You might like to consider not having a door directly from the parking area into the kitchen; it's an easy route for petrol fumes and exhaust gas to get into the most smell sensitive room in the house. It looks to me that you could
a) swap the kitchen with the utility room and thus have easier access from kitchen to dining
b) block the kitchen/garage door and instead have a door from garage to outside, pretty much next to your main entrance

Although I never actually entered the run, I did run down that hill quite a few times in my childhood. Oh, and rolled down it a few as well. Some aged relatives lived in a tiny cottage somewhere on the hill and I got to visit during summers spent with my grandparents- so long ago that it was even before anyone walked on the Moon.

@anssi said:

About 64-bit: I was recently at a short AutoCad Architecture New Features course, and I was surprised at how much faster it ran in their dualcore machines with a 64-bit OS compared to our 32-bit single processor old workhorses with a significantly faster clockrate.

I don't bother to keep up with details of this stuff anymore but my understanding is that the 64bit mode allows use of a the 'real' cpu instead of limiting you to the 'fake x86'. Current intel CPUs are massive RISC machines with a layer of fake x86 wrapped around them. They have dozens (or even hundreds!) of registers instead of the insane old x86 arrangement. Think of it as being similar to running the old 68k MAc emulator for the PPC Macs on top of the PPC emulator for intel Macs. Some parts of some code might run dozens of times faster in 64bit OS mode.

@jean lemire said:

How about adding angular dimensionning for arcs.

404 Not Found

(www.crai.archi.fr)

@remus said:

perhaps a facility for downloading plugins from within SU, as well.

You mean like an (iPhone-ish) AppStore? I don't imagine the technical aspects would too hard but the management involved to make it a trustable source of quality plugins might be a problem.

@remus said:

close your eyes tim

Opened up the power supply for a little poke around and found the spring thats meant to hold the fan blade in tension was loose. Swapped it for an old fan i had lying around and all is well again.

Oh, well spotted. I completely forgot to mention fan noises. I had a 'wind tunnel' powermac for a while. Perhaps that experience made me want to completely forget forever anything to do with fans...

Well, it does use your screen, but voodoopad is working quite nicely for me as a quick-note-taker and info organiser.

You could also try Evernote which has the interesting advantage of always syncing to the cloud and so all your computers (and some phones) have the same info. Handles notes, images, does some OCR on images so you can search those scrawled notes you snap. I have it on my iPhone and you can snap a shot of a notice and get it OCR'd within minutes; late you can spotlight to find the phone number or website of that interesting business you spotted advertised on some bus or truck. I think it does voice notes too.

An iPhone is worth it just for the decent web-browser. Everything else is pure bonus. You get a jolly good iPod. A nice photo album in your pocket. A moderately capable camera. It can play some games that a lot of people like. It is always net-connected. It can find you maps and soon, will be a turn-by-turn GPS nav system. It can control your Mac when playing FrontRow stuff. It can control your house lights/security/etc.

Oh, and it's not bad as a cellphone.

All in all, for $200 plus the equivalent of an afternoon's work to run it for a year, I think it's a pretty decent device.

One of the typical causes of buzzing in power supplies is the plates inside the transformer loosening and rattling around as the magnetic field oscillates. Sometimes it is possible to tighten things up again if there are screws anywhere (safely) accessible. Generally I wouldn't mess with the rather cheap and nasty power supplies in most PCs. There tend to be big scary capacitors in just the right places to zap you if you put a finger or screwdriver in there.

If it really bothers you it might be worth obtaining a decent quality aftermarket PSU. No idea of good brands but searching for 'quiet PSU' etc should help.

@linea said:

Tim
Do you have any cad experience yet?

It depends somewhat on how one interprets 'experience'; for example I was an IBM Research Fellow thirty years ago, working in the field of user interfaces for 3D modelling software. Lots of experience there, but a while ago. I use SUPro quite a bit these days but I've negligible experience with current classic 'CAD' programs.

@linea said:

What is it you want to draw? Some apps are more suitable than others for specific disciplines. Here is a good list of mac cad apps with reviews.

Pure Mac: CAD - Software for Mac

(www.pure-mac.com)

I have a bunch of house plans dumped from VectorWorks as DXF files and I want to get them into SU so I can derive accurate dimensions etc. I have now - finally- got though the list by working with DoubleCAD to import them and write back out as an older format of DXF. It took a couple of dozen attempts, with regular fatal crashes of DCAD, rebooting the VIsts vm etc. Lots of fun, for a certain deranged definition of 'fun'.

I downloaded and tried several apps while doing all this.
QCad was utterly incomprehensible and refused to import the files.
EazyDraw claimed to have read the files but displayed nothing.
HighDesign ditto.
Not a very reassuring experience all in all.

But thanks for the pointer - I'll try a few more sometime and see if any of them are helpful.

What is the best app on OSX for handling DXF/DWG type files?
I've just been trying DoubleCAD on Windows on Parallels and it was not a pleasant experience. Windows looks worse every time I have to fire it up (rarely, thankfully) and the UI for DoubleCAD is complex beyond belief. I think there are fewer buttons/menus/widgets in my starship!
I'm going to make an attempt to extract the info I need with it but really, a decent, simple, not too expensive native app would be nice. If only SU would import the damn files adequately....

@solo said:

Not necessarily, firstly is SU multi core even possible? how will that be achieved?

It's probably possible but potentially very difficult. I could imagine separating out user input events, inferencing, rendering, to separate threads but making it possible and useful to have multiple threads working on each is harder. A quarter of a century ago (eek!) I was working on solid modelling software; it was possible to make a parallel version to ray trace the voxel models (and we did - a 128 processor system) but it turned out that you could write a better algorithm that would run faster on a single cpu given the hardware of the day. Perhaps it's better now. Perhaps it isn't.

@solo said:

64 bit I'm not sure about but from what I've heard it won't make much of an improvement in performance

My understanding is that 64bit here really refers to using the 'proper' 64 bit instruction set in modern intel architectures. Don't forget that the Core 2 Duos etc that we are mostly using these days actually have a reasonable cpu and instruction set hidden away under all that nasty x86 (blech) wrapping. I think they run x86 code (puke) as a sort of spare time hobby, something to do while they do their real work. Which as we all know, is plotting the overthrow of the human race. With the proper instruction set in use you suddenly have a sensible number of registers, for example.

I was gonna reply to you but just couldn't get around to it earlier and really couldn't be too bother...... oooh, what's that?

My suggestion is to find a civil engineer that you can get interested in the project. Perhaps even someone from a major concrete supplier or concrete construction specialist; that way you'll likely get good advice free of charge and maybe even a route to help with construction.

@unknownuser said:

35. To look oneself up on the internet. An entirely new form of self abuse for the digital age.

Ego-surfing. Been in use for at least 14 years.

Better fun - ego-surfing your bosses bookshelf and pointing out the books about you or your work.
Even better fun - looking through your bosses bookshelf and having someone else point out the books about you or your work.

Take a look at http://www.concretenetwork.com/concrete/footing_fundamentals/why_soils_matter.htm for some basic info. Without any special effort your structure will apply around 2,500 lb/sq.ft. pressure and so be ok on most soils better than clay.

Has anyone tried SU7pro on one of the new iMacs with a Radeon 4850 GPU yet? If so, is it working well?

@unknownuser said:

in general, i think i'm fairly open minded but maybe i really am missing something?

The important thing is not to be so open minded that your brain falls out.

Money is simply barter with deferred actualisation. I barter some effort for some DeferredBarter tokens and later I exchange them for actual goods. Nobody in their right mind would want to try to build a functional economy with actual physical barter. It was tried in the past. That's why they invented Corn Exchanges etc.

Aaaaaargh. It's started happening again. WindowServer lockup after a couple of hours work. After rebooting I tested various things including removing all plugins, opening a new model, importing my old model into a new model, removing all textures etc etc. None made any difference; the memory usage just ticks up and up. Even the completely empty model does it.

There were no crash logs created, same as before. There were hundreds of

17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] SketchUp(959,0xa0353720) malloc; *** error for object 0xa02606d8; Non-aligned pointer being freed 

type error messages logged.

Possibly related (but maybe not) I got some really curios complaints on my last quit of SU -

17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);3081; warning; parenthesize argument(s) for future version 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);3104; warning; parenthesize argument(s) for future version 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = Units 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 0.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = StampOffset 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 12.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = GridSpacingX 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 120.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = SmooveRadius 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 4.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] key = GridSpacingY 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] value = 120.0 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] Error;  
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] #<LocalJumpError; unexpected return> 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);106;in `load' 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] Error;  
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] #<LocalJumpError; unexpected return> 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] /Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 7/SketchUp/Plugins/Zorro2.rb;650 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);106;in `call' 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] (eval);106 
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] Error;  
17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] #<LocalJumpError; unexpected return> 

and

17/03/09 17 Mar 6;15;16 PM [0x0-0x45045].com.google.sketchuppro7[959] /var/pulse/data/recipes/5374103/base/src/googleclient/sketchup/source/sketchup/macapp/MaterialUtils.mm;596; failed assertion `0' 

for example.

OK, so I'll try this 'safe-mode' stuff and see if it still happens. I may be projecting from years of experience in developing virtual machines for object languages but this does seem awfully like a garbage collection bug in the Ruby interpreter.