While many functions in WordPress (the self-hosted kind) work like a charm, this one gave me the run-around a few days ago: The auto-saving post revisions that got added to WordPress a few releases back.

On our departmental website (http://eco.umass.edu/) that I created in WordPress (works great for this purpose, it’s the “Just-enough CMS!”) we had a problem where our longer pages wouldn’t show the visual editor when we tried to edit a page. The recent problem happened especially on this page. If you look at the entire thing, you’ll notice that the text body consists of approx. 2700 words. It happened on other pages, too – all very long pages.

As it turns out, WordPress was saving an unlimited number of revisions for these pages. Unbeknownst to me, there is no limit set in WordPress on the number of revisions – which inevitably leads to a rapid increase of the size of the posts database table. This did then lead to some kind of a time-out when the WordPress admin page was rendered, which prevented the WYSIWIG editor from loading.

The fix for this is to add a line like any of the following two examples to the wp-config.php file in the WordPress root directory. I will make sure I set this on all of my sites from now on! Having revisions is great but there’s no reason to push it too far (especially on shared hosting).

/* Limit post revisions to 20 */
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 20);
/* Disable post revisions altogether */
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);

It is also important to realize that these settings only take effect after they are set and a page is re-saved. To do a wholesale revisions cleaning of an entire blog (which I still may do to reduce the database size), it is better to look for a plugin that does that automatically.

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This version comes with a few enhancements to satisfy both user bases: Geo-modelers (who create buildings and objects for Google Earth) and planners/designers (who model all kinds of objects in 3D). Here is a brief list of new features:

• The following features integrate already existing Google data and services closer into SketchUp. This will aid nicely in creating and refining geo-located buildings.
  • Model geo-location with Google Maps
  • Color imagery and more accurate terrain
  • Match Photo improvements
  • Building Maker
• Solid Tools – Although it should be noted that SketchUp does not include “solids” in a classic CAD sense now (it is still “only” a surface modeler), this set of tools adds a variety of boolean operations (union, subtract, intersect etc.) to the SketchUp toolset. The only downside: while this is an exciting addition, it is only available for Pro users.
  
• A feature that should make users happy is that now toolbar locations can be saved and restored. This does not fix the nagging toolbar reshuffling that happens occasionally but it offers a fix for when it happens.
• Outer Shell - This feature discards all internal geometry of a shape. It will be very useful for reducing geometry for geo-modeling (and Google Earth upload) as well as 3D printing.
• A new toolbar to facilitate setting the north angle (the image also shows the new “face” of version 8: Susan!
  
• Updated DWG/DXF 2010 import/export – Another Pro-only feature (remember that this was removed from the free version with the 7.1 release).
• And some nice-to-have additions:
  • Scene Thumbnails – This makes reorganizing scenes much easier
  • Back Edges – These can now be shown dashed right in SketchUp
  • Push/Pull pre-selected faces – This makes the Push-pull tool behave more like the other editing tools
  • Calculate volumes - This comes with the new solid (“manifold geometry”) tools. Should be useful for calculating concrete volume etc.
• LayOut also got some new features:
  • Angular Dimensions – To complete the available dimensioning tools
  • Dashed Lines are configurable
  • Precise Move
• The SketchUp Ruby API got enhanced with several new methods that deal with the new manifold geometry (“solid”) tools. It should also be noted that the Ruby engine that drives many plugins got updated. More on that should be on this page soon.

You can watch a short video overview of the new tools below. There is also a nice, official blog post and a website (and some release notes – and even more) to read through.

Although there are lots of great new features, I am still missing others that would have justified the new major release number (8 as opposed to 7.2) a little better. My personal favorite would have been a better way to deal with plugins. The extension capability through Ruby plugins is such a major feature of SketchUp (especially given many recent, powerful plugins) that a better plugin management – including a version-checking and updating function – would have provided a useful, broadly-aimed feature. After all, this idea was rated second-highest on last year’s product ideas list.

Leaving my pet-peeve request aside, release #8 delivers quite a few interesting new features and improvements that offer something new and useful for every kind of user.

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Traveling to summer conferences is always fun. This is especially true if it is held in an Italian resort town. This year, the bi-annual World Conference of Timber Engineering was held at the end of June in Riva del Garda at the beautiful Garda Lake in northern Italy.

This conference is always a great venue to meet people who build with wood or do research in wood. Topics are mostly centered around structural issues but there is typically also a good size architectural component. If you missed this year’s conference but want to stay in the loop on what’s happening in structural and architectural design with wood, feel free to browse the official website (while it is up) – or simply read on and enjoy a quick visual overview.

The first visualization below is a collection of the conference topics as a Wordle. I always find it very enlightening when I have a large amount of textual data to simply copy the raw text and then dump it into the Wordle web site. Since the algorithm behind this service sizes words by their frequency, it is quickly possible to get a feeling of the overall tendencies.

In this case, I copied the presentation schedule, which contained not only the titles but also authors’ names – the result is shown below (common words, numbers and general terms like “wood” have been removed). While it makes sense for an engineering conference that “structural performance” is a central topic, themes like “analysis, composite, glulam, shear [likely as in 'shear walls'], strength” and the always popular “joints and connections” were strong topics. Open the image to its full size to drill deeper into the “fine-print”.

An interactive version is here.

As with any worldwide conference, it is interesting to see where participants came from. As you can see in the two maps below, there was an dominance of European participants – clearly also due to the proximity to the location. Other strong groups came from USA & Canada and Australia & New Zealand. What really surprised me – especially in times of very tight travel budgets – was the strong showing from Japan. The largest single country group was from Japan!

This map drills a bit deeper into where people came from in Europe.

You can explore the raw data here.

So what can we read out of these maps? Due to the nature of the conference audience, the countries highlighted above likely are strong participants in building with wood and conducting research in structural uses of wood. Of course, this is affected also by travel funds availability and other factors but it may serve as an indicator.

One can be tempted now to assume that wood research and construction activities happen mainly in countries that have a large forest resource. To check this assumption, I pulled out the FAO’s (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) forest distribution map (shown below). This comparison now shows that South America, Africa and especially Russia were underrepresented at the conference relative to their forest resources. I am sure the reasons for this are varied and can not only be simplified to “economics” but it is an interesting comparison, nevertheless.

The next WCTE is scheduled for 2012 and will take place in Auckland, Australia. You can already visit their website at http://www.wcte2012.com. See you there!

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The new Voluntary Product Standard, PS 1-09 Structural Plywood, provides expanded and updated national standard requirements for producing, marketing, and specifying plywood for construction and industrial uses. Included in this version are revisions which address thickness and labeling in order to comply with national labeling requirements. Advisory appendices dealing with labeling requirements, green building attributes and formaldehyde have also been added.

This brochure replaces Voluntary Product Standard PS 1-07 Structural Plywood, and is available in two sizes. The standard version, Voluntary Product Standard, PS 1-09 Structural Plywood, Form L870 contains 72, 8-1/2 x 11 pages and is available for purchase for $4. It is also available as a free downloadable PDF.

The condensed pocket guide version, Voluntary Product Standard, PS 1-09 Structural Plywood Pocket Guide (with Typical APA Trademarks), Form L875, contains 88, 3-3/4 x 6-1/2 pages which provide excerpts from the larger version. It is only available in printed form and will be available for purchase for $4 later this month.

PRG-305, Performance Standard for APA EWS Stock Glulam Beams is the newly released standard which provides design properties for APA EWS performance-rated stock glulam beams used in residential or commercial floor and roof construction. Includes terminology, manufacturing considerations, design properties, load/span tables and qualification requirements. Issued May 2010, this publication is available only as a downloadable PDF. Form PRG-305, 19 pages.

Via: June 2010 APA Publication Update

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Now that the world cup is getting closer by the day, it was time for me to get my gear ready. After all, I have to support Germany in this one. As it turned out, this was also a good opportunity to create some graphics with SketchUp and try out printing them on fabric with Spreadshirt.

Consider this the inauguration of my (mini-) t-shirt shop: If you want to own any of these, just click on the link below and select the perfect color and size for you. The images on this page are just color samples. Spreadshirt has many more colors available – although I would only recommend printing this design on a light-colored t-shirt. I also made a version without the number – that one is a bit more “timeless”. This design and a few others are now available in my Spreadshirt shop. Hope you like them, too.

By the way, I will be posting new designs every once in a while, so keep an eye on the new “shop [as]” link in the site menu on the left.

Link: http://alexschreyer.spreadshirt.com/

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On a recent visit to Whistler, BC (yep, the place where the 2010 Winter Olympics were held), I had the fortune to be given an impromptu tour of the Austria Passive House, a building constructed for the Olympics and used as “home base” for Austrian media during the events. This 2700 s.f., two-story building is frequently called the “first certified passive house in Canada” and its purpose is to showcase passive-house technology to the Canadian public.

Built by a combination of local general contractors and engineers and a variety of Austrian fabricators (see the website below for a list), this house was also an opportunity to showcase European building technologies and test their feasibility within the Canadian building framework. As a result, it features wood-dowel-laminated solid wood walls, triple-glazed windows, a geothermal heat pump and much more.

While the architecture of the house is a modernized version of the classic wooden chalet, it is a beautiful example of modern wooden house design.

On a side note: It is always interesting to see what happens to a building after some time of use. While this one currently transfers its occupancy from “official” national house to a home for bikers and cross-country skiers, it has apparently received a not-fully-styled wheelchair ramp. Hopefully there will be money available to turn this rather temporary-looking solution into something nicer later.

Pictures

[Show slideshow]

There is also a nice YouTube video that shows the construction process:

Specs

Location: Whistler, BC, Canada

Built: 2009

Architect: Treberspurg & Partner Architekten, Wien, Austria

Engineer: Equilibrium Consulting, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Fabricator: Sohm Holzbautechnik, Alberschwende, Austria

Links

• The official website: www.oesterreichhaus.at
• Austria Passive House – Blog
• Article on Whistler2010

Please note: All information above is accurate to the best of my knowledge. The intent of this presentation is simply to showcase interesting wooden structures that I have photographed. I have not been involved in the planning or construction (unless mentioned above). All images are © A. Schreyer.

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With more than 25,000 documents already uploaded into the system, Autodesk wants to position Project Butterfly as the “Google Docs for AutoCAD”. Beyond being able to edit an AutoCAD drawing online (which by itself is a great feature), these are the collaboration options:

• Share a DWG file for editing, redlining or just viewing. Various options allow for control of sharing parameters determining who sees what. It is also possible to revoke permissions as needed (for example after bidding on a project has ended).
• Crop a view and share only a portion of a file. This cuts down on clutter when sharing large documents.
• Co-editing and chat. Multiple users can edit the same file synchronously. As an added benefit, collaborators can bring up a handy chat window to talk about what they are doing.
  
• Share any file in Butterfly’s file browser. This would allow using Butterfly’s web space as a central document repository (organized e.g. per project). Given the (current?) promise of unlimited webspace, this is a great plus. One feature that I am still missing here is versioning for non-DWG files, but that may be on the horizon. Also, at this point, non-DWG and non-image files can only be downloaded, not viewed online. It should at least be possible to open a PDF file in a separate window. There may also be an opportunity for inclusion of another Google service (Docs!) here.
  

Another very interesting new feature is the inclusion of Google Maps. At this point, a Google Map view can be underlaid under a drawing and scaled to the drawing’s dimensions. This even allows for use of Butterfly as a lightweight GIS viewer, where layer-based features (e.g. utility lines) can be viewed together with topography information and orthophotos. Unfortunately scaling is not based on the model dimensions (which shouldn’t be too hard to implement) and positioning should be coordinate-based to make this a more precise tool. But at least it offers great opportunity for visualization of anything from sewer pipes to building floorplans.

One question that will be central for most users is data fidelity: “Will the content of my uploaded file be fully preserved when I download the edited file?” Autodesk’s answer is that the uploaded file gets processed by their RealDWG engine. Once a download is requested, changes made in Butterfly will then be merged into the original file and the result will be served, which should preserve all original data. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to try this out, so feel free to leave any comments on this process below if you have.

Another important point is data security. Unfortunately this is not clearly visible at the moment. When a user logs on, he/she does so on a page that isn’t SSL-secured (the “s” is missing on the “http”). So it isn’t immediately clear that uploading proprietary company files happens over a secure connection. As Weiss outlined, a lack of SSL encryption is inconsequential since the only component transferred over http is the Flash-viewer. All uploading and downloading happens through a secure and encrypted connection within the Flash environment. Also, data is stored on Amazon’s S3 servers that are used by many online services.

When I asked about Autodesk’s 3D software (like Revit or Inventor), I was told that the current focus of Butterfly is on AutoCAD users but that in the future, expanding this platform vertically (literally and figuratively) into 3D is an option. At this point, the most likely use scenario with these programs is to export a DWG, then import it into Butterfly for collaboration and editing and then link the DWG back into the 3D software to make edits manually.

I am curious to see how Autodesk incorporates this online branch into their desktop software. I am sure, we’ll soon see an “Export to Butterfly” button. Hopefully this will offer some functionality to link and merge files easily. In any case, Butterfly will likely not be as freely accessible to everyone as it is now in its beta stage. It would be great, though, if basic functionality like viewing DWG/DWF files and markup/measurement would remain free. That would offer an alternative to installing numerous viewers and would be in line with Autodesk’s Design Review product philosophy.

Similar to my older post, I’ll end this post with a wishlist (use the feature request button in Butterfly to submit yours):

• Support American units (feet and inches).
• More precise positioning and scaling in the Google Map view.
• File versioning for non-DWG files and online viewing of office- and PDF files.
• File>New. This would allow Butterfly to work ass a basic no-installation CAD software.

You can find out more about Project Butterfly here:

• http://butterfly.autodesk.com/ – Try it out for yourself
• http://autodeskbutterfly.wordpress.com/ – The official blog
• http://www.youtube.com/autodeskbutterfly – Youtube channel

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Let me make this point clear first: I fully understand that professional-grade software packages are complex and extensive. They use high-powered computation and extensive libraries and therefore need resources. But my goodness – does Autodesk ever fill up my hard disk!

Now that the spring semester is coming to a close, it is time for me to again look at the upcoming software releases that are to be used for teaching and will be installed in our computer labs. Since Autodesk recently released the 2011 lineup of their software (and in the meantime has posted them on the student community as well), I needed to look at the system requirements for all of them. The resources required to run their software are mind-blowing! Apparently every but one Autodesk software package requires more than 1 Gigabyte of space on the harddisk. Several packages even require 5 GB or more.

The one laudable exemption to this resource-guzzling lineup is Ecotect Analysis, the building energy analysis program, originally developed by Square1. Maybe in tune with its goal of lowering environmental footprints of buildings, it is notably small.

Let’s see how long Ecotect will be able to stay small. Yes, its graphics engine could use some tuning and at least in the 2010 version, the famous ribbon wasn’t there yet but please, Autodesk, don’t overdo it on the bloat in future development.

If you take a closer look at the Autodesk Revit installation (the 2010 version in my case), you’ll notice that most of the space is taken by the Rendering support files and the family library. The image below shows the file types and as can be expected the single largest file is a sky environment: “hemispherical_002_half_tiled.exr”.

List created with WinDirStat

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While we are (slowly) preparing for our trip to the World Conference on Timber Engineering in Italy this summer, I realized that I never posted about the two upcoming wood-building -related conferences in Europe. If you have some spare travel money (yep, flights are not cheap this summer) and some time in June, then you can double-dip on two very interesting conferences. Here are the details:

3rd European Congress for Energy-Efficient Construction in Wood

Where: Congress Centrum – Gürzenich Köln (Cologne), Germany
When: June 9-10, 2010
Links: Website | Program

11th World Conference on Timber Engineering (WCTE)

Where: Riva del Garda, Trentino, Italy
When: June 20-24, 2010
Links: Website | Program

I can’t find on the FHB website whether the Cologne conference is offered in English, but the majority of speakers seem to be German. The WCTE, however, will definitely be all-English.

To be regularly updated on wood-related conferences, bookmark this page on my Timber Engineering Reference:
Timber Engineering Reference – Conferences / Trade Shows

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I must somehow have overlooked this one. Apparently since last fall, Canadian Wood Council’s Wood Design & Building magazine has been posting their issues online using a free web-based viewer. If you don’t know this magazine yet – it is a beautifully presented resource for North American wood design and architecture that gets published approximately four times a year.

This online version is already a great step towards making wood design more accessible and giving beautiful design ideas a broader audience. May I suggest as a next step that the entire magazine rack be converted to online viewing. This would pull a very extensive archive out of the darkness of the magazine shelf. Obviously this can very well be funded by ads (see all that grey space around the magazine on my screen – just don’t overdo it). I am looking forward to seeing more!

Here are direct links to the latest issues:

• Winter 2009/2010
• Fall 2009

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