You are a model of predictability. You come to your office every day of the week at 8 am sharp, never one minute late. You take no breaks until noon, when you instantly disappear from your building. At 2 pm you rematerialize in your office, where you work until 6 pm. You take weekends off, […]
We have made Apache Felix run successfully on the UNC90 embedded platform and here I’d like to share our experience. Our UNC90 runs on an ARM9 chip with 16 Mb flash and 32 Mb RAM. It runs the uClinux operating system. The flash is divided in four partitions according to the linux/drivers/mtd/maps/modarm9.c file in uClinux’s […]
Recently I got this email from Dr. Dimitrios Gyalistras of ETH Zurich: I would like to draw your attention to the newly launched website of the project Use of Weather and Occupancy Forecasts for Optimal Building Climate Control (OptiControl): http://www.sysecol.ethz.ch/OptiControl/ OptiControl is a collaborative effort by the ETH Zurich, EMPA Dübendorf, MeteoSwiss and Siemens Building […]
I have released version 0.1.0 of the Java GNU Scientific Library (JGSL) project, its first public release. You can download it from here. This first release provides Java wrapper classes for the Special Functions module of the GNU Scientific Library (log, exp, airy, bessel, etc). I’ve run some preliminary tests on the log function, that […]
I have already mentioned elsewhere that the OSGi technology is likely to play an important part in the computerization of current and future buildings. It is a very attractive programming model for building management systems, especially with respect to its software lifecycle model (stopping, updating and restarting) that does not require a reboot of the […]
Philip Greenspun has written a nice report on a MIT meeting whose theme was energy. You can find it here.
Grant that I will never ever have to submit a paper in Word format again… But in case that should happen, here is David’s step-by-step cookbook for converting a ground-breaking paper on building physics from LaTeX to Word format. The idea is to first convert it to HTML, and use Word to convert it—something that […]
The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is a rich state-of-the-art C library of mathematical routines. Pretty much everything you could think of—special functions, linear algebra, function optimization, fast Fourier transforms, and much, much more—is covered by this library. I have taken over the open-source Java GNU Scientifc Library project at SourceForge. The plan is to write […]
Too much choice can sometimes be just as bad as not enough. Market research has shown that there is an optimal number of jam flavours a supermarket should have on shelf for its customers—less than that, and you feel constrained; but more than that and the variety confuses you.A recent paper in Energy and Buildings […]
CS Lewis called this person the “embarassing enthusiast”. A person very committed and very verbal about your common religion, yet someone who occasionally discredits your own views by advancing weak arguments to support it. What to do with such a person’s views? You cannot oppose them—for that would work against your own. Yet you cannot […]