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Showing posts from October, 2010

The android revolution

Still busy trying to get my AU Virtual classes ready, so with little time for my side projects... But I changed my Nokia E71 phone (amazing piece of engineering, by the way) for a Samsung Galaxy S. My wife says it's a wannabe iPhone... I say under the bonnet it has a very different beast: the android OS. I got tired of waiting for the android 2.2 version to reach the market... and all manufacturers are promising great new features in the phones "about to be released". So I made up my mind and entered the phone store. I was amazed by the range of options: iPhone 3G,3GS,4... Nokia E72 (I admit it crossed my mind...) and the android ones: HTC, Samsung, Dell... Bigger screens, or bigger memory, or faster processor, or a cheaper plan, they all sound tempting. My decision was based on the Operating System mainly and a balance between screen size and capacity to fit my pocket (the Dell Streak is fantastic... but I haven't seen mobile phones that big since the Motorola &qu

Formula-driven surface in Revit

The heading to this blog reads "... trails of projects too small to be considered or too large to be accomplished...  " This time it's one of the short easy-come easy-go projects, start to end in 2 hours. By chance I came across a challenge on an AUGI forum: http://forums.augi.com/showthread.php?t=119544 The subject "Revit can't do it" and some names I recognized got my attention, and before I realized I was fighting to get a solution. The puzzle consisted in drawing the shape of the British Museum atrium roof. Fortunately part of the briefing information was a link to a geometric analysis of the shape: http://opus.bath.ac.uk/14111/1/ChrisDeakin2001.pdf Based on the capability of the new adaptive components I quickly built a family that would drive the height from the coordinates x y (Reporting Parameters) of the Adaptive Point (using in principle the technique described by Zach Kron here ), but using the complicated formulas in the report...