Under NDA

Hello again! It's been over a month since my last post, and I just want to let you know what I've been up to: I've been travelling a lot, a couple of short trips to Belgium (bank holiday weekend) and Italy (to the wedding of a friend), and then a week off to Maldives, celebrating my wife's 30th birthday. All this left me with little time to spend on side activities, if you don't consider bicycle riding under the rain, highway driving to get to the airport when your flight is already boarding, snorkelling, sunbathing and eating a lot activities worth mentioning in this blog... Cycling in Belgium Driving in Italy Snorkelling in Maldives I have been working too -in between trips :P -, and that lead to some development on the Genetic Design problem that will publish as soon as I have a spare moment under the title "Success of Failure"... because it's proving extremely interesting and moving in the right direction but yet far from practical.....

It's been a great first week as a blogger, adding 15 followers, nice comments and references from other blogs. I am also very happy that the point I made in my first post about trying to meet people with same interests or chasing similar goals have already paid off! In the meantime Alistair from the office sent me a quick note that got me thinking: in the BIM community we generally talk about drafting tools that deal with drawings separately as "2D", and then the ones where all the information gets stored in a single model as "3D". All clear up to that. Then we get about 4D (time) and even 5D (money) to describe the advantages of meta-data and database capabilities in our beloved Building Information Models. But in modern physics there is a diferentiation between "Spacetime", where time and distance measurements are combined in a single manifold, in the Relativistic approach and multi-dimensional Euclidean space (which is the geometry we are taught...

In my second post I'd like to thank my friend and Blogging mentor David Light, who featured this space in his highly respected blog. I guess most of you got here through there, but if you landed directly here I highly recommend having a look at http://autodesk-revit.blogspot.com/ , packed with tips, news and tools for the BIM enthusiast. Enough said as introduction, let's talk about my current after-hours project. About 2 years ago I went to a conference on Genetic Algorithm applied to Design. In a room full of engineers, I saw some examples of Genetic principles applied to Air Conditioning system planning, lighting design, and some shy approach to layout planning. The tools they used were some Java and C++ applets, lots of spreadsheets with complex scripting and occasionally some diagrams. Despite many interesting things were said, I was left with the feeling that the Architectural Design implementation was one I would have liked to chase, eve...