@cheffey said:

How did that post get linked there Gai? That looks like the old forum?

Shhhhhh. It's a beta-tester secret.

Like they say at Google..."Lasers! Think lasers!"

No. Are you on a Mac?

@bznjc said:

We do end up using watertight STL files (or as absolutely close as we can get them). We eventually purchased some software just for repairing STL files. I know ZCorp is offering their ZEdit solution as well but we have no experience using it.

Jake,

There has been much debate over which piece of software (or Ruby script) is most effective for converting SKP to STL. What do you folks end up using?

(Pete, I assume you're familiar with Evil Mad Scientist Lab's Candy 3D printer?)

Oh, geez...you're going to give Google ideas now. They'll throw all kinds of coders at putting this capability in Orkut, and no one will be left to work on SU 7.

Interesting (or maybe "critical") security advisory on Ruby:

Arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities

(www.ruby-lang.org)

I have no idea how this effects Ruby on SketchUp, but it seems to be a big deal for people using Ruby outside of SketchUp. Some of the Ruby forums seem near panic.

@cerevellum said:

Hmm, weird..

It couldn't have to do with Firefox 3, do you think? Anyone else having this issue?

Lates,
Zach

I'm using Firefox 3...however, I did notice something odd about Firefox, with the browser consuming 98% of my CPU after I installed the plugin, and not releasing it (and still showing in Processes) even after I quit it. I'll need to check and make sure that was just the GE plugin and not something else, like a buggy theme, of course.

@cerevellum said:

@Gaieus: Re: FF3 >> It is now! (gearthblog.com)

@Tom: Nice site so far, but for some reason I couldn't get the Earth option to work. It keeps telling me there is a problem with the plugin. gl!

Zach

Seems to work fine for me, with a bit more snappiness than the stand-alone GE, as Tom noted.

@alan fraser said:

I would assume this might set a precedent for those companies that produce such content by means of laser scanning, however.

There are a few companies that make models of whole cities (like Sanborn, which supplies the "grey" blocky models for much of GE). I wonder if this ruling could be used to justify ignoring their regulations against redistributing their city packs?

Apparently a federal court has decided that if you make a digital model too similar to an existing product, the digital model is not in itself protected by copyright. In the case in question, the plaintiff made very accurate car models for Toyota, which reused and redistributed those models without the plaintiff's permission.

(I saw this originally on /.)

301 Moved Permanently

(www.sltrib.com)

The ruling:

Page not found | Tenth Circuit | The United States Court of Appeals

(ca10.uscourts.gov)

Anyone think this will impact their business model?

What are you using to make the animated gif, Pete?

@remus said:

No need to be jealous of my artistic talent lewis

That's a pretty extreme "sketchy" Style, Remus.

I wonder if the Google Warehouse has a Tom Baker component now....

EDIT: Yes, of course it does.

I was hoping for a model of a Dalek, Remus, or at the very least the interior of the TARDIS.

Or K-9, maybe?

@unknownuser said:

funny thing, I tried last night Aptana - it has some nice features, but for me is waaay to bloated/slow.

nowadays I play with SublimeText coded by an ex-google. as it is at the beginnings it doesn't have all the cool tricks, but it is extensible via python scripts (if Ruby were available I would jump in to write some specific Sketchup thingies)

another one that I keep an eye on is Intype

Sublimetext looks very nice, and it is very small at 11 MB installed...smaller than RDE in fact. And it's only $59, which is not that bad. I'll give it a shot and see how the features work out...thanks, TBD.

@greyhead said:

The free version of Aptana Studio might be worth a look. The feature set keeps on changing and it seems to promote Ajax at the moment but there is (or eas) a perfectly competent Ruby development environment included in the package with many of the features you mention.

Bob

Thanks, Bob. I'll try it as well on a workstation. Just the download is 98MB without the Ruby plugin, which means this too is a bit heavy for the subnotebook...it may be that I will just have to stick with RDE or SCite for the Asus eee after all.

Thanks, Todd. I'll try it out tonight.

The only issue I see is the size of Netbeans, ultimately about a half gig...98 MB for the IDE (Ruby only), plus another 400 MB for JDK runtime...not a big deal on my workstation with its terabytes, but a lot of space on something small like that Asus eee subnotebook I like to carry around.

Assuming I live that long, next spring I've been asked to teach an advanced SketchUp course for architects that would include Ruby scripting in a big way. So I've decided to review the language in the most comprehensive way possible, both in and out of SU, and I'm working my way through the most recent version of "the Pickax."

Does anyone here use an IDE for Ruby (on Windows...there are some decent ones built-in to Ubuntu Linux) outside of SU? SCite ships with Ruby 1.8, but it seems very limited in niceties aside from auto-folding. I've been using RDE ( http://homepage2.nifty.com/sakazuki/rde_en/index.html ) for the last day or so, and it seems adequate and does "beautify" code, but there is some unclear language in the manual. And I've been spoiled by the really polished IDE for the Processing (Java) language, which auto-indents, auto-embeds, prompts to close brackets, embeds referenced files, beautifies code, and whatever ( http://processing.org/ ). Anything like that around for free or a small sum for Ruby?

Thanks--Lewis

@unknownuser said:

Question of a total candide
There is no tool in Su for reccord actions on the screen for see the result in Ruby?

Do you know that such a thing was built into SU1 (before Ruby), but it was hidden? John Bacus and I had a little bit of an argument about it at 3DBC. I still think a macro recorder is a useful thing. But they pulled it out by SU2.

@remus said:

nice work. I dont suppose this is for the competition lewis mentioned earlier?

If it is, keep in mind that they are evaluating for build-ability, according to the brief.

You actually don't need telescopes to see aurora, so I assume that this isn't for that competition. Aurora tend to fill a good portion of the sky, in my experience.

Hi Jake. Thanks for joining in, and for the photos. It's so nice to see rapid prototyping from SketchUp. So many "NURBS-snobs" of my acquaintance have dismissed SU as incapable of producing satisfactory models for 3D printing! (There's some irony in that position, since an STL file itself is a mesh format and not NURBS.)

Since the question has come up, what format do you actually end up sending to the printer? When I worked for YSOA, we had a Dimension ABS printer that accepted only water-tight STL files. The models were typically made in Rhino, but then the Rhino-generated STL files were still run though Geomagic to make sure they were absolutely tight.

What do you end up doing with mesh files from SketchUp to get the 310 to like them?

I like the thunderstorm sky/general sepia tone. I keep thinking that there should be more space indicated between foreground/background using a depth mask, but you really don't have a distinct foreground so it might not be a useful gambit.

The dome in the background shows a few facets in profile, so you might want to take care of that.