Frog Up or Down

I, like so many, have a lot of digital information, and its growing, from simple letters and emails, through to the vast number of photos I now have dating back to about 1989, Then there are a load of presentations, research documents and scans, and thats just my private side, the business is just as big, with drawings, letters and site photos, plus other research and industry digital catalogs. My private life is spread across several methods of storing all this stuff i keep, from Google Drive, to my Mac account, and evernote. Google holds the most, and what prompted this particular blog, was a note I got from Google telling me I am very close to my present limit of 116GB. I will increase it, I see no option, I rely og Google for so much, more on this later. Apple, I have used for so long, their iCloud is ok, but sharing in any form is just impossible, compared to Google, so all I have there are backup of photos and some email, but the more I use Google, the more I want back int...

The online paper by John Foley ,  ORACLE entitled " As Big Data Explodes, Are You Ready For Yottabytes? " is required reading to understand Big city data, the impact it will have and the actual size we are talking about. There are several links to other papers, which give depth to the subject, but I started making notes and went for over an hour just following up links, key words and concepts. You might think just what has this to do with Architecture and the Architectural Technologist, well we are the detailers, the designers of materials and their use, as we head further into BIM and the data it can generate, and the way this data can interact and generate its own data, ,,,,, need I go on, its a subject we need to understand now.

When I first got a computer, it was a commodore 64 , with, little or no memory , no internal disk, just floppy disks with 64K and the idea of a megabyte of memory, a thing of beauty and wonder, The Mac Plus came out and it had a 1mb of memory, truly outstanding. We then saw leaps and bounds over the years, till my latest Mac boasting 1Tb (  Terabyte ), of dish space, and 16 Gb of memory it now seems this is not the end, as machines become so much faster, and memory cheaper, we are going to see an increase in memory and now storage, as cloud space becomes the next big leap in computing, I currently have about 1TB of online storage shared between Dropbox and Google Drive . This article is not about the fast pace, but the buzz words we now are staring to use, : Terabyte,Petabyte,Exabyte,Zettabyte,Yottabyte Notice megabyte is no longer listed, the list starts at Terabyte, for a full list try the Wiki site I

One thing is unmistakably clear: the energy storage market is only in its infancy and is poised for huge growth in the coming decade, and it will make the biggest impact we have seen on construction in general. Why do I say this, well I have just been reading the report of the RMI, Rocky Mountain Institute on the    Energy Storage North America conference  (ESNA 2015) in San Diego, California .  We can expect massive changes in the way we create, store, distribute, and use electricity, and you can easily see that this will have an effect on the way we design, and detail. Plus the way we treat the sun, its position, and out use of via both PV and water panels, ie roof orientation, and the attachment of panels to gather the best of the sun, ie tracking software. This is not just a USA project, the impact is global, so perhaps the UK government can take another look at the nuclear plants they plan to build. Big apologies for the blatant u...

Image by eversion via Flickr Ideas sometimes come thick and fast, some days they just don't come at all, so I now constantly carry with me my iPhone for the camera and notepad, and my moleskin for jotting ideas that I can't put into words. Currently I can't get the environment out of my mind, its like everything I see has a connection, from material source, to running costs, to maintenance, why oh why do we build houses with such deep and expensive foundations,  the innovation is to develop a simple foundation that allows minimal contact with the ground, I want all of the materials manufactured in a factory and brought to site ready for installation, now you going to say that this is tried and tested technology, and your right, so were is the innovation , simple its in the ground, think of the major building problems, and you think of damp, so if the house is supported on simple piles , and the piles are connected to a lattice of beams, around the perimeter ...

Image by eversion via Flickr Ideas sometimes come thick and fast, some days they just don't come at all, so I now constantly carry with me my iPhone for the camera and notepad, and my moleskin for jotting ideas that I can't put into words. Currently I can't get the environment out of my mind, its like everything I see has a connection, from material source, to running costs, to maintenance, why oh why do we build houses with such deep and expensive foundations,  the innovation is to develop a simple foundation that allows minimal contact with the ground, I want all of the materials manufactured in a factory and brought to site ready for installation, now you going to say that this is tried and tested technology, and your right, so were is the innovation , simple its in the ground, think of the major building problems, and you think of damp, so if the house is supported on simple piles , and the piles are connected to a lattice of beams, around the perimeter ...