Nakheel Tower, Dubai, a tower more than 1 kilometre in height

Another one of the amazing structures to be built.

“The design challenges are met by an innovative solution in shaping the tower geometry to provide a highly robust and redundant structure, at the same time as creating an aerodynamic effect to minimize the effect of the local wind storms. The cylindrical tower is 95m in diameter, but in actuality is four towers encircling an internal void, linked at intervals by ‘sky bridges’.”

More on www.nakheelharbour.com

Via WSP press release - WSP Group is the structural engineer for Nakheel Tower, Dubai, a tower more than 1 kilometre in height.

FLEXnet network licenses via VPN

Even though this Knowledge Base document about FLEXnet/FLEXlm:
License management and support for VPN connections says that it is not supported by Autodesk it does not mean that it does not work. See this previous post on how to use FLEXLM_TIMEOUT and you will most likely find that it does work just fine with this solution to the problem.

Autodesk’s new headquarters for its AEC division

Autodesk eat it’s own dog food and will live in it too.

Autodesk is opening a 65,000 square-foot office building in Waltham, Mass., to serve as the new headquarters for its architecture, engineering & construction (AEC) division. This is where Revit is developed. (The office in Manchester will still be where it is where a lot of AutoCAD Architecture folks are located.)

The interior of the building is being designed and constructed with Autodesk's portfolio of products for building information modeling (BIM) and is the first project in New England to use the integrated project delivery (IPD) model, an innovative approach to design and construction that can accelerate project timeline and reduce costly errors.

The building is located at 1560 Trapelo Road in Waltham, Mass., and the interior was designed by architecture firm KlingStubbins and built by general contracting firm Tocci Building Companies. Using the Autodesk Revit platform for BIM, the firms were able to create coordinated, digital design information and documentation, and use that information to more accurately predict energy performance, as well as appearance and cost.

I think this is the building that one of the Google cars have taken a photo of.

Or click here for Bird’s eye view on Live Search Maps. I think it now shows the old building though.

See press release for more details.

See also this post

Disable Help Menu Content in Autodesk Design Review 2009

Now Autodesk have provided a way to Disable Help Menu Content in Autodesk Design Review 2009. This is good news as you might not want your users to check for updates for example.

See the post on Beyond the Paper

BIM blog tips

If you work with BIM or about to start doing it I suggest you visit ThinkSpace for several great posts on the topic. Right now there is Effects of BIM On Project Lifecycle Phases the 10:th BIM episode.

JTB FlexReport 5 beta 1 is available to test drive

If you’re curious take a look at the draft documentation JTBFlexReport5B1.pdf (3 MB) or you can request a fully functional trial. Make it easier to assess you network license usage of applications using FLEXnet/FLEXlm/IBM LUM or 12D.

How to sort 1TB of data in 68 seconds or even 1 PB

“We are excited to announce we were able to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds.” – Google Blog

But that was not enough they tried with 1000 times more data. 1PB.

“It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers.”

The method they use is MapReduce that makes it possible to run multiple processes simultaneously on multiple computers.

Programming model for MapReduce

Input & Output: each a set of key/value pairs

Programmer specifies two functions:

map (in_key, in_value) -> list(out_key, intermediate_value)

• Processes input key/value pair
• Produces set of intermediate pairs

reduce (out_key, list(intermediate_value)) -> list(out_value)

• Combines all intermediate values for a particular key
• Produces a set of merged output values (usually just one)

Inspired by similar primitives in LISP and other languages.

Adobe Updater problem solved

AdobeUpdater.exe started to show an annoying empty dialog box each time I restarted the computer. It said the installation was not ready and I could continue it later. I found no way to clearing it or accessing the settings or stopping it from showing up again and again.

I tried installing the latest Adobe Updater 5.1.1 update to no avail.

Eventually I solved it by deleting the Updater5 folder (I have Windows Vista):

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Adobe\Updater5

HP+Autodesk+NVIDIA deal

If you’re about to purchase both AutoCAD 2009 and a new PC this is worth taking a look at.

Each of the bundles include:
•AutoCAD^® 2009 Software, the latest version of the world's leading 2D and 3D CAD application.
•HP xw4600 Workstation with Intel^® Core^™ 2 Duo E7200 processor offering next-generation performance technologies in a powerful, flexible and reliable workstation.
•NVIDIA Quadro^® Professional Graphics providing unmatched power and performance.

Visit www.hp.com/go/cad and NVIDIA’s Autodesk site www.nvidia.com/builtforpros.

BTW. I noticed in NVIDIA’s newsletter NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputer. It is based on the NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture and powered by up to 960 parallel processing cores. I wouldn’t mind having that as a rendering machine.

3D Printing Service for AutoCAD models

This Autodesk website has links to several services:
Print an AutoCAD Model Through a 3D Printing Service

Here is a document describing how to optimize your models and prepare them for 3D printing. You can print 3D solids, but not surfaces, parts of a block, meshes, 2D
geometry or text.

This is related to the AutoCAD 2009 subscription bonus pack 3 Shaan has posted about.

Small Basic - for kids or if you want to learn programming

I started programming on Sinclair ZX81 with a built in Sinclair BASIC interpreter in the early 80:ies and think it is great to see a brand new, simple and free programming language and IDE.

Visit Small Basic to download it and for more information.

Small Basic starts with a really simple programming language that gathers inspiration from the original BASIC language.  It has no more than 15 keywords and is strictly imperative.  There are no classes, scopes, generics, lambdas, etc. - just pure imperative code.  The language is typeless and all variables are dynamic and global all the time.  The code gets compiled to IL and runs on the .Net Framework.

It comes with a set of libraries that can be accessed from within a Small Basic program.  Since the language itself is .Net based, new libraries can be created or the existing libraries modified using any .Net programming language.

Next, it combines the features of the language and the libraries into a very simple and friendly programming environment.  This environment gives beginners, access to professional features like Intellisense(TM) and Instant context sensitive help.  It makes writing programs and executing them a breeze.

Small Basic blog

Project Newport real-time 3D story building technology

Project Newport involves a mix of architecture, movies, and games. This sounds really interesting.

Convey design intent with Project Newport – real-time 3D story building technology for architectural visualization and presentation. With breakthrough game-engine technology, Project Newport is easy to use and enables architects to show their designs in context.  They can explore design options, visualize changes instantly, and create vivid, immersive 3D presentations.

Keep an eye on Project Newport

Via the Autodesk Lab

Wonder how it might relate to or have similarities with Wikitecture

ADN member access to Autodesk Subscription site

Jim Quanci just emailed me that “You have access to the Subscription Center including all extensions now - see right hand sash of the ADN extranet home page - http://adn.autodesk.com”

As an ADN member, you have “Visitor” access to the Autodesk Subscription Center for two uses:

1. Access to quarterly extension releases for add-on design and testing purposes. As with all Autodesk software provided to ADN members, these quarterly extension releases may not be used for end-user “production” design and modeling purposes – and may not be shared with end-users or outside your company.
2. Access to on-line training classes so you can quickly learn and understand how Autodesk products are designed to be used by end-users – enabling you to better design and integrate your technologies with Autodesk products.

This is really great news for Autodesk Developer Network members. Now I can also read “Stoeckel on Subs”. I find no feed though.

Process Explorer v11.3 now with physical memory history graph

Process Explorer v11.3: This update to Process Explorer includes numerous enhancements and bug fixes, including a physical memory history graph, options to configure memory tray icons, asyncronous thread symbol resolution and security ID lookup, dynamic recognition of new volume drive letters, multiple character matching in the process view, and a smaller memory footprint.

Notice the new tray icon.

Read also the excellent post Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory on Mark Russinovich's technical blog for interesting facts about physical memory, address space, virtual memory, committed memory, paging file and more. Learn more about what’s in the task manager or even better the Process Explorer.

Via Sysinternals Site Discussion