I use Media Temple for hosting of websites and Subversion repositories. The quality of service they provide is solid (especially considering the price) and the ability to SSH into the server and dig around at the command line is a huge plus. Unfortunately one of the areas they are lacking in is backups.

Media Temple provide a backup service but it is very limited in terms of capacity and granularity. Their backup function also does not provide any Subversion repository dump support which is crucial if you have ever experienced the pain of recovering from a Berkeleydb corruption.

Below is a script I use to backup my web domains, databases and Subversion repositories to compressed tar archives. Once these have been generated they are uploaded to the Amazon S3 storage cloud to create an off-site backup of off-site resources. The ability to backup directly from Media Temple to Amazon is great because it removes the middle-man (me) and maximises bandwidth usage. Pulling a tonne of data from the United States to New Zealand just to send it back again is certainly not an economical use of Internet resources.

Version 1.91 of the theme addresses a few issues raised by users and can be downloaded from here.

The most notable addition to the theme is a system statistics sidebar. The code for the system statistics is based on that within the Blue Frame theme (now the default Webmin theme). 

The new sidebar (click to enlarge)

If you are a current or potential user of Google SketchUp then I would recommend checking out the SketchUp Show. It is a regular video podcast that goes through how to use the various pieces of functionality avaiable in the free modeller. The production quality of the tutorials is very high and they go through at a pace that is easy to follow along with. Because these are video podcasts they are not small downloads (about 100meg each) so do not try attempting to download them via a dial-up connection unless you can wait a few days.

The L.A. Times ran an interesting story this week, 'Virtual marketers have second thoughts about Second Life'. The article covers the issues Second Life is experiencing when it comes to maintaining the initial flurry of 'virtual' commercial participation within the online world. This news is troubling because it was this same commercial interest that led many to declare Second Life to be the 'next big thing' which would one day surpass the 2-dimensional World Wide Web. Unfortunately such claims seem to have been all but put to rest with the rise of competing virtual worlds and slowing economic and social growth in Second Life.

News that commercial marketing interest is waning comes as no surprise when one takes into account the actual number of Second Life users active at one time.

Even at peak times, only about 30,000 to 40,000 users are logged on, said Brian Haven, an analyst with Forrester Research.

This low active user count just does not provide the marketing economies of scale available when compared to the traditional Web. Once this low population is distributed across a relatively large virtual environment and the cost of participation is factored in (land and development time) involvement by a commercial entity becomes difficult to economically justify. As Duncan Rilely of TechCrunch describes:

If we apportion the upfront costs of design (say $5,000 although it’s probably higher) and setup ($1675) over 12 months the CPM rates become $21.20 (top) and approx $180 (bottom of the top 5). The CTR rate is irrelevant: the CPM cost for businesses on Second Life is insane: simply even for the very best, the figures don’t add up.

Note: CPM is marketing speak for Cost per thousand impressions whilst CTR is an acronym for Click-through Rate.

Today the lead developer of the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) project announced that in February 2007 Apple purchased the CUPS source code and took him on as a staff member. CUPS is significant within the *NIX world because it is arguably the most well supported and feature-rich printing system available. Apple has used it within OSX from the outset and personally I feel it is the best implementation of CUPS available thanks to the Aqua interface and the fact that the majority of printers just work without any effort.

There would seem to be no immediate danger of CUPS code being completely closed sourced considering it is currently released under the GPL2 license. What the code purchase suggests is that Apple probably plans on internally re-licensing the code under a closed source license for many, if not all of the platforms that could make use of it, i.e. Mac, AirPort and the iPhone.

Dual licensing such as this is not uncommon by vendors who control the rights to GPL code. It is a good way of benefiting from an open source development model and community whilst still being able to ship a modified version of the code on closed devices or only binary form. License flexibility such as this will become increasingly important as the GPL3 license is adopted as it resolves many of the loopholes vendors used to ship GPL code in what effect were closed devices (Tivoization).

Now that Apple does have a formal stake in CUPS my biggest hope is that they can spare a graphic designer to give the website and the CUPS interface with a much needed aesthetic overhaul and maybe a better logo...

Charlotte Young of Victoria University has kindly updated the rather old but still useful Revit 5.1 tutorial so that it encompasses some of the new functionality that has been introduced in the prevailing years. The revised tutorial is targetted at Revit 9.1but I am sure most of the concepts and commands will continue to remain vaild well into the future. The updated tutorial is available here:

Revised Revit 9.1 Tutorial

Version 1.90 adds some customisation options to the theme for those that do not like the default appearance of the drop-down menus. There are two options available, one to hide the drop-down menus and another to hide the icons associated with each item on the drop-down menu. The updated theme can be downloaded from here.

These configuration options can be set in the theme-stressfree/config file after the theme has been installed. By default both options are set to on (display):

enable_dropdowns=1
enable_menuicons=1

To disable the drop-down menu altogether set enable_dropdowns=0 or to simply hide the menu item icons set enable_menuicons=0. Below is an example illustrating the default drop-down menu on the left and on the right the same menu with the icons disabled.

Last week I had a pretty interesting email conversation with Ryan Schultz about Second Life (not to be confused with First Life) and its potential for architectural collaboration. In a nutshell I am not a fan of Second Life. Certainlly one day 3D will play a much stronger role in our experience of the Web but I don't believe Second Life is 'it'. If you are interested in reading our conversation then Ryan has done a pretty good job of presenting it on his Studio Wikitecture site. I come off sounding reasonably intelligent which I guess means those long hours of watching Discovery Channel are beginning to pay off.

I can’t help but feel the online 3D market is at the same place as the 2D online world was between 1990 and 1995. Back then we had walled gardens like Compuserve, AOL and even Microsoft Network (which originally shipped with Windows 95). Whilst these communities had a lot of money behind them the rapid adoption of open HTML and HTTP concepts quickly usurped them.

When it comes to 3D architectural collaboration I really do not see much of a role for entirely immersive worlds like Second Life in a business context. Immersive worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft have a tonne of conceptual baggage that is part and parcel with the whole experience. Your average business person, be it client or architect, just wants to focus on the job and hand which is interogating and understanding the building design in a clear and comprehensive manner. 3D is just one avenue for this exploration, conventional 2D architecture drawings and conversation is no less important. Because of these demands architectural collaboration will continue to trend towards standalone and portable 2D/3D media such as DWF and PDF rather than moving into online worlds. These are relatively lightweight and immediately accessible mediums compared to Second Life, where just finding the architecture could prove problematic for unaccustomed users.

Another undiscussed factor which is just impossible to shake off is the stigma associated with any entertainment-centric technology when applied to a business problem. For ten years I have been watching demonstrations of how architecture can be 'experienced' within a 3D game engine yet nothing has really come out of it apart from a lot of promising demos and the odd chuckle when a reviewer gets bored and decides to virtually shoot the other attendees. Whilst it may seem a little silly I think deep down many people just cannot take these derived tools seriously (although they would never admit it). This may change over time, especially as the generations who have grown up with Doom and Quake begin to ascend corporate ladders. However until such a time I think any architectural visualisation experience centered around entertainment or gaming technology is going to struggle for credibility in what is in general a fairly conservative AEC market.

Generative Components, also known as Smart Geometry, is a technology for describing the underlying rule-set of a geometric form. Currently it is in its infancy but potential exists for it to become the basis of a new field of AEC consultancy centered around geometric exploration. Central to its success will be the ability for its proponents to utilise the Internet to improve its technical accessibility and enable consultants to deliver the benefits of Generative Components to any interested architecture practice no matter its size or geographic location.

Even though it is smarter, BIM is still dumb

Typical CAD or BIM modeling tools are relatively simple in nature because all the major design elements are systematically defined by the architect or drafts-person building the model. Unfortunately this process depends on the person creating the model having at least some idea of the intended outcome before undertaking the work. Also once the model is built the underlying geometric motivations behind it cannot be efficiently experimented with. Generative Components empowers the designer with the ability to almost effortlessly explore many different yet related iterations of the same concept in order to determine the strongest architectural response to the given situation.

Yesterday my copy of Photoshop 10 arrived and I have been playing around with it a bit. Aside from the vastly improved performance thanks to native Intel support by far the coolest time saving feature I have come across so far is the automatic photomerge option.

Oriental Bay this afternoon (click to enlarge)

The image above is two separate photographs I took today with my k800i mobile phone whilst walking around Oriental Bay. They have been automatically stitched together with Photoshop in a process that took less than ten seconds. Overall the results are pretty impressive considering that zero user input required.