After making two different attempts in-person to convince the Menlo Park city engineer’s office to provide the PAARA/MPCDRC radio club with the 3D contours or DTM of the paper map that I had earlier obtained for the princely sum of $5, I managed to contact someone in the office that was able to get me the data I needed.
Although I was annoyed at the language barrier (I had to spell “club”—twice), the enginner on duty I was transferred to said she would check with her supervisor, but probably wouln’t get back to me for a week and a half, since the office was shutting down for a week.
I was pleasently surprised, however, when just ½ hour later I received a call back from the same engineer, saying she had found the file and would be happy to E-mail it to me. It indeed arrived a few minutes later.
Opening it in AutoCAD showed some interesting things. First, the paper map I alredy had was missing a few details I knew existed, such as the methane collection network that we of course need to protect during our set up. Turns out these are in the DWG file, just on frozen layers.
Also, although most of the contours have the correct elevation assigned to their Z value, a few contours had a bogus elevation of just 10 feet. This became apparent only when viewing the map with 3DORBIT.
We’re well into the 21st century, and it’s been almost six years since Microsoft first documented how to install drivers and applications without annoying users, in the MSDN article Best Practices: Avoid Reboots During Install. This information also appears in Windows Logo Handbook—BackOffice Requirements (see page 39), and several other locations.
Yet right now, I’m just installing an FCC database that uses ESRI’s Arc Explorer 2.0 to allow searches of commercially licensed radio and television broadcast antennas, cellular phone towers, Licensing Market boundaries, and other useful information—and it’s telling me that I must reboot before I can use the program.
Even as recently as December 2001, Microsoft described Installing Drivers and Utilities without Rebooting on Windows.
Why is it, then, that ESRI forces users to suffer this needless reboot? It is time-consuming, forces you to interrupt anything you are working on, and then restore it all when the installation is complete. This frequently happens to me just when I have a bunch of browser windows open with carefully constructed searches and search results open, and there is no good way to save the current state of such research.
So ESRI, I challenge you to fix this annoying bug. It shouldn’t take more than 2 months.
If you’ve been reading the other CAD blogs, then Joe Greco’s passing will not be news to you.
During the many years that Joe wrote for CADENCE, we came to talk often about our passion of 3D modeling and the technology that surrounds it, and when I left the magazine business recently and decided to strike out on my own, Joe was one of the first people I talked with about what areas of the industry needed more attention, and as always, his comments were insightful and pertinent.
When I arrived at Autodesk University on Sunday last month, I checked in to my hotel and then made a beline for the Betty Boop bar, where many of us would meet at 7ish every year, on the evening before the first day of the conference. When I discovered Joe wasn’t there, I dialed his phone, half-expecting to hear a doppler shift as it rang nearby, but instead found out he was still in Arizona, snowed-in.
Four days later, he was gone, and will be missed by all fortunate enough to have known him.
Walking out of the AUGI meeting a few minutes early, I was slightly delayed by a woman wearing an HP shirt, passing out flyers.
The flyer I got had the number 12 (or some other nearby number), and the gal from HP was saying “Would you like a free SpaceBall? Take this to the HP booth” to me and the next person behind me. If there had been any mention of this, I had totally missed it. Apparently, I was one of 20 or so other lucky individuals who just happened to pass through there at about the same time.
Surely all the others had the same goal I did—of beating the crowd into the line for the AUGI Beer Bash on the show floor, but alas, the line was already longer than any I had seen at AU.
Upon reaching the HP booth, I learned that the giveaway appeared to be a clever geurilla marketing effort by HP to encourage people to explore the benefits of the device, and quite likely to evangelize it back at their office. To receive the SpaceBall 5000 USB, each of us had to turn in our numbered flyer (no double-dipping!) and sit through an automated training session with the device.
Being quite familiar with the device already, I didn’t really need the training session at all, but agreed to try it anyway. I was impressed with the exercises the tool used to tutor new users, and offered the fellow from HP that gave me the demo (and the SpaceBall) a few tips on how it might be improved.
Not to be overly fateful, but I did see this as a sign that my desire to return to covering the CAD market after a year’s hiatus was clearly in the cards.
Welcome to CADJournal—a new concept in covering computer aided design–related technologies.
Created by the former technical editor of CADENCE magazine, CADJournal’s purpose is to test and analyze software and hardware for ease-of-use, capabilities, and interoperability. This blog will be freely available, and will chronicle my experiments with using CAD for a variety of tasks ranging from creating maps for volunteer orginizations to designing inventions to made-up experiments, all as a means to test the capabilities of CAD software and hardware.
Special reports will also be available for purchase as I complete research on various topics and individual products.
