martedì 31 gennaio 2012

Cloud thinking & Cloud computing in 3 D design

The question asked was whether a 3D design project on cloud computing is something feasible.

Told the guy I am doing it sometimes, and if you know what are you doing things go smooth, butt if you don't...

So he e-mailed me back:

Thank you for your feedback.

I am trying to understand a feasibility of cloud model for CAD, and very interested in details of successful projects.



The application - Autocad - was in a cloud? where was the data - in cloud also?

How was the quality of graphical output?

How did you deal with security?

And which provider - Amazon ?

Many questions - :-) !

Best regards, Georgy

And this made me think of how hard is to start from scratch when you have no idea what are you doing, thus I replied:

The feasibility of a cloud model it depends on the cloud you use, it depends whether it is a physical cloud or a virtual cloud, it depends on the size of the cloud and on the team that works with you.

I started on the physical cloud of Godaddy, and I am disappointed, I have positive and negative inputs for any physical clouds, Amazon included.

One uses these services when in lack of resources or knowledge to setup their own virtual cloud.

But using their physical computers as cloud terminals and some physical clouds as storage, organized in such a manner to behave as a single cloud, things can be adapted to more specific needs.

Last project I worked it like that, is smoother, but you need to know what are you doing.

Proprietary clouds like Amazon or Godaddy have extremely tight regulations that can be restrictive for certain jobs (they will never admit it thou) and most of the times in a long run one will notice scarce customer service, communication problems with the provider, and similar inconvenience, since they outsource most of the jobs to lower wedge areas placed companies that do in the same time same kind of services for several clients that have different regulations and thus their personnel is somehow Jack of all trades, but masters at nothing.

The application must be installed on each terminal apart if you want good speed when working with, the cloud made available the repository data, bot the one of the project and the additional ones needed (suppliers, models, parts, standards)

The quality of graphical output is as good as the drafters are. This is why we cloud think too, one is best in a certain area and another one is best in another area, we shift roles and tasks according to our skills many times during a project. This speeds up things and improves quality.

Security is a delicate issue, there is little or no reason to worry of somebody stealing your data from the cloud (unless they are after you on purpose) or in the transfer, but you are cloud thinking too, and although you have NCNDA signed with everybody, like in any job, if you are unfair with one of them you might also expect lack of loyalty, but this happens out of clouds too, thus the employee will always react according to the employers behavior.

Best regards,

Emil.

Just to discover my guess was right, another one that is testing the sea with the finger to see whether is deep and wet...:

RE: Not easy to start, but very proficient, one can hire an online manager for the project that would be in permanent liaison with the team and the management...

Great experience. Nice feedback, thank you.

Currently I am preparing POC for ProE based on Citrix solutions (XA, XD, etc.)

At this stage I am rather far from a project, want to start a working system to involve those interested to launch a production solution.

Made some progress on Amazon and local platforms.

And this is why I am interested to know "who is in the same boat", and maybe who is looking for such solutions to have themselves.

Regards,

Georgy



I don't blame him for starting, I blame the others for not giving the dude a hand, I did what I could in little time I had, my question is: why was I the only one to help when this topic was posted in a Linkedin professional group of 3D CAD experts of over ten thousand folks?

martedì 17 gennaio 2012

How to generate trafic by blogging? Easy, be charming!

When I first started blogging I had no idea of what I was doing, actually I still have no idea, but it works just fine.

My active blogs are:

www.wouldntcareless.blogspot.com (was my second blog, and most successful), than I also put up www.rainingidiots.blogspot.com



previous I had other blogs that never took off.



I wrote to pull traffic to my site www.mindyourbusines.com that is specialized in ultralight aviation, giving away construction plans and selling e-books and construction plans, and previously I wrote on the subject, guess what... the very few passionate people jumped in to comment or read, and nobody else.



While on Wouldn't Care Less I simply curse the system, the government, the banks, the human stupidity, or on the Raining Idiots Around I unmask e-scams publishing their letters and explaining how they make money on stupids, and people share my blogs in a viral manner.



To my surprise this is a very required lecture by all sorts of people, example: I had some 200 Facebook friends that I hardly gathered in years, and some 100 twitter contacts, same way, BUT since I publish in Facebook and twitter my blogs in chunks of 3 in the morning, noon and evening, total 9 a day (and I might write some 1 to 6 a month) I have friends request that flood me, up to 10 a day on each system, thus I don't have to hunt for them anymore.

Actually on Facebook I am approaching the max limit.



My site was receiving some 2 visits a day in the beginning, but I integrated links to my site in the blogs, and now I am on page 1 or 2 in most search engines for my principal keywords because of the traffic generated by my blogs readers (beware my texts have nothing to do with my site content, but if I write well, they are curious to see what else is in there)



Thus a well wrote blog attracts criticism, comments, replies, visitors, traffic to the site, more friends on social networking platforms (LinkedIn included) and I am posting my thoughts but also posting my friends thoughts in my blogs giving them direct credit, thus helping friends too.



It worked fine to me, thus try a few versions of blogging yourself, open a few blogs and see which style attracts more comments, visitors, criticism, replies and so forth, and after one year or two, close the blogs that are dying and keep doing the ones that took of and fly high.

mercoledì 11 gennaio 2012

The problem with technology.... is us!

I am sorry this topic is so short, damn it, there is much more to be said and done on it!



Humans have the bad habit to get addicted to things and habits simply because it is inbreed in our software so we can survive.



Since early history we got addicted to sex, but that was understandable, reproducing the race should of being something we should enjoyed or nobody would of had kids anymore,



Than we discovered alcohol, first by error, than by raffination of our error! Booze!



Later we discovered other addictive things like coffee, tobacco, hallucinogenic plants, and lately artificial chemically elaborated hallucinogens.



All harmful in a long run both for the person and for the society, but we legalized some and banned others.



Now is Star Trek time, o yap, I recall those episodes with the alien species that were technologically interconnected in society and all shared their thoughts to all the civilization and heard their thoughts simultaneously, no privacy of thinking, and were trying to conquer the non shared minds and turn them into similar by implanting them the chips.



We are heading there, we are passing from addiction to be inbreed into technology, not technology in us (although that will be the first step), but if things go the way I see in 100 years there will be no more humans on earth, just bio-robotics using human bodies as ambulant chips carrier that will do the thinking, creating and decision.



I let you imagine the consequences of such a society if somebody injects a worm to take over their power of thinking after they gave up their individual independence to the network....

giovedì 5 gennaio 2012

Going green is a mindset, not a damn fashion trend

I have an uncle, my mother's sister husband.



Who doesn't?



He must be now over 90, and I am over 40, but I do remember that in the summer vacations my mom shipped us for 3 months way up north to her sister to get us out of the city life and smog for a while.



They had some 40 hectares of land spread in small napkins here and there over the hills, the most large of them was 5 hectares, but good only for hay, and the closest one to their home was 3 hectares on a hill right over the village center, the rest were in between half a hectare and 2 hectares spread over 15 miles range from the house in about all directions.



They had some 300 sheep, about 10 cows and oxes and grew each year about a dozen of pigs, had 8 nasty dogs that fought wolves and bears to protect the sheep and cows, many cats to clean the rodents and hell knows how many rats and mice in their 4 winter houses (rather stables with a dorm room) spread on the main hay fields where they would take the cattle and sheep in the winter to eat the hay.



And with all this they had no car, no tractor, nothing likewise, all they used were their 6 horses, to plow, to carry (they had two horse-pulled carts, one heavy-duty with wooden wheels, and one with car pneumatics for hay or going to town to sell stuff).



They cut their hay grass by hand, they plowed with the horses, harvested by hand, transported with the horses (boy I had fun riding those huge beasts at 5 AM going to one field or another to pasture the cattle and the lambs while they did agriculture jobs, it was the only reason I woke up all mornings on my own at such hours.. lol)



When I was about 16 I become smarter and asked my uncle how comes they don't use tractors and trucks, and he said:

"The tractor might plow faster, but won't shit anything good to create manure!"

That was a tough lesson on living organic that I never forgot and I still try to live by that philosophy although I got specialized in industry, robotics, welding, aviation and hydro electric turbines, in my home we buy things in such a manner that packing can be reused and recycled, we try to eat as much as possible organic food, I advise and create sun heaters for home use (with pipes done out of recuperated empty aluminium coke cans), sun heated ovens so that one can cook the food with no toxic fumes, I also mingle with HHO bubblers and stuff, and try to create electricity from anything that is not toxic, like sun, water-flows and wind, get hot water from the sun heater, and create air-conditioning with the sun heated condensing towers.



I also love ultralight aviation (It takes you places with less than half the pollution a "clean" car would do and in a more funny way, no traffic jams, no red lights, no police tickets, and most important you can build your own plane/chopper for cheap in your own garage and legally fly it once registered and you passed the course and got your NPPL (in Europe) or LSA certification in the US and so on).