows how to play the trombone, but doesn't.
  5. What's the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?
     With a drum machine you only have to punch the information in once.
  6. What's an accordion good for?
     Learning how to fold a map.
  
  
• Alfred Robinson's seminal 1958 report "On the Use of Quaternions in Simulation of Rigid-Body Motion".
  This is a re-creation made from a photocopy by using a scanner, OCR software and a word processor. At present (25 October 2006 + small corrections in Appendix A part 1, 24 Feb 2009) I have completed sections I to V of the main part and parts 1 and 2 of Appendix A.
  The following is the original Table of Contents (with original page numbers, not preserved in my version). I shall only be re-creating sections I to V and Appendices A and B. I consider the other parts to be less important, and in any case, I don't have photocopies of them.
  
  

  SECTION		Page
  I	Introduction	1
  II	The Euler Parameters	4
  III	The Cayley-Klein Parameters	10
  IV	Quaternions	16
  V	Infinitesimal Transformations	19
  VI	Theoretical Error Analyses	22
  VII	Simulator Results	39
  VIII	Summary and Conclusion	53
  APPENDIX
  A.	Orthogonal Transformations	56
  	1. The Independent Coordinates of a Rigid Body	56
  	2. Orthogonal Transformations	57
  	3. Properties of Matrices	61
  	4. Infinitesimal Rotations	66
  B.	The Euler Angles	72
  C.	Servomultiplier Errors	72

  
  Let me know if you are particularly keen to have the rest of it, as otherwise I may take several months. Even if you want it more urgently than that, it will take a few weeks as the photocopy is 81 pages long with many equations and a few diagrams.