The Building Coder

Avoid Brain Racking by Using Using

You should always keep things simple (I think). The opposite can lead to racking your brain. In one case at least, that can easily be avoided by using a using statement – Avoid brain racking by using using – On the VS operation unspecified error – Native sons... Read more →

Swissbau Basel and Comparing Family Part Atoms

Here is a last-minute announcement that I will be attending the Swissbau Basel on Wednesday, a quick hint to answer a support case that just came in today, a forum thread issue, and a pointer to a drum solo – Attending Swissbau Basel on Wednesday – Comparing families using part atoms – Maximum area rectangle in polygon – Neil Peart drum solo... Read more →

Starter Kit, Books and Music

A search for Revit API related books, a very nice new Revit API starter kit, a richer and much more complex literary AI-related book, and a quick bottleneck steel guitar blues recording not related with any technical topic whatsoever – A very basic book on Revit API – Revit API starter kit – Machines like me – Bottleneck blues guitar... Read more →

Avoid CAD Import in RFA, AAG16 and Endtrip

Some interesting topics of the day for this first cloudy one after a truly wonderful Indian summer – Avoid imported CAD content in RFA family definitions – Advances in Architectural Geometry 2016 – Endtrip full sound replacement... Read more →

Autodesk Open Source All Over – Germany and Japan

Here are some notes on Autodesk Open Source involvement from AU Germany, the Japan hackathon, and two other nice topics for today: Autodesk University Germany Japanese View and Data API hackathon projects CAD Term Translation Cool presentation gimmick Autodesk University Germany In the keynote session, Carl Bass introduced Spark, Autodesk's new 3D printer and total commitment to open source: Connected – Spark connects digital information to 3D printers in a new and streamlined way, making it easier to visualize and... Read more →

RoomEditorApp Plurals and Free Educational Software

Yesterday, I mentioned some last-minute clean-up of the JavaScript part of my room editor, adding the handlebars module and a call to refresh on save. Today, for the sake of completeness, I'll add a last-minute pass over the Revit add-in part as well, including an even more trivial change. I'll also mention that I had some time out in nature again, before jetting to Toronto for two days next week, celebrating a deep and wonderful sweat lodge or back to... Read more →

WAV Database, Python and GUI Tutorials

My son Christopher is thinking of creating a music database for his personal use supporting some strict requirements that other databases do not fulfil. That prompted me to jot down some advice and a couple of starting points. The initial requirements are simple. Question: I am wondering if I should build my own sample management software since it seems to be quite difficult to find anything useful... My wishes: Build a database of sounds and tags, categories, comments etc. for... Read more →

Nightingale M3U and Denormalized Filename Characters

Here is a post addressing a Mac denormalized filename character issue, music players on Mac and Python file manipulation, so nothing to do with the Revit API. It appears that Songbird is dead, Nightingale is its successor, and nothing much else is happening on that front, neither now nor ever. I guess Nightingale will die a natural death too one of these days, but I am still using it so far anyway. Just like Songbird, Nightingale does not provide any... Read more →

DevDay@au Chronicle Estorage View Depth Sound of Noise

Monday was the first day at Autodesk University in Las Vegas, dedicated to the forward-looking confidential DevDays conference with the main focus on the rEvolution – where desktop meets the cloud. In spite of the confidential nature of the information discussed, I am sure I can share an at least an outline of the content here in public with you. I'll also touch on a couple of other interesting topics that cropped up on the past few days, such as... Read more →

Super Insane MP3 and Songbird Playlist Exporter

I am still in the USA, visiting my colleague Kevin Vandecar in Goffstown, New Hampshire, returning to Europe on Tuesday. Today we worked in his huge garden, loading a bunch of tree stumps on a truck with a tractor, then went for a swim in the beautiful Uncanoonuc Lake: Back in February I mentioned using Songbird to play music on the Mac, extracting M3U playlists from it, and determining the playlist duration using ffmpeg and mutagen. I encountered lots of... Read more →

MP3 Manipulation Using Python, Mutagen and Ffmpeg

Today is an education day, and I am taking another look at displaying a 2D view of a Revit model on mobile devices using SVG. I started off doing so quite a while back, implementing a room polygon and furniture picker in SVG. That implementation displays a read-only view of the model, useful for picking and identifying elements, e.g. for querying or adding metadata to them. Today I plan to go one step further, though, and enable translation and rotation... Read more →