I’ve been working on an Ecotect training document for a while, it is still a work in progress, but see what you think so far. Ecotect for site analysis

as it is a work in progress, if you want to put notes on the tutorial and send it back, that’d be very much appreciated!

I snuck it onto the tutorials page a while ago, but I didn’t announce it. If there is enough enthusiasm in the comments I’ll carry on working on it.

This table shows the rate at which the numbers grow as you go up through the resolution steps.

For those of you who are a bit rusty on your powers of ten (like me), that bottom right number is 12.5 billion! That’s for each panel, so if you have a 5×5 subdivision on a grid, that’d be into the trillions of calcs for your analysis. No wonder it takes a long time.

I thought I’d check to see if I was supposed to be using British billions, or American billions, and it turns out (Long_and_short_scales) that all billions have been the same in the English speaking world since 1974!

His thesis was about the use of evolutionary algorithms to explore design options, more specifically with evaluation driven by environmental parameters. His project work was focused around finding widow configurations that satisfied certain lighting criteria, using ecotect analysis as the fitness evaluation.

He doesn’t have any server space, so I’m putting his work up here.

this is the thesis pdf (low res raster images for small file)

the lua code

and a summary doc

My trip to RMIT is all on now, and it all hinges about gettign the correct forms filled in and sent to the right people, but with very little guidance, and an 11 hour time difference at play it’s tricky, I should be going some time in January, and the couple of weeks to get my head around the city, and all the prime coffee.

I was teaching a UEL again today, this time I wasn’t Josh’s little bitch, preping his students for his full on assault while he parties at weddings in LA, it was my show, and despite the usual pre-terror, it all came together (i think).  We bashed into a bit of LUA scripting for ecotect, and the scripts we covered are living on the ceca wiki now.

Given that the term  doesn’t start at RMIT until the 3rd of March, i’ve finally got a chance to get all the litte bits tied up that i’ve had on my task list for years and years. all the little stuff, like doing the image credits on my degree dissertation, and designing my dad’s house that i really ought to have done ages ago, but have been dragging my heels. I’ve also got  an absolutely massive pile of books that i’ve been buying from amazon and then not finishing to much through.

so it’s all about trying to resolve my work life balance to the point where there is much more life involves from now on!

Go Kawakita is doing a masters at Brookes as a part of their MSc in Energy Efficient and Sustainable Building program, and as his thesis subject is so similar to mine, I’m tutoring him a bit.

He’s going to be prolifically blogging about what he’s doing on his blog, ETSDL.

Keep coming back, as it should be interesting! (Hopefully he’ll make it look a bit nicer soon though!)

so now i have legit copies of Generative Components and of Ecotect, one day i might have lots of legal commercial software, but i might go open source for a few things like office.

it’s quite a funny feeling after all these years of only having cracked software, but i think that cracked software is still very important. without it i would never have go to the position where i could justify the buying some real software. i really think that companies that charge for student copies of software are shooting themselves in the foot by preventing students getting hooked and thereby making a market once they have graduated.