thesis

Recently Scott Sheppard from Autodesk blogged about Docupoint Discovery, an intranet/Internet search engine for AutoCAD files. It works by parsing binary AutoCAD files and indexing their textual and numerical content. Whilst it is not super intelligent (i.e. it doesn't make spacial assumptions based on the actual models submitted) it does help Autodesk workgroup users find information faster. The upshot of the Docupoint Discovery system is that you don't actually need a copy of AutoCAD, it reads the binary files into the index and if you need a quick preview it uses Autodesk's own DWF viewer technology to show it to you (now that is really helpful).

A similar set of functionality can be provided if you are an ArchiCAD Mac user by harnessing OSX's Spotlight functionality and the freely available ArchiCAD Spotlight plug-in. With this plug-in installed OSX can index all your ArchiCAD files (alongside all the other relevant project data like PDF files). Then with the next version of OSX (Leopard) or the open-source Weblight server you can search your Spotlight index on the intranet/Internet via a web browser. It does not offer the DWF-based preview option of Docupoint Discovery but for a zero-cost, minimum configuration solution it is not too shabby.

A blog post by David Megginson brought to my attention an article posted six years ago by Joel Spolsky about architecture astronauts. Who are they? Architecture astronauts in Joel's words are:

"Smart thinkers (that) just don't know when to stop, and they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean anything at all."

The moral behind Spolsky's story will continue to remain relevant simply because it is a lesson often forgotten in the heat of a debate or brainstorming session. David Megginson agrees with many of these observations but does point out architecture astronauts have had a positive, if not always successful effect on technology development. From the real world of architecture I am always reminded of Mies van der Roe's ability to grasp the big ideas of modernism whilst still keeping his head when it came to functionality and details (after all, 'God is in the details'). This ability gains even more credit when you compare his work to Le Corbusier, arguably one of architecture's great astronauts, who's ideas often far outstretched their functionality or success in the real world.

On a technical tangent I especially agree with one of David's last points about XML and the heady effect it has had on technology architects and evangelists in the past:

"(Architecture astronauts) believe that if a bit of standardization is good, a lot must be even better."

If anything both posts highlight the importance of stopping work, taking a step back and readdressing what it is you are actually trying to achieve and the way it is being done. Unfortunately for most of us it is all too easy to get caught up in the big idea or the nuts and bolts, in the process missing the chance to grasp what we were really on to in the first place.

OpenID is an easy to setup identification system for both users and developers that is beginning to gain industry momentum. OpenID uses URL's as unique identifiers which is a flexible and memorable way of tackling what your identity is. As it is relatively simple in principle OpenID is not a solution for all identity tasks but in a loosely joined, Web-centric context it is well suited.

All you need to do to use it is sign up for a free OpenID account, or if you are really adventurous implement your own system. When you login to an OpenID-enabled website/service it takes your submitted url and password and passes it on to the OpenID service for authentication. The first time you successfully authenticate you must tell the OpenID service exactly what (if any) information the target website/service should be able to see.

Finding quotes in a print medium is not as challenging because books have pages which whilst not entirely accurate does help a reader find a quote within a reasonable amount of time. Unfortunately quoting from an online source can be very painful for the reader. Even when provided with the text-based quote and hyperlink to the article they must wade through the entire article in order to identify the relevant quote and its context. Tech-savvy users will quickly jump to their browser's Find function but for the layman there is Cite Bite.

Cite Bite takes a quote and a hyperlink to the quote and displays the page with the relevant quotation highlighted which is a huge time-saver within large article. Cite Bite can be used through a Web-form, browser bookmarklet or Firefox extension. All these methods are easy to use and you end up with results like the following...

For over a year and a half Adobe has been making some interesting moves that could bridge the gap between the Web and traditional desktop applications. Adobe's first move in this strategy was to purchase Macromedia, the company behind Flash and a range of Web development tools. With these technologies in stock they are now actively developing Apollo, a cross-platform desktop framework which draws together HTML, PDF and Flash to create a Web/desktop hybrid environment (refer to this technical article for details).

TechCrunch has an excellent article about Apollo and posted a podcast with Adobe's chief software architect Kevin Lynch on the subject. With Apollo Adobe will be put on a direct collision course with Microsoft in the emerging Rich-Web application arena. Alongside Vista, Microsoft are releasing their new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS) technologies. WPF and XPS are Microsoft's response to the two formats that have successfully defied their monopoly on desktop file standards: HTML and PDF. WPF is part of the .Net 3.0 framework and whilst intended to replace the aging Windows graphical API a large part of it is devoted to facilitating Rich-Web applications through XAML markup (an incompatible derivative of HTML). XPS on the other hand is a direct PDF competitor and is not intended to replace any existing Windows technology rather destroy the incumbent. Usurping these entrenched standards is important to Microsoft because as history has shown controlling a standard is equivalent to holding the high ground on a battlefield; it does not automatically win you the war but it goes a long way.

An Apollo application running on Windows

Providing search services that span a number of disparate websites is a challenging problem that in the past has been left to the big-boys such as Google. However Amazon's OpenSearch RSS format is changing this reality and providing a means for effective multiple website search to be deployed at low cost by small development teams.

Background

Most organisations comprise of a number of different interest groups (I like to think of them as factions) and when it comes to external and internal websites it proves far more efficient to let these groups build and maintain their own independent sites rather than combine them under a single unified banner and management structure. The reasons for this are pragmatic rather than technical, in fact from a purely technical perspective it is far easier to concentrate on building a single massive website as this means one architecture, one management group and a homogonised user base.

The buzz around Web 2.0 may have only started in the last year or so but already industry commentators are putting their opinions in the hat for what will constitute Web 3.0? Such talk strikes me as more than a little premature and what is being discussed appears to be a regurgitation of the technologies proposed during the dot-com boom of the mid-nineties rather than original ideas on how to take what we have learned from the previous two incarnations of the Web.

Discussing Web 3.0 is premature because no one has come to grips with what exactly what the concept of Web 2.0 is right now. There are loose ideas of community, interaction and the writeable Web but no simple, easy to understand description has yet crystallised. Until this occurs its hard to tell where one set of conceptual ideas finishes and another begins. The bursting of the dot-com bubble signaled the end of one distinct period of Web development much like the K-T boundary marked the end of the dinosaurs (mostly). This intense moment of destruction followed by relative calm gave those on the Web time to pause, disseminate what came before and evaluate the best way forward.

To make matters worse discussion about what Web 3.0 could be appears to be centered around the relatively old concepts of the Semantic Web. Whilst a nice idea such arguments ignore the fact that Semantic Web ideas existed well before Web 2.0 concepts and in terms of realising these grand ideas not a great deal has changed. From a technical perspective the enabling technologies are still overly complicated and at a practical level no clear upgrade path exists from our current dumb Web to this idealised space (apart from millions of hours of painful, manual classification). Of greatest significance the Semantic Web relies on our ability to generate classification systems for many different forms of data. Given that a single office document standard cannot be agreed to and development of in-depth, domain specific semantic languages such as Industry Foundation Classes are stalled such a proposition seems far off.

For years the Open Design Alliance (ODA) have been working towards providing an 'open' (i.e. freely distributable) set of libraries and tools capable of reading and writing the DWG file standard. DWG is the default standard within the AutoDesk suite of CAD/CAM applications (the most notable and ubiquitous being AutoCAD). On November 13th 2006 AutoDesk filed a Trademark infringement lawsuit against the Open Design Alliance, apparently around the use of digital watermarks within TrustedDWG files created by the ODA libraries.

TrustedDWG is a digital watermark present within AutoCAD 2007 that ensures the recipient of the file that it was created using genuine AutoDesk software. This functionality has two uses, the marketing reason of course is that it protects customers from the dangers of nasty external programmers who cannot program to save themselves and as a consequence try to destroy your data. This is the marketing reason and like all good marketing reasons it is a completely lame excuse that attempts to cover up real technical issues. The fact of the matter is AutoDesk software is in itself notoriously bad for file corruption. After over five years of tutoring CAD I've seen numerous file corruption incidents and all have involved purely 'genuine' AutoDesk software. Perhaps if AutoDesk engineers were allowed to spend more time on developing a file standard with internal verification systems and less on monopoly protecting digital fingerprints they would not need to worry about third party applications damaging user's data?