Jeffrey McGrew's blog

AUGI AEC Edge is out, and it looks great! Lots of great articles. And we're not just saying that because some of them were written by our friends!

So a little over a year ago, we bought OS X Server software. Expecting it to be easy to use, we were pretty jazzed. For it looked like we'd be able to do a lot with it. Calendar sharing, fancy wikis, etc. We're a tiny business, we don't have IT staff, and don't have tons of time to set stuff up. Apple talked about how OS X Server was a good solution for small businesses, and we bit. After all, the other Apple stuffs we've bought we're very happy with.

Sadly, about a month ago, I finally threw in the towel on the whole thing. Uninstalled it from the MacPro we had it running on, and now I'm trying to see if I can sell the software legally.

The first thing that drove us crazy about the OS X Server software is that it only has two speeds: "Stupid" and "IT Director". Either you get huge slider buttons to turn 'on' or 'off' something (with zero other configuration options) or you switch to 'Advanced' mode. You can't switch back. Which would have been fine if either mode worked well.

With Basic mode, it appeared that you'd set something up correctly. As in, "I slid this big button on that says I want to share Calendars". Then you'd try to actually share a Calendar, and have tons of problems, and there would be zero help. You wouldn't even have a heads-up as to what was happening or why, just that big button you could turn on or off. Turns out that sharing Calendars on OS X is somewhat iffy, works best if you also setup OS X to be the DNS server (or have a proper DNS server already running), and would still have problems when it came to, say, showing that Group Calendar on the Group's Wiki. Which was an advertised feature!

So then we figure, hey, we're pretty computer savvy, let's switch to Advanced Mode and have all the options. Maybe we can make this work like it's supposed to. But then Advanced mode requred extensive setup to do anything at all. For example, to just share calendars, you'd have to not only have a full DNS server properly running, you'd also have to have a proper Authentication scheme, and the default was Kerberos. Which is named after a multi-headed devil dog, which is a pretty apt description of our experience with trying to set this up.

Either way, things would just randomly fail. The DNS server would just stop working. Permissions problems with file shares would crop up.

Finally, every single time Apple sent out an update to, say, iTunes, the server would want to download that and update itself. Which would usually also want to update Quicktime, which would then want to reboot the whole machine. This happened monthly it seemed. Most of the time the updates broke something. Why iTunes was on the server, I'm not certain. I guess so I can be cool and groove out while I struggle with a server that doesn't work, so that I don't loose my cool, take the server down to cupertino and throw it through a window in frustration.

After multiple re-installations, many hours reading the support forums, even hiring a consultant guy to come in and see why the VPN wasn't working... Oh man. The VPN. It worked ONCE. ONCE I connected remotely. It never worked again after that. Even after several re-installs, from a completely clean formatted disk.

Anyways, so, like I said last month we got a new (to us) server. It cost $150. It's a used Dual Opteron with a SATA Raid from weirdstuff.com, the computer junkyard of Silicon Valley. I put Ubuntu on there, pulled the big hard drives from the old MacPro server, and spent an afternoon setting it up. Sure, it's a little harder because I have to edit text files. But hey, once it's setup it stays that way. It doesn't break randomly. It even lets me do updates without problems. Imagine that.

With Netatalk, it even acts like an Xserve, it even lets us use it as a Time Machine backup drive. Crazy, huh?

Oh, and for Calendars, we instead bought BusySync. Which is awesome. Peer-to-peer iCal (and Google Cal) synching, effortless, always works.

So for $150 bucks, plus the $40 per copy of BusySync, we've got a much better experience than the $1000 OS X server software could give us. Sad!

If you're thinking of buying the OS X Server software, I'd wait until the Snow Leopard version comes out, and then I'd wait longer to see if it lives up to it's hype. I know we'll never buy it.

Now, of course, this could just be because I'm stupid, and couldn't setup OS X Server properly. I am not an IT professional, and all this is just my opinion and personal experience here. But if it is that I'm too stupid to setup OS X Server, then how was I able to setup Ubuntu to do the same job in less time, and have it work flawlessly?

Another new product we displayed at Maker Faire is our newest addition to the LED interactive table line, The Pulse Table.
It's much more affordable than the Ripple and the Wave, and it's sleek base is available in two different colors. Enjoy!

We made them for a friend's wedding to use in the photobooth, and took the rest to Maker Faire. They sold out so quickly, that well, we had to post them up here too. Enjoy!

Our friend Attaboy has a big gallery show in LA right now that if you're down that way you should check out. It looks amazing!

And not just because it's got the little boxes in it that we made for him!

We've always loved Attaboy's art work, we've bought a number of pieces from him over the years. Soon he'll be too famous and we won't be able to afford to anymore!

Attaboy also runs the incredible art / culture mag High Fructose with his partner, Annie Owens, a great artist herself. What an inspiring, creative duo!

Wow, what a great time. Maker Faire just keeps getting better!

This probably was our best year yet. Artgolf made a ton of kids really happy while surviving admirably.
Making something to survive the onslaught of several thousand seven year olds is chock full of lessons!

It also took home two blue Editor's Choice ribbons. Which we wouldn't have been able to do without our Artgolf volunteers.
Thanks for rocking everyone!

The addition of the 'space invader foosball' was a big hit with everyone.
The Maker Faire Artgolf course all folds up, packs away, and is now on it's way to storage, waiting for the next event.

We also had a booth in the Expo hall, showing off our stuff and selling our little collectable robots.

We had a bunch of fun mustaches-on-a-stick that were left over from a friend's wedding we made a bunch of stuff for.
They proved to be quite popular, selling out before noon on the first day and popping up in lots of people's photos.

We made these great panels to envelope our booth and to show off the more 3D sorts of things we do.

And being masters of flat-pack, everything in the end broke back down and was easy to ship back home!

Thanks again everyone, this was our best Faire yet!

When you throw something away it just goes someplace else.

Our shop produces a fair amount of scrap. We only use sustainably harvested or recycled materials and water-based finishes. The CNC process we use optimizes materials a great deal. Some of our scrap even winds up in the work of local artists. However, we still wind up with quite a lot that has to be tossed, and that means something is getting wasted, if only energy.

Or is it? Instead of just throwing our waste into the dump, or worse just burning it all, we drop it off at the green waste processing center for Alameda County!

While it sure doesn't look pretty, the end result is pretty neat. First off, a lot of the wood waste is used to make biomass fuels.

What doesn't make good fuel gets made instead into mulch for gardens and landscaping. Which they sell cheap and give away to cities for projects.

What doesn't work for fuel or landscaping winds up in a giant compost for organic materials out in central California.

While it's not as neat as building a downdraft gasifier and then running a generator from that to power the shop, it's a lot better than it all just going to dead landfill.

So while reusing something is better than buying new, you should feel guilt-free in your purchase of heirloom quality furniture from our store. For what little waste we do produce is dealt with as responsibly as we're able to do currently, and we're always looking to do better!

Another Maker Faire is upon us! Huzzah! This weekend should be full of fun and awesome (as Maker Faire always is)!

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We are heavy users of Building Information Modeling. We not only share as much information as we can early in the process, we also directly fabricate parts of the project from the very same models. Parts we sometimes hand off to contractors for installation, sometimes it's even just templates and jigs that help the contractor install things faster or better. Anyways, we're very open and share tons across the board with those we work with.

We just gave a talk on what we do at the TAP preview that's part of the larger AIA convention that just breezed through town. When we give talks on what we do, and how we work, we always get one or two Architects saying something to us along the lines of "well, that's great you can work that way, I could never do that because of all the liability" or "if I share my models, I'll just get sued".

While those concerns are legitimate, I do feel that they are overblown. People always fear the unknown, and this whole BIM / IPD workflow is pretty new and uncertain. CNC production is almost jetpack-future territory. However, getting sued over sharing a CAD file or a BIM model with a contractor or fabricator I think is a bit of a boogyman. I have yet to hear of someone getting sued over it, yet everyone is scared of it!

Honestly, the elephant in the room I feel is in the Contract Administration, the Implementation, in the project execution itself. Change orders, omissions, coordination errors, and other big CA problems are all very expensive and very real. And chock full of frightening levels of legal liability. Everyone in the construction industry has heard of someone getting sued over problems like these. It's likely that we'll get sued over one of these at some point in our careers, it's almost impossible to avoid.

Wouldn't you think that having the opportunity to possibly reduce such problems should be taken advantage of as much as possible earlier in the process? Simply using BIM instead of a traditional process we feel helps reduce these problems; IPD and direct CNC fabrication workflows even moreso.

Sharing more information leads to better coordination and therefore less liability we feel. Actually, as an industry, I think that we should embrace a significantly more open workflow, and change how we all work together.
It's a big part of why I left Gensler, and started a design-build firm. I saw an opportunity to embrace this new way of working, and to see where it might go. CNC-enabled Design-Build negates those big worries, and lets us just get down to building great things.
Which is why we all became designers, engineers, or architects in the first place!

So we've been speakers at Autodesk University, Autodesk's big yearly conference and grand poo-bah get together, in the past. It's always been a great time to connect, teach, learn, and hang out with some old friends.

This year they are doing something a little different, they are opening up the conference sessions to a general vote. Which we think is awesome! Once you sign onto the AU website, you can vote on which sessions you'd like to see this year.

So if you're going to AU, and you'd like to see us talk again, please take a moment to vote for one of our talks:

Model to Marvelous Goes Mental: Realistic Approaches to Photo-Realistic Design Visualization with Revit® 2010

From Fabulous to Fabrication: real-world Digital Fabrication and BIM

There and Back Again: Getting anything out of and into Autodesk Revit

Lean, Last Planner, Agile and Scrum, oh my! Modern Processes for Production

Thanks, and we certainly appreciate all the support we get from everyone out there!