[Radiance-general] changes to radiance-online

[Peter Apian-Bennewitz]

Hi folks,

one minor info about radiance-online itself:

Six years after I started radiance-online, the configuration is about to 
change.

Flashback: It had started as an unofficial guerilla project in 2000, 
filling the void of a mailing list and a maintained website. Over the 
years, it grew to support the CVS software archive, hosted the Radiance 
mailing list with around 300 users and distributed the CDs of the past 
Radiance workshops. My idea had been to run a stable, no nonsense 
system: The system has been kept updated, and thanks to RAID, it 
survived two dying disks on the last 2 months without downtime. Various 
backups and self checks helped to make sure the source code distribution 
and the mailing list system remained consistent. And -yes, - many thanks 
to the IT at Fraunhofer ISE Freiburg for providing bandwidth (see 
http://www.radiance-online.org/webalizer/stats/ for details) and 
rackspace generously.

During the past months, it became obvious that new features would be 
useful. However, I didn't feel it would be wise for me to broaden my 
free support for it by a large scale, and trying to locate co-funding 
was fruitless. Which I found a bit sad, and, IMHO, may correlate with 
the management structure of Radiance.

Anyway- The domain registration expires next week, so I wrote to the dev 
list in May that I plan to "pass on the torch". Ideas then popped up on 
the dev list and LBNL (Lawrence Berkeley Nat. Lab., Greg Ward's employer 
when he wrote the legacy parts of Radiance) suggested to take over. They 
contacted me yesterday for the domain transfer, so we'll go ahead as 
planned. Which, in some ways, seems a good thing to me, as it will merge 
everything back in one place. And I'm glad we found a reasonable 
solution which allows me to focus back on what I want and need to do: 
optical material measurements.

So, with the old machine being shut down in the next weeks, and the new 
one being set up, you may experience some transitional problems. My 
apologies for any inconvenience this may cause.

Many thanks to all the folks who, by their email or code contributions, 
enhanced Radiance, smoothed the way for newcomers, located problems and 
made the Radiance community a lively place.
Also many thanks to Danny Fuller at LBNL (Windows&Daylighting) for 
taking over the system administration.

regards and happy rendering
Peter Apian-Bennewitz

-- 
 pab-opto, Freiburg, Germany, http://www.pab-opto.de
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