Episode 009 - Nathan Miller

Nate has a new website check it out here: http://provingground.io/

Download it on iTunes!

Show Notes:

1. Lunchbox is a kit of tools developed by Nate for both Grasshopper and Dynamo doing everything from mathematically-defined surfaces to paneling systems to data management

2. Nate runs a website called The Proving Ground that is a veritable cornucopia of cool computational miscellany

3. CASE takes all of their employees on an annual treat to brainstorm the future direction of the company - this past March CASE took over San Francisco

4. Brian doesn’t know the difference between an X-wing and a Tie Fighter

5. JIRA is an issue and project tracking software by Atlassian

6. Agile is a set of software development methodologies for incremental development, flexible response to change and rapid delivery

7. A sprint is a short period, typically 1 week to 1 month, of focused team development of a project

8. Lean is a term used in several industries from manufacturing to software development to describe management principles focused on efficient project delivery using less resources, creating less waste, and taking less time without a loss in quality. Lean emphasizes continual improvement by learning from prior project experience

9. Scrum is an iterative and incremental software development strategy based on the structured team roles of product owner, development team, and scrum master and includes team rituals such as the stand-up meeting, the discomfort of which ensures that meetings are kept short and to the point

10. The Scrum Master’s primary responsibility is to address team roadblocks and maintain the overall scrum process

11. The Scrum Master is the Winston Wolfe of software development

12. HDR is a large architecture and engineering firm based in Omaha, NE

13. CASE has been working on building analytics dashboards as a means of monitoring team and project performance

14. MySQL and PostgreSQL are examples of open source databases

15. File System Navigator (fsn, pronounced “fusion”) was an experimental software for viewing file systems in 3D, making an appearance in the “It’s a Unix system!” scene from Jurassic Park

16. In other Jurassic Park computer tomfoolery, a heavily smoking Samuel L. Jackson hates “this hacker crap”

17. Deltek Vision is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application that track times and fees and is used for everything from business development to LEED project tracking. Timberline/Sage is another example of ERP

18. A can of Barbasol, Brian and Zach’s shaving cream of choice, is used to smuggle dinosaur embryos out of Jurassic Park (“Don’t get cheap on me, Dodgson”). Barbasol capitalized on this years later by making collector cans for Jurassic World

19. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) file is actually a hyper-specialized STEP file

20. Michael McCune made this insane IFC schema chart and is developing Anvil for Dynamo to Solibri interop via Dynamo. Michael is smart

21. Geometry Gym IFC is a set of tools developed by Jon Mirtschin for IFC interop between Grasshopper, Revit, and Navisworks

22. BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) is an XML schema to encode BIM issue messages into platforms other than the model’s original platform for enhanced collaboration

23. Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBie) is a data set closely aligned with BIM to help standardize critical project data at the point of origin and is used primarily to support building operations and maintenance

24. Dynamo has democratized the ability to use Revit smarter, which used to require advanced Revit API knowledge. Stockroom by Matt Nelson and William Wong extends Dynamo’s ability to tap into the Revit API

25. Rhynamo is an open-source interoperability tool for Rhino and Dynamo. Check out the Bitbucket repo for the source code

26. Mantis Shrimp is a similar tool (uses intermediate data files as opposed to an automated live connection) that has the ability to connect Dynamo and Grasshopper

27. Brian named Rhynamo. The backup name was Rhymenoceros

28. Nate teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Architecture where Nate is also an alum

29. General Grievous can hold so many lightsabers

30. Here’s Neo fighting a bunch of Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded

31. Brian uses AVP as a verb to describe a movie mashup, like when Hanna-Barbera AVP’d the Flintstones and the Jetsons

32. The first Star Wars was not originally titled Episode IV

33. In the Episode VII The Force Awakens teaser trailer we get a look at the Crossguard Lightsaber for which there are many theories (like, really in-depth stuff) and a meme

34. In the second teaser we get a first look at the Chrome Trooper

35. For a more expansive Star Wars universe check out the books and the comics. NERD!

36. Wait, how many Death Stars are there? And how much would it cost to build one of those things? WOULD MAKING A DEATH STAR SPUR US JOB CREATION?

37. Hyperspace is a method of traveling in science fiction that is often depicted as faster than light speed by virtue of traveling through alternative regions of space - kind of like wormholes. Therefore, the criticisms of making the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs being incorrect, seeing as a parsec is a unit of length and not of time, may be unwarranted

38. You can set your Rhino units to parsecs

Lightning round:

1. What book(s) are you reading right now?

   • Mostly stuff on business development

2. What music are you listening to right now?

   • Film scores by John Williams (Star Wars, Superman, Jurassic Park), Hans Zimmer (Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Man of Steel), and Trent Reznor (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl)

   • The Cantina scene

   • The Inception BWONG

   • Eminem

   • The Downward Spiral (1994) by NIИ

   • How to type a backwards N

   • Why is Tool not on iTunes (Because they are too awesome -Zach edit).

   • A Perfect Circle

   • Rammstein

   • How to Destroy Angels

   • Ride the Lightning (1984) by Metallica or ...And Justice for All (Zach edit)

   • Omaha bands like The Faint and Bright Eyes

   • Omaha is known for its indie rock scene (and musical scene overall) and boasts the record labels Saddle Creek Records and Team Love Records and the venue The Waiting Room Lounge.

   • There have also been many references in music to the Omaha scene including the line from Band of Horses’ “The Great Salt Lake” “Everybody listen you’ll be the next Omaha,” presumably a comment on Omaha being the latest in a series of “the next New York” which has probably just been New York all along

3. What’s your favorite sci-fi film?

   • Star Trek and Star Wars (If Nate was forced to choose it would be Star Wars)

   • Dianetics

4. What’s your favorite retro-game?

   • Reddit has a retro-gaming subthread

   • Super Mario 3 (1988)

   • Loves me some warp whistles

   • The torn edge in a Grasshopper component lacking either inputs or outputs (common to visualization components) looks like the level completion zone (which supports the theory that the game was just a stage play)

   • After Nintendo of America found the Japanese SMB sequel, now known as The Lost Levels (1986), too difficult and similar to the original, they adopted a game titled “Doki Doki Panic (1987)” into Super Mario Brothers 2 (1987). Oddly enough, Doki Doki Panic was itself adopted from a pre-Lost Levels prototype for SMB2. It’s all very confusing

   • Brian's fav game is Star Tropics (1991)

   • Zach’s is Doom (1994)

   • Without today’s level editors Doom levels were created as WAD (Where’s All the Data?) files

   • This is the book where Zach first learned CAD and programming: Tricks of the Doom Programming Gurus

   • Zach and Nate had remarkably similar childhoods

   • Zach once mapped his teacher’s face onto a Cacodemon. There is a separate sprite for when the demon spits fireballs so Zach and his buddy had to edit the map using MS Paint

5. What’s your favorite childhood cartoon?

   • Ghostbusters

   • Nate always walks by ghostbusters firehouse (Hook & Ladder 8) when he’s in NYC

   • He-Man ”BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL”

   • Thundercats

   • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - here’s the theme for 10 hours

   • Batman: The Animated Series

   • Here are the X-Men fighting 10,000 Sentinels

   • X-Men was hardcore - they killed off Morph. He was kind of lame though, and looked like a junkie

   • Brian thinks that the 1991 Chevy Lumina Euro Coupe kind of looks like the Batmobile from certain angles

   • Zach’s favorite X-Men (X-Man? X-Person?) is Nightcrawler, a superhero who can vanish from a room but only by leaving behind an acrid smell

   • Would you rather: Be able to teleport but you soil yourself every time, or have to walk everywhere you go but you never have to go to the bathroom?

6. What’s in your current “app kit?”

   • Nate used to hang with them but then Mike McDearmon and Brian Ringley had a year-long epic struggle for AEC-APP supremacy. Guess who won :)

   • Excel

   • Visual Studio

   • Nate maintains a list of free design tools if you want to practice architecture without spending any money on software

   • Transaction files contain instructions for generating geometry in Generative Components

   • Remember ParaCloud?

   • Form.Z had, and likely still has, a great topo and stair tool...also here’s how to add the System Beep to your own apps. (Please don’t do this).

7. Describe your productivity ritual.

   • Cappuccino, dry, mostly foam

   • Headphones on, music rockin

   • Evening with family

   • Crush code with a beer into the night

   • Take calculated breaks when hitting a wall

8. What’s something that you think is a critical issue in technology that’s currently being overlooked?

   • Addressing design technology innovation holistically - there is no HTML standard or framework to support innovation in AECO

9. What’s something that recently blew your mind?

   • A howling monkey inflating its neck at the Omaha Zoo

   • Daniel Davis and Andy Payne’s work with indoor positioning at CASE

   • Simple “CASE Shares” like news that Tableau 9.0 has automated data cleanup and pivot features - these targeted tactical things seem like common sense once you have them and you would never want to give them up

   • Any Payne’s Monolith representing a new paradigm of modeling with voxels

10. Who is behind Banksy?

    • HAVE YOU EVER SEEN NATE AND BANKSY AT THE SAME TIME THINK ABOUT IT

11. WHAT IS ARCHITECTURE???!!! In one sentence.

    • *redacted*