Recovering from a Hard Disk Failure

Earlier this month, I suffered, for the first time, what can only be described as a "virtual death." My computer reported a "hard disk read failure" and refused to work any more. Never having encountered a computer problem before, I had slackened off a bit on the backup front and lost quite a bit of data. My hard drive now sits at a data recovery facility and I am hoping the experts there are able to retrieve as much as they can. It was a hard way to learn the most fundamental computing lesson: backup, since no one is guaranteed a crash-free existence. If you have written to me within the last couple of months and have not received a response, please re-send me your email, as I have no access to it for now.

One of the products that was being exhibited for the first time at the recent AIA 2005 National Convention and Expo held in Las Vegas was VisionREZ, a building information modeling (BIM) application customized for residential design that is available as a plug-in for Autodesk Architectural Desktop (ADT) or as a stand alone product. It features drawing extraction, automatic framing, built-in cost estimation, and many other smarts specific to residential design, and is an excellent example of one of the likely future technological trends in AEC: BIM applications customized for specific building types. This month's product review takes a closer look at VisionREZ to see how it works.

This will be followed by a Viewpoint contribution from Tom Sweeney from the Preconstruction Departement at J.H. Findorff and Son Inc., a self-performing general contractor currently ranked 265 on Engineering News Record's Top 400 Contractors. He contrasts his personal life empowered by search technologies such as Google, which provides immediate access to any kind of information, versus his work for a general contractor where he still operates in a pre-Google world of disconnected construction information.

And finally, in this month's "Building The Future" section, we will explore the CIS/2 format, the equivalent of the IFC format for interoperability among structural steel engineering applications, and see how the two connect.

Thank you
Lachmi Khemlani

Editorials > July 2005