The Musing Mill

There’s been a lot of talk among my friends about Second Life, an Internet MMORPG environment, otherwise known as SL. I’ve been experimenting with getting 3D geometry into SL. I’ve found other people trying to do it with Sketchup and Blender. The screenshot is from Blender. I came across this article on a Rhino plugin that might be promising;

Rhino has an internal “MeshToNurb” command. This command converts each and every face of the mesh into a Nurbs surface and joins them together. This makes the final solid object complicated and difficult to work with.

Mesh To Solid for Rhino, on the other hand, studies the mesh object and determines the features that define the geometry of the model. It then creates a single trimmed Nurbs surface for a group of mesh faces that collectively define a feature. Finally it joins all the trimmed Nurbs surfaces to form the final solid. The resulting solid contains a far lesser number of faces and is much easier to work with.

Mesh To Solid for Rhino is very easy to use. It adds a new command to Rhino called “MeshToSolid”. Simply type “MeshToSolid” at the command prompt and select the mesh you wish to convert into a solid.

I’d like to try and find a good path to get Revit data into SL. Programming the API is an option, but I think it will give you faces, not solid primitives, like those needed in SL. Rhino might be the best cleanup helper tool. I’ll keep ya posted.

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Today is the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. It is this event that caused my parents to leave Hungary and come to the US. I’m lucky that they did. Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1956 was the Hungarian Freedom Fighter. My father led a troop of 32 people during the uprising. I have found 2 good websites memorializing the event. They are;

Site with downloadable book
and
Hungary1956.com (photos)

It lasted just several days until the Soviet army returned with tanks and reinforcements and brutally crushed the revolt. The uprising is historically significant in that it was the first successful overthrow of a Soviet occupied state, and led to the revolution in Poland. It showed just how weak the Soviet hold on it’s states were. Ultimately, this revealed weakness directly contributed to the fall of the Soviet empire.

For a while it looked like the Hungarians would win and the Soviets would stay out. It is a fact of history that a second-rate diplomat named Yuri Andropov was the ambassador to Hungary in 1956, and he was the one who suggested re-occupying Hungary to Kruschev (the Soviet leader at the time).

This event ultimately catapulted Andropov to be the head of the Kremlin. He was not a leader cut our for such a position, and the Soviet union collapsed in part due to his leadership in the early 1980’s. In fact, most experts agreee that without Andropov’s support, Gorbachev would not have succeeded him as head of the Kremlin. You can read about him here;

Wikipedia on Yuri Andropov

Given the situations today in the mideast, I think our world leaders could benefit from paying attention to the phrase “Do not forget history, unless you want to re-live it.”

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Good news - Google hired me and is putting me in the Cairo office.

(Just Kidding - I had to figure out a way to use that picture)

No - Google has declined further interviews, and it’s a good thing since I now have to concentrate on Solo Structures. But I just can’t help it. I’ve been researching Google since February and I keep finding more interesting stuff. For instance, do a Google search on “Marissa Mayer” and then click the Wikipedia link.

One that page you’ll find a link to a presentation she gave at Stanford this May. It’s a great insight into Google. Listening to it rewound me back to working with Leonid and the brilliant Russian (well, mostly Russian) engineers on Revit and the early days of the startup. I agree with their “formula.” Launch it rough around the edges and polish it QUICKLY as your most vocal early-adopter users complain.

Marissa is set to present at Harvard with Carl Bass (CEO of Autodesk) in November. BTW, I hope Marissa has a thick skin, since this article made me split my sides laughing.

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As many of you know I’ve been working on a startup for about a year now, and it’s been a struggle with financing.

Most of the angst is self-inflicted, since we are trying to raise all the funds privately and not through VCs. So to those of you thinking about starting a business I give this advice;

Never underestimate how hard it will be to get people to part with their money.

Really. Leonid and Irwin were able to do it fairly easily with Revit because of the climate at the time and their incredible track record of success. I think it clouded my expectations.

For the length of this summer it’s been hard to tell whether the Solo business will survive. People have asked, why don’t you take it to a VC, but the controlling interests in the business don’t want to. So, it’s not my choice.

I was very close to pronouncing it dead this weekend when I had not heard from architect of the deal in almost a week. We would normally talk several times a week so this was really unusual. So to those of you thinking about starting a business I give this advice;

Don’t ever panic

I finally got him on the phone yesterday only to find out that things are all set and he was just busy trying to get stuff out of the way so he can focus on this once funded. It figures. Anyway, it’s a good idea to keep more than one option open, thus the interviewing you see sprinkled here.

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When I first started the second year of my MBA program, it was looking like the most useful class (professionally) would be Financial Statement Analysis (FSA).

Don’t get me wrong, FSA is great. Basically, you can take a company’s financial statements and dissect them in ways that they can’t hide behind - at least as good as any paid stock market analyst could. Very useful.

But now, after a few weeks into it, the CLEAR winner is Modeling and Simulation Using Excel (QM880). Many thanks to Tina Thiarra for suggesting I take this class last Spring. In short, every week, we take 5-6 complex problems in Operations, Marketing or Finance, problems I previously would have thought unbelievably difficult to figure out.

We then solve each of them in 15 minutes using Excel. It’s a mindset. Just wait until I figure out how to apply this stuff to Internet Marketing…

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I have an interview with Product Management at Google tomorrow and I came across this document while doing research. The design and development philosophy expressed in it is very similar to the one we had at Revit. No surprise such a process yields a great product. They have a ‘Top 100′ list, we had a ‘Top 50.’ Oh well, I guess we weren’t as big!

Maybe there are similarities due to Sergey Brin’s russian heritage. He was born in Moscow, and his family came to America in 1979. His father was a math teacher. Leonid (founder of Revit technology) was born in St. Petersburg and WAS a math teacher (just kidding).

The notes were taken by Evelyn Rodriguez and posted on her blog. My great thanks to her for the insight into the way Google creates products.

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Although it might work technically, I think this is a bad PR move for Google, which publicly claims to have a philosphy of making money without being evil…

Google labs eavesdropping software

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If you think that MOG.com is as cool as I do, and you hack Ruby code, then you’ll probably understand why Starfish extends Ruby (already cool) into ice-cold cool territory.

http://rufy.com/starfish/doc/

It’s used to make distributed programming ridiculously easy (thanks Rails!) for those of you who need to massively parallel process something. Sounds like what we’re doing for Solo Structures right now.

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Social software in the enterprise,
originally uploaded by Larsz.

Another good one from Larsz. This mindmap is from the Collaborative Technologies Conference held in Boston this past June. It’s a breakdown or structure of how social web-applications are altering enterprise dynamics.

Yes…this is the real geek stuff

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We’ve done a lot of different things this summer;

But I think the thing Steven liked the MOST was crabbing in Delaware. Food that you can hit with a hammer AND eat too? What could be better to a 3 year old boy?

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