BIM Programming Madrid and Spanish Connectivity

I spent this week in Madrid, presenting at the BIM Programming conference and teaching the subsequent two-day workshop on the Revit API and Connecting the desktop and the cloud.

BIM Programming Madrid

BIM Programming Mainstage Presentation

My mainstage presentation addressed the following topics:

Everything went very well indeed, with a rather Spanish schedule meaning late hours, so I ended up eating dinner between ten o'clock in the evening and midnight, and falling into bed between one and two in the morning every night.

I am exhausted!

The Spanish Nature of Connectivity

So it turned out to be a pretty crazy week with very late hours compared to my usual habits, little sleep, and many exciting technical discussions.

I probably talked more here in the last few days than I have in the entire last few months back in Switzerland, at least as far as programming is concerned.

Connecting the desktop and the cloud is so utterly easy!

The BIM and developer community here is Spain is incredibly enthusiastic about the possibilities this offers.

It has been a great pleasure and honour to work together so closely and intensively with Alberto Arteaga Garcia and above all Jose Ignacio Montes of Avatar BIM.

In the past days, Jose and I implemented FireRatingClient, a new stand-alone fireratingdb client, a Revit-independent Windows forms-based sibling of the FireRatingCloud Revit add-in.

You can check it out right away. The GitHub readme tells you all you need to know to understand it.

You can also check out the to-do list to get an idea of the direction we are headed.

Furthermore, we are working on improvements to the RoomEditorApp, which we intend to migrate from CouchDB to node.js and mongodb.

Castafiore

On my last night here, Alberto took us to La Castafiore (twitter).

A nice dinner accompanied by opera arias and ending in a rather unusual yet also very Spanish manner:

La Castafiore

Zazen

This coming Sunday morning, I will be leading a short Zazen meditation session, so here are some notes by Thích Nhất Hạnh on how to sit:

Matins

To end the sitting, I plan to read this nice morning poem by the late John O'Donohue together:

Matins – Eternal Echoes

II.

I arise today

In the name of Silence
Womb of the Word,
In the name of Stillness
Home of Belonging,
In the name of the Solitude
Of the Soul and the Earth.

I arise today

Blessed by all things,
Wings of breath,
Delight of eyes,
Wonder of whisper,
Intimacy of touch,
Eternity of soul,
Urgency of thought,
Miracle of health,
Embrace of God.

May I live this day

Compassionate of heart,
Gentle in word,
Gracious in awareness,
Courageous in thought,
Generous in love.

It is especially nice in German, or maybe I am just more used to that version nowadays:

Morgengedanken

ich erhebe mich heute
im namen des schweigens – schoss des wortes
im namen der stille – heim des zugehörens
im namen der einsamkeit – der seele und der erde

ich erhebe mich heute
gesegnet von jeglichem ding
schwingen des atems
wonne der augen
staunen des flüsterns
nähe der berührung
dringlichkeit des gedankens
wunder der gesundheit
gottes umarmung

möge ich verleben diesen tag als mensch
mitfühlenden herzens
gütigen wortes
freundlichen achtens
mutigen sinns
freigebiger liebe

AlphaGo, Machine Learning, Machine Intuition?

Talking about Japanese culture, the AlphaGo Go computer program has now beaten a grand master of Go.

Machine learning is gradually conquering areas that cannot be cracked by pure combinatorial analysis, like chess, but require learning and something akin to intuition to solve.