Yesterday marked my first day as Chief Technology Officer at Neurobat AG, a young company formed in Switzerland to industrialize and market advanced building control algorithms, such as the ones commonly researched and developed at my former laboratory, the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory at EPFL. This also marks the end of almost three […]
About two weeks ago I posed the following question on the Bldg-sim mailing list: Where can I find a list of publications relevant to the field of building simulation? I’m particularly interested in refereed journals and books. The ensuing thread has been extremely helpful, in particular Shanta Tucker who pointed me to the IBPSA website. […]
I always try very hard to keep my posts within the main topic of this blog, namely computers in the context of building automation and simulation. Occasionally I fail, like for today’s post. I’d like to tell you about a software company co-founded by a friend and fellow Toastmaster of mine, David Portabella. The company’s […]
As you might know, my primary background stems from the field of academia and research, but over the past years my interests have focused increasingly on software engineering. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear to me today that if I had known what I know today about software, I would without doubt have been […]
I spent most of the day today debugging a very mysterious error we encountered when trying to programmatically call a web service over SSL from Java. Here is the source code with which we managed to reliable reproduce the error: import javax.net.SocketFactory; import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory; import java.io.*; import java.net.Socket; public class SimpleSSLTest { public static void […]
MATLAB seems to have a very peculiar notion on how to represent dates and times. Yesterday I spent a wonderful couple of hours debugging some code that’s supposed to compute the sun’s position, most of which could have been avoided if the MATLAB designers had followed a simple convention used by, I believe, most computing […]
I’m currently experimenting with new themes for this blog. I was not quite satisfied with the width that Typebased would leave me for giving code samples. So do expect some visual instabilities on this blog for the days to come. 🙂
ESP-r, is an integrated modelling tool for the simulation of the thermal, visual and acoustic performance of buildings and the assessment of the energy use and gaseous emissions associated with the environmental control systems and constructional materials, in the words of its official website. In other words, it’s a computer program for modeling a building’s […]
I think there’s no escaping this simple fact: the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is definitely here to stay, and all the evidence shows that it has tremendous potential for being used in home automation devices. I still remember from a previous life when we hunted for a JVM implementation that would run with a minimal […]
In a previous post I described how I tweaked my WordPress installation to support the display of MathML markup, for displaying mathematical equations. One of the steps involved changing the content-type from application/html to application/xhtml+xml. That step was necessary, or else Firefox would simply not render the MathML markup properly. Unfortunately, application/xhtml+xml is simply not […]