garethace

I am going to start a thread for 'the geek olympics' over at aceshardware soon, but my own nominee, would be a character by the name of Bill Joy: That was said by one Marc Andreessen, Netscape co-founder. Anyhow, Bill Joy is an example of just the kind of leader, in technological circles, who is responsible for focussing all kinds of projects, on fairly sound coordinates and directions across that whole landscape,... but an interesting point too, as this article of Bill's highlights, and was hated be many too in the technology industry, including Linus Torvalds who was horrified by it.... http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html It has been described as Bill Joy's behaviour of not stopping 'a distance' from the edge like most people do, but having to go right up to the very last inch from the edge, where you can see all the molten lava bubbling down beneath you,... in order to envision what the future holds for the species on this planet in general. Very negative coming from a 'real leader' in the technology field. BTW, that guy Kurzweil he refers to in the article is a very widely read author about Artificial Intelligence and that kind of field, who Bill says he just happened to meet by chance at some conference, and was fundamentally changed by the chance meeting with Kurzweil. Brian O' Hanlon.

So this is the meat, of my post.... It is on the theme of leadership too, and sort of ties back in with the Systems Thinking thread, and 'standing back from it all'.... something that hopefully I will get to do over the xmas hols. Happy xmas everyone. Brian O' Hanlon.

I'll tell you what guys, here is a huge tip for all of you,... which you might need at some stage... totally unrelated to this thread and post,... but I said I would put it in anyhow, as kind of an xmas bonus. Remember when you studied English in school? Remember when you read an important piece of literature that someone at some point in time, had gone to a lot of trouble to present and to put together? Now fast forward to today's reality, where information can be packaged and put together in mere seconds and published to a huge massive audience even faster.... at some stage in the past, in those English classes there was just one poem, or one piece of text, or one short story, or play, that perhaps had been around for years and years. And one could have to study and look at this one work of literature or art, or music, or whatever, for maybe a whole year, because it was part of your examinations at the end. Now that meant one very obvious thing, your initial reading of the literature or work of art, deepened and grew during that same period. In fact, you tended to discover often, that what you had initially discarded as pure rubbish, somehow could be understood at numerous levels and knitted itself together with all kinds of themes,... in other words, there were many different readings of the same thing, not just one. And as long as you lived on this earth, you probably could keep finding new ones.... all from one piece of text, one painting or one short novel or story. Anyhow, my point is that people tend to think nowadays, that complexity comes from having gigabytes of information passing over your desktop continuously all day long every day,... and the notion of a grotty old book in a library with one page of text, is just scoffed at, as 'old-school'. However, it has become increasingly obvious to me at least, that what the old school had was many ways, to see a single object. While the new school, can often have just one way to see a whole lot of objects. And worse still, the new school often gets mad, if their initial reading of a post, doesn't provide them with the instant gratification they so ultimately desire. Sad. Brian O' Hanlon.

How many different styles of leadership described in the Goleman interview have you encountered in your experience? http://www.pfdf.org/leaderbooks/l2l/summer2002/goleman.html More to the point, has anyone here, encountered a combination of the different styles of leadership, working in project teams down through the years, that worked well. Because, Goleman, does seem to argue quite strongly for a 'combination' of different styles of leadership, over stressing one particular type in particular. Unfortunately, reading through the interview, I would have to say, for myself... that down through the years, working on so many different architectural design project teams, types of projects and clients etc,... that I have witnessed very strong examples of all six styles of leadership. But, while that was nice to experience,... I cannot say that I have ever really worked on any project, where there were a couple of different styles blended together for best effect, if you know what I am saying. I would be very interested to hear what other people here might think. (The following in just the mandatory Geek insight into all of this... sorry, couldn't resist) I was just reading Linux Torvalds last night, describe the six different processes that exist in the Unix operating system, and how Unix was a beautiful and simple operating system, unlike something like VAX, which was more akin to Chinesse writing, with a pictorial represenation for everything. That by combining the 'six basic processes' in the Unix operating system, you could achieve all the complexity you ever needed, using simple and beautifully basic six tools. It is very coincidental, how 'leadership' psychology seems to have hit on these six types of leadership styles too. :-) Daniel Goleman is an author who studies how teams behave and a phenomenon he calls 'emotional intelligence'. I reckon myself, that there are some pretty good case studies in emotional intelligence out there, in the architectural community. I think some architects have probably used emotional intelligence as a tool or even a weapon, down through the years in their careers to get results and turn things to their advantage - in a way, I have to say I admire at some level, because it is pretty smart. Though I wouldn't ever try to emulate it. gareth

Lets just compare, all of this with a totally different field,... that of Biology, which recently also, has employed sophisticated forms of visualisation technology, and developed its own fancy name for it... Bioinformatics! :-) I think, in architecture,... you have a couple of really big perennial problems, that you need to deal with,... but they are interesting problems,... like 'building' something, is a perennial, but nonetheless interesting problem. It is always a challenge as building technology, economics, materials and standards adjust to meet with the times. In a similar way, to how medicine has to advance accordingly to meet the challenges of dealing with new illnesses etc. I think, some of you who build real buildings, and visualise also, will find the language used by Mr. Stein above interesting. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/biocon2003/stein.html Brian O' Hanlon.

President Whitmore and others look in awe as Dr. Levinson (l) demonstrates his mastery of the alien technology.

Okay, you asked for it,.... How did Jeff Goldblum's laptop uplink with the Alien Computer, in the movie Independence Day? http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=8109 Enjoy!

Read on,... :-) Today I finally have the privelege of sharing with you, this little explanation on how Jeff Goldblum could interface with the alien ship on Independence Day. I just bought the latest collector's edition since my original version had no special features or anything and it was on sale. I remember people making fun of it's biggest flaw: How could David's laptop interface with an alien computer? As near as I can tell, they used that dildo shaped antenna they plugged onto the bottom of the craft to transmit to a satillite that the aliens were using and piggyback on their own signal back into it's source on the mothership. Well, now I understand completely what was involved. :-) First of all lets learn something about networking history and Java, James Gosling and the Green Project, a secretive project by Sun in 1990, which ultimately produced the Java technology they own now. The key insights into the software that would run such devices came to Gosling at a Doobie Brothers concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California. As he sat slouched in front-row seats letting the music wash over him, Gosling looked up at wiring and speakers and semirobotic lights that seemed to dance to the music. "I kept seeing imaginary packets flowing down the wires making everything happen,'' he recalls. "I'd been thinking a lot about making behavior flow through networks in a fairly narrow way. During the concert, I broke through on a pile of technical issues. I got a deep feeling about how far this could all go: weaving networks and computers into even fine details of everyday life.'' Gosling quickly concluded that existing languages weren't up to the job. C++ had become a near-standard for programmers building specialized applications where speed is everything - computer-aided design for instance, where success is measured by the number of polygons generated per second. But C++ wasn't reliable enough for what Gosling had in mind. It was fast, but its interfaces were inconsistent, and programs kept on breaking. However, in consumer electronics, reliability is more important than speed. Software interfaces had to be as dependable as a two-pronged plug fitting into an electrical wall socket. "I came to the conclusion that I needed a new programming language,'' Gosling says. Which when translated into reality,... this grew to become a very robust industrial strength distributed and object oriented computer language.... At demos, Naughton (a young member on the Green project) would go to the white board to show the scope of Oak, (early 1990s implementation of Java technology) filling the blankness with lines crisscrossing from home computers, to cars, to TVs, to phones, to banks, to - well, to everything. Oak was to be the mother tongue of the network of all digital things. Initially, Sun tried to market this Oak Technology for TV, set top boxes, but it never took off,... But then,... along came the Internet and it was because of Bill Joy's input, (a veteran of the older Unix environment) that Sun finally saw that the Internet could become Oak's redemption. Joy's support was critical in what became known as the Internet Play, the "profitless" approach to building market share - a ploy Netscape had made famous by giving away its browser. "There was a point at which I said, 'Just screw it, let's give it away. Let's create a franchise,''' Joy says. The Java applets are the key. Here's why: for a program to run on a computer, it must first be translated from a language like Basic or C into the machine's native tongue. Because this translation process is incredibly time-consuming, most software comes already translated. But that means different versions have to be created for different computers. Java gets around this problem by using an intermediate language - a sort of Esperanto that is not machine specific but that can quickly be interpreted by any computer. The result is that small programs - applets - can fly around the Net without regard to what kind of hardware they end up on. If you need to watch an animation that requires a particular fancy doodad to run it, but you don't have that doodad, your machine will pick up the Java-coded applet along with the animation file and run both. Who cares where the software lives? Who cares what kind of machine you have? Who cares about Microsoft? BTW, you understand this is all a bit tongue in cheek. garethace.

Well aren't all those products you are talking about, aren't they ideas or products, that need to be realised? I mean, they are nice just as ideas and beautiful in their own right, but doesn't someone need to build a commercial in a sense, out of different components. You mention this idea of architects getting out of buildings for real, and getting into other areas, that is hardly even new. Does anyone even realise, that the system which allows to conduct this discussion at all, the Internet, was just a concept, that had absolutely no precedent, needed to be put together from the technology that could be gleaned together in the 1950s and made to work. The tenders were issued to various companies by ARPA in the United States, and a little known Boston group of architects, who specialised in the design of acoustics for large auditoriums won the contract... to design the Internet, the same infrastructure that you are now using. Yeah, its official, architects built the Internet... and they had to assemble all the people who could do it, and all the parts that had never been used in the sense of 'networking' before... all Honeywell systems, to which they had to network enable themselves. So the examples that you have stated above, just pale by comparison with the creation of something as ground breaking and revolutionary in its concept as a coast to coast linking of computer systems, in the 1950s!!!! Yeah, I really have to take my hat off to some architecture firm in 2004, who comes up with a bright idea, to sell something online,... wow, where did they get that idea? :-) But my point is that BBN, in Boston, started a small company with a track record as architects, later acoustics consultants, later all kinds of scientific gizmo consultants, and eventually beat IBM and the rest to land the single largest responsibility ever in the whole history of computing! :-) Anyhow, just to drive home my points even further... I am taking an online introductory course in Java Programming Language at the moment, it is just a fascination or a novelty for me, which I probably will not do very well or even finish, but the really strange thing about it, is that almost all of the problems that software developers encountered building software.... are precisely, verbatim the exact same problems, or rather challenges that I encounter every day of my life as a practicising building designer. (Never finished enough coursework in University to call myself an architect... but there you go) So I wouldn't say that architects are learning more about other fields, so much as, that down through history all sorts of people at the very cutting edge of technology and come to Architects to help them solve the most pressing problems of the age... yeah, simple architects whose only real experience was in the building of everyday objects and things we use, experience and live with. My reply to Crazy Homeless Guy here: http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=7906 goes into a little more detail, in relation to web services, the things that object oriented Java and .NET programming language manages to build today,... right on the bleeding edge of web technology.... Don't try to consume it in one sitting. :-) The fundamental task of virtual software creation and intelligent use, even at the cutting edge... is not a million miles away from the task of building in the physical world today... and somewhere in all of this, I believe is the future of architectural visualisation. But if I have 'gotten off the point' or gone too far into the weeds, then my sincerest apologises all round! :-) Brian O' Hanlon.

Here is basically what I am talking about... Economy of Scale: Software Development. . . Is it important to know about something to know how to write digital tools for it? Agree or disagree? I mean, anything from games to how to design a ship for the high seas. I recently read a post by Vincent (another forum, chess AI algorithm expert from Holland) here, about early writers of chess playing software not actually knowing that much about playing chess. I mean, I guess, the same could be said about John Carmack (writer of code for Quake, Doom etc) and games. I dunno. But recently I wrote a blog rant comparing design of architecture, it's software, with that of a closely related cousin, software to design bicycle frames. So calbiker (a biker), Vince, and some others might find this piece of interest. Software 'to design' I think should be closely related to the sort of thing it is meant to design, yet that goes totally counter to the point of commercial software in the first place, which is to provide a generalised solution, to as wide as possible a base of customers. Hence success of Microsoft model say, in operating systems sphere. But is this lack of specialisation of softwares, to save costs on development, getting a bit much? Anyhow if you have 2 hours to spend... listen to some of this.... http://wpcarey.asu.edu/seid/cabit/events.cfm Down at the bottom the video streamed of the debate is excellent... here are the rough notes I have already scribbled down... will put into some kind of format soon. It compares Sun's J2EE and Microsoft's .NET.

Patience, feed me... :-) Anyhow, thanx moderator for cleaning up that other spare thread I left, nice one. garethace.

Now if, you take the above post in relation to bikes/buildings as being about materials and strength of structure... read the following piece from that bike frame web page also. Bacause, if designing bicycles were to be compared to architecture... then the above, is very like the 'constraints' not posed by materials or structure.... but things like ordinances, site services, civil stuff basically... the bike frame has to satisfy the conditions where it can 'wear' many other standard components, that the frame will need to give it the functionality of cycling. Here is my rant about civil + computer aided design tools. Gee, in my recent threads here, I talked somewhat about the 'reality' of working in the field, as opposed to piping some views, that I read in books or were interested in.... So just to prove, that I haven't lost all committment to digital end of things, I decided to start this particular thread. Basically, it is a series of 'what-ifs', what if the design software companies were to 'mainstream' this whiz bang new feature or that, how might it affect existing CAD documents and archives, especially considering my believe, that computers have the ability to destroy an awful more than they have to create. Bearing in mind too, having worked on a load of civil stuff as an intregal part of several projects now, i.e. the first stage 'to develop' any large scale development, is to organise where/how you are going to run utility type of stuff, months if not years even before the money, investment and interests comes around to actually do the building stuff on top of the grade level. So going through so much pre-planning and careful thought with civil stuff, you really don't want your civil digital documents, to suddenly get a live of their own, backups, or no backups,... it is always easier to have one consistent set, throughout, and avoid confusion of versioning etc, etc. Just bear that point, in mind, in relation to the above two quotes. In a somewhat similar way, to how a bicycle frame designer would hope that their chosen software design platform, would guide rather than obstruct them from ending up with something, that 'fits' with all other necessary cycling components like derailleurs, gearing, drivetrain etc, etc. Brian.

that you have ever actually be priveleged enought to witness. :-) This architect in a lecture was showing a DVD video clip of a walk through the realised project, and right in the middle of the video, which was supposed to sum up the experience of the lecture.. http://www.irish-architecture.com/aai/events/data/1094589228.html his laptop made a very loud beep, and proudly proclaimed to a packed lecture theatre of hundreds, that the battery was too low! We just fell around. No backup power chord, nothing. Awh! I hope we start getting more and more MIPs from the network, that is all that I can say! :-) P.S. I would like to thanx Mr. Architect all the ways from Spain for a most wonderful evening lecture in any case, it will be a sad, and sorry day, when I allow 'the Personal Computer' to ruin my enjoyment, I can tell you.

MBR? Are you really gone digital in your exploits these days... is that what consumes you now most of all, just wondering. Anyhow, in case the building thing is still in your blood at all right now, I was wondering what you thought of this: http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?p=57337&posted=1#post57337 Or whether, that sort of thing does get you driven, at all these days. I would just be interested to know, about someone with a long time interest in architecture and things substantial, as in real, materially speaking.... what you feel like nowadays, immersed in things pixelated and accelerated and applets, dialogue box oriented etc, etc. Brian.

Just a random, blog-type, architectural construction/design rant.... :-) Maybe, just maybe we can instigate some combination of looking at pictures as pictures and looking at pictures that tell you something... so, metal framing building... off the cuff... Anyone here ever use tubular sections? Apparently they are useful things in some circumstances, i.e. where you have possibility of lateral loads on things, or where things can twist/subjected to a lot of torsion etc, etc. One such circumstance, would be at the gable of a large factory, where you need a huge big door. To learn some more feeling for this kind of phenomenon, in the structures of architecture.... I can point you here. I know, on a bicycle, the manufacturers go to extreme lengths to avoid your bodies energy being drained away into just 'flexing the frame' as opposed to transmitting the energy onto the road/tire point of connection. Making strange bends at critical places, and using very tiny tolerances between forks, chainstays, seatstays and wheels, using very stiff aluminium material tubular sections, which are machined to be thinner walled in the middle than at the ends... all this design, not to waste those precious cycling kilo-joules. Bikes are an entirely different set of design circumstances, to building I know, but it just highlights how deeply that some engineers/designers have gone in relation to 'the act of making' something. Just to get the discussion some way started, I decided to link this image, perhaps others have more? Here is an example of an image, that really shows, how much people 'think' about frame construction... to a real bike user/sport enthuasiast, this is so much more than a pretty picture. http://www.specialized.com/SBCBkModel.jsp?spid=9693 I feel that with architectural visualisation, the image often 'means' so very little unfortunately, just a statement of fact actually and not something 'I want' to believe. BTW, for those of you, who really find that image confusing without wheels etc, attached, that black post sticking up to the top of the picture is where a saddle would go and ultimately the 'rider' of such a piece of equipment. That frame is for rough, off-road usage... unlike the lean, and minimalist ultra light permanent road surface cycling bikes, that I described above. Every bit of machining, weld, struting or whatever on a bicycle frame, is more money the consumer has to pay up... And if you are standing on the shop floor with wallet/credit card in hand, you really are conscious of what you will pay for. Compared to when we design/visualise buildings some times, and are not as concerned with properly using the clients budget! :-) So.... jumping back from bicycles, and back to building specification and technology world once again, here is a quote from a Steel Systems Construction reference book: So bear that in mind, with reference to the earlier talk about a cyclist transferring his/her energies, not into bending the frame of the bike, but into the action of cycling, and moving forward. Aluminium is currently the preferred material for cycling frames, due to its stiffness, unlike Steel which flexed a lot and was comfortable to ride therefore, but ultimately a lot of what you were working for, was just 'absorbed' by the actual frame of the bike. Cheers for reading. Brian.