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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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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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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Joshua Schachter: Del.icio.us - Things we’ve learned,
originally uploaded by Larsz.

This is a great overview of all the things that have to be considered when building a company with a Web-hosted application as it’s main interface to the customer.

The guys at Delicious have done a great job and these are their notes.

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Shaun Inman, Mint: 10 Reasons Why You Need to Build an API,
originally uploaded by Larsz.

Everyone (and by this I mean software-types, MBAs or CAD users) knows APIs are important. I’m trying to work with Vertex in Finland and they apparently do not. Here’s a good summary of why they are that I found on Flickr…

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So B-school is still fun, but BUSY. The difference between this and working is that at work I didn’t have a deliverable EVERY DAY of the week. In fact, I had a class this week that had 3 deliverables all in one class. So the pace is pretty frantic.

I’m starting to learn some stuff that would have been very useful to me the last few years. At work, I always wondered how anybody could confidently make use of ’squishy’ survey data. I’m now understanding that you can seperate out confounding factors using statistics. I learned stat many years ago, but in the context of engineering, not business. Application makes all the difference in the world.

The other interesting insight is that I’m starting to understand the mindset of a marketer. I’ve done the tasks and the math before, but working through the reasoning of cases with a master like Menezes is a real eye-opener. It really allows you to understand how to structure a compelling argument for moving a business/product in a given direction.

I can confidently say that an MBA is going to be a huge asset - I should have done it years ago.

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In the middle of last week, I got a callback for a Product Management position at Google, so I have another phone interview on Friday. They basically ask you questions about products and design, leading to a question about how to improve a Google product. This seems like an interesting way to get feedback as long as it makes it into the official loop.

Anyway, since I had the opportunity, I went right after the core product and told the interviewer how I thought they could improve AdWords. Maybe next interview I can focus on Adsense. It’s a pet peeve…

Why? Well, for one thing, Adsense is COMPLETELY insecure. Since the publisher codes are available within the source of the page, anybody with a site extractor that supports PHP can fake being you and get ALL your sites banned in one go. Actually it’s easier - if someone wants to get you banned, all they have to do is join a free surfing site and put your URL in the rotation. You will then get invalid clicks and VIOLA, all your sites will be banned by Adsense. As a bonus, you will have no recourse with Google.

There are discussion and articles on various forums about this and it is some of Google’s dirt they try and keep under the rug. There is an easy way to fix this and I’m surprised they haven’t done it yet…method to be revealed in an another interview someday

For instance, this site is EXACTLY the type of site Google wants in it’s publisher network. Yet, somehow everytime I submit, they come up with some vague reason to say it’s not what they’re looking for. It indicates their system is broken. I think they know that. Or maybe it’s because I’m starting to bash AdSense. I think I’ll submit MusingMill again today. Let’s see what happens. (revised - 10/17) Yes, Google turned this site down again. Hmmmm.

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