A blog post by David Megginson brought to my attention an article posted six years ago by Joel Spolsky about architecture astronauts. Who are they? Architecture astronauts in Joel's words are:

"Smart thinkers (that) just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all."

The moral behind Spolsky's story will continue to remain relevant simply because it is a lesson often forgotten in the heat of a debate or brainstorming session. David Megginson agrees with many of these observations but does point out architecture astronauts have had a positive, if not always successful effect on technology development. From the real world of architecture I am always reminded of Mies van der Roe's ability to grasp the big ideas of modernism whilst still keeping his head when it came to functionality and details (after all, 'God is in the details'). This ability gains even more credit when you compare his work to Le Corbusier, arguably one of architecture's great astronauts, who's ideas often far outstretched their functionality or success in the real world.

On a technical tangent I especially agree with one of David's last points about XML and the heady effect it has had on technology architects and evangelists in the past:

"(Architecture astronauts) believe that if a bit of standardization is good, a lot must be even better."

If anything both posts highlight the importance of stopping work, taking a step back and readdressing what it is you are actually trying to achieve and the way it is being done. Unfortunately for most of us it is all too easy to get caught up in the big idea or the nuts and bolts, in the process missing the chance to grasp what we were really on to in the first place.

OpenID is an easy to setup identification system for both users and developers that is beginning to gain industry momentum. OpenID uses URL's as unique identifiers which is a flexible and memorable way of tackling what your identity is. As it is relatively simple in principle OpenID is not a solution for all identity tasks but in a loosely joined, Web-centric context it is well suited.

All you need to do to use it is sign up for a free OpenID account, or if you are really adventurous implement your own system. When you login to an OpenID-enabled website/service it takes your submitted url and password and passes it on to the OpenID service for authentication. The first time you successfully authenticate you must tell the OpenID service exactly what (if any) information the target website/service should be able to see.

It would appear that the people at Nemetschek were busy over the Christmas holiday purchasing the majority of Graphisoft's shares. Nemetschek Vectorworks and Graphisoft ArchiCAD are two highly respected CAD/BIM packages that form a significant portion of the CAD marketplace (behind industry leaders AutoDesk and Bentley). At the end of December Nemetschek purchased all the privately held shares of Graphisoft and sometime during January they aim to capture the remainder which are publically held. The intital deal involved 5.7 million shares valued at 51.8 million Euros (approximately NZ$98 million). This purchase turns Nemetschek into a very serious AEC software vendor with a user-base of around 270,000 people.

What this means for the two competing CAD products is difficult to say. Vectorworks is very strong in the two-dimensional arena whilst ArchiCAD has a very mature 3-dimensional Building Information Model (BIM) core. It would be difficult for Nemetschek to continue marketing both products head to head considering the competition within the Architecture, Engineering and Construction space. It is also dubious whether the underlying software architectures are similar enough to warrant some kind of software merger considering both have a long development history. Given that it is unlikely that one of the products will be phased out (due to their entrenched users and functionality), a more likely scenario will see Vectorworks focus on the traditional 2D marketplace whilst ArchiCAD will continue to pursue BIM ideals at the expense of pure-2D functionality. This is the strategy employed by AutoDesk with their AutoCAD and Revit platforms and it seems to be working quite well for them. But unlike AutoDesk there is significantly greater functionality and ideology cross-over between Nemetschek's products which may prove harder to resolve internally in terms of where the two sit in the market and relate to each other.

Hopefully once the buyout is complete the long-term future for both entities will become a little more clearer. From a spectators position it certainly wouldn't be interesting to spend almost NZ$200 million and just maintain the status quo, but it may make the most business sense so I wouldn't be surprised if nothing exciting happens immediately.

Finding quotes in a print medium is not as challenging because books have pages which whilst not entirely accurate does help a reader find a quote within a reasonable amount of time. Unfortunately quoting from an online source can be very painful for the reader. Even when provided with the text-based quote and hyperlink to the article they must wade through the entire article in order to identify the relevant quote and its context. Tech-savvy users will quickly jump to their browser's Find function but for the layman there is Cite Bite.

Cite Bite takes a quote and a hyperlink to the quote and displays the page with the relevant quotation highlighted which is a huge time-saver within large article. Cite Bite can be used through a Web-form, browser bookmarklet or Firefox extension. All these methods are easy to use and you end up with results like the following...

One of the many Christmas gifts I recieved this year was a very clever, all singing and dancing Valvoline mouse. It's hardly ergonomic but it has a lot of character.

The nice thing about devices with removable batteries is that fixing something that has locked up is a simple task of pulling the batteries out. Unfortunately the batteries on the iPod cannot be removed so if your device does lock up you can be in a spot of difficulty. Fortunately there is a relatively simple process to reset an iPod, just do the following:

1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Slide it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
2. Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears, about 6 to 10 seconds. You may need to repeat this step.

These steps were quoted from the Geekfishing Blog which also has a number of other tips on resetting a stubborn iPod.

Lead Samba developer and vocal open source figure Jeremy Allison has left his position at Novell in protest of their recent patent-protection agreement with Microsoft. It is a great move from Jeremy who has made it clear in the past that his principles (and tongue lashings) will not be bent by corporate pressure.

In a parting shot Jeremy made public a letter he had sent to Novell management. Within it he made a brilliant point regarding the patent agreement and the often misunderstood reaction to it by the Free Software community:

"Do you think that if we'd have found what we legally considered a clever way around the Microsoft EULA so we didn't have to pay for Microsoft licenses and had decided to ship, oh let's say, "Exchange Server" under this "legal hack" that Microsoft would be silent about it - or we should act aggr[i]eved when they change the EULA to stop us doing this?"

It is an excellent point that brings into question people's willingness to accept theft and wrong doing as something that can only occur to an object with a defined monetary value. The components that form GNU Linux have a value, they are Free in all senses of the word. Yet when Novell and Microsoft found a way around the GPL2 license to 'sell' their patent-protection alongside GNU Linux many in the industry viewed it as completely honest and worthwhile. This even though the agreement broke in spirit, but not in practice, the licensing terms of the GPL2.

UPDATE: CNET News.com is reporting that Jeremy Allison will be joining Google in the new year. 

Weather has to be the most boring thing in the world, (it's not like you can do anything about it) but Nintendo has blended conventional weather channel functionality with Google Earth graphics to create something pretty special. Below is a video of the new service which seemed to be made live today.

For over a year and a half Adobe has been making some interesting moves that could bridge the gap between the Web and traditional desktop applications. Adobe's first move in this strategy was to purchase Macromedia, the company behind Flash and a range of Web development tools. With these technologies in stock they are now actively developing Apollo, a cross-platform desktop framework which draws together HTML, PDF and Flash to create a Web/desktop hybrid environment (refer to this technical article for details).

TechCrunch has an excellent article about Apollo and posted a podcast with Adobe's chief software architect Kevin Lynch on the subject. With Apollo Adobe will be put on a direct collision course with Microsoft in the emerging Rich-Web application arena. Alongside Vista, Microsoft are releasing their new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) technologies. WPF and XPS are Microsoft's response to the two formats that have successfully defied their monopoly on desktop file standards: HTML and PDF. WPF is part of the .Net 3.0 framework and whilst intended to replace the aging Windows graphical API a large part of it is devoted to facilitating Rich-Web applications through XAML markup (an incompatible derivative of HTML). XPS on the other hand is a direct PDF competitor and is not intended to replace any existing Windows technology rather destroy the incumbent. Usurping these entrenched standards is important to Microsoft because as history has shown controlling a standard is equivalent to holding the high ground on a battlefield; it does not automatically win you the war but it goes a long way.

An Apollo application running on Windows

Providing search services that span a number of disparate websites is a challenging problem that in the past has been left to the big-boys such as Google. However Amazon's OpenSearch RSS format is changing this reality and providing a means for effective multiple website search to be deployed at low cost by small development teams.

Background

Most organisations comprise of a number of different interest groups (I like to think of them as factions) and when it comes to external and internal websites it proves far more efficient to let these groups build and maintain their own independent sites rather than combine them under a single unified banner and management structure. The reasons for this are pragmatic rather than technical, in fact from a purely technical perspective it is far easier to concentrate on building a single massive website as this means one architecture, one management group and a homogonised user base.