I’ll be attending National Manufacturing Week in Chicago next month, to get the latest scoop on the manufacturing industry and related CAD software. Actually composed of eight shows—including the National Design and Engineering Show (NDES)—this event takes over the entire McCormic Place convention center.

Notably absent this year is Autodesk, but CAD vendors that will be exhibiting include Actify, 3D Systems, Adobe Systems, auto·des·sys, Cyco Software, PTC, SolidWorks, SURFCAM, UGS, and VX Corp.

Trying to sort through the list of vendors I’d be interested in visiting, and in fact, trying to get any details at all about the show, I’m struck by how slow and cumbersome show’s Web site is. This is the premiere manufacturing show for the U.S., and the fact that it isn’t a stellar example of ease-of-use, quality, and performance is an interesting comment on those same aspects of America’s manufacturing prowess and capability. The whole site is clearly database-driven, and quite slow. The exhibitor list is painful to navigate, since you can’t always select mutliple categories. I had to run a dozen different searches to compile a list of all the CAD vendors.

Barmy.

I’ve downloaded and “installed” the GlobeXplorer ImageConnect utility for AutoCAD, but already am getting the impression I won’t like it much. It is labeled prominently as “free”, but when you find the real meaning of the word, it means “free 14-day trial” with watermarked imagery.

And “installed” means putting the files in the Program Files directory, telling you they’re installed someplace else (C:\GlobeXplorer\ImageConnect), and then telling you to add that incorrect path to AutoCAD’s search path. Oops.

And what’s this with the length of the actual path? C:\Program Files\GlobeXplorer\ImageConnect for AutoCAD?

And even after ignoring those disjointed directions and using APPLOAD to load the LSP and ARX files, I’m still having no success. Ahh, the problem becomes clear. The program was last updated in 2003, explicitly mentions support for AutoCAD 2000, 2000i, and 2002. I’m running 2005.

I’ve left a message for Tech Support, so we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

I’ve explored the Earth Explorer application just long enough to discover it doesn’t have any application for anyone doing civil planning of any kind. Max resolution is 1km, and there is no georeferencing support in it at all. It also doesn’t support the SpaceBall, so it’s been uninstalled.

Trying Keyhole NV, I’m also disappointed that it doesn’t support the SpaceBall for 3D navigation, doesn’t offer any of the high resolution aerial photos I’ve found on the USGS site, and although allows me to overlay images I already have, doesn’t support GeoTIFF, thus requiring me to manually register the image by changing its transparency and fiddling with the image handles at the edges and corners. Yuck. On the plus side, it’s got a plethora of vector and POI overlays, including accurate local roads, gas stations, schools, etc. This feature will be a big help in planning for Field Day, and will speed up one of the data collection efforts—building a location overlay for our APRS mapping with the local hospitals, fire departments, police stations, ATMs, restaurants, and a few other things that might or might not be in the Keyhole database.

GlobeExplorer looks a bit more promising. It is not a 3D program, and its primary interface is a difficult-to-use Web page that lets you order prints and electronic images at somewhat reasonable rates. But the images are JPEGs, not GeoTIFFs and there is no indication if they are provided with georeferencing data. On the plus side, the company offers plug-ins for CAD and mapping software that might just offer that functionality, so I’ll be taking a closer look at its ImageConnect software for AutoCAD later this week, hopefully.

For now, though, I need to recover from the late night at the WordPress launch party.

I’m in The City, attending the WordPress 1.5 install event, hosted by the lead developer, Matt. I first started using WP at version 1.2, having been sold on it as soon as I discovered its devotion to Web standards and typography.

From the beginning, it was clear to me that WP was the right tool for this site, but it wasn’t until I started using the 1.5 beta that I really felt sure this was going to be the right long-term solution. Tonight, with the official release of 1.5, is the right time to say a little something about the software.

If you’re handy with XHTML, CSS, and understand PHP even just a little bit, WordPress becomes as customizable and powerful as AutoCAD is once you understand menu scripts, and attribute tags, and know a little bit of AutoLISP.

If you’re blogging with TypePad, MovableType, Blogger, or anything else, WP 1.5 is something you just have to try. Aside from the philosophical difference in WP from other blogging systems—of everything being served dynamically from a database, so that any change is instantly propagated—the new features make WP far easier to use, increase its flexibility, and may change the way you organize your site:

Pages

WP can now manage just about every item on your site, if you wish. Posts are posts—by design meant to be fleeting glimpses that soon get relegated to an archive—but pages are meant to last, with much simpler Web addresses (think CADJournal.com/About, or CADJournal.com/Advertising) that will last forever. They’ll behave just like static pages, but will benefit from all the template and style changes made to the site design, instantly, just like everything else about WP.

Modular Templates

Instead of having monolithic templates for each type of posting that must have everything, including the XHTML wrapper, 1.5 now has modular templates, where the header, footer, sidebar, and main content are separate files, so that a change to the sidebar affects all pages on the site, without having to be copied from the main posting template to the archive template to the individual entry template.

Dashboard

The dashboard always shows you your site’s stats—the most recent post titles, the latest incoming links (trackbacks), and number of posts—along with the latest news from WordPress (except for tonight, when Matt is busy helping people upgrade (a 5-minute process) and and tweak their sites—the official announcement should come tomorrow).

Blogs within Blogs

For me, this is a big thing. You can create additional WP loops that pull content from the database in a different manner than the main blog on any page. I’ll be using this to post the latest news and new product announcements on every page without disrupting the flow of my main blog that covers my trials and travails of using all these cool CAD tools, but with the power of the filters, the possibilities are endless.

It’s obvious by now that blogging has made the Web hip—but WordPress is also making it fun again.

I spent several hours yesterday researching what consumer stereo shutter glasses are still available—I even went down to Fry’s in a fruitless attempt to find them in a retail store. What amazed me was the number of different glasses that have been sold over the years, as well as the number of different methods used to connect the glasses to the computer.

From reading the Stereo3D charts—and just from common sense—it becomes clear that the only sensible interface standard is what this site calls “VESA-3″—the three-pin mini-DIN connector initiated by StereoGraphics and adopted as a standard by VESA.

After finishing that fishing expedition, I decided to visit StereoGraphics’ Web site, to see what they were up to, and discovered a pleasant surprise. The company announced at SolidWorks World that the next version of SolidWorks will be supporting its shutter glasses. This is great news, and tells me that that stereoscopic display is far from dead in the CAD industry.

So with this encouraging news, I’ll be adding stereoscopic support to my list of must-have features that I test with all CAD software.

Somewhere last week, I found a link to a cool NASA software project—World Wind—which appears to be a revival of the Blue Marble Viewer (for the Blue Marble project) with a different code base.

The ability to view and zoom in on a 3D globe of the Earth is wonderful, but the program only works on Windows, and since its code base is C# and DirectX, instead of C++ and OpenGL, it will be very difficult to port to other platforms. I applaud NASA for creating this, but since our tax dollars are being spent, they should be spent on tools that work on Windows, Mac, and Linux, to ensure equal access.

And the UI is also as frustrating and confusing to use as The National Map. Even though the whole thing is rendered in 3D, there is, of course, no support for either 3D mice such as the SpaceBall or stereoscopic viewing.

I’ll be testing this tool this week, comparing it with the commercial competition—Keyhole, GlobeXplorer, and Earth Explorer. (I might also take a NOAA thingie for a spin.) In software like this, I would expect to be able to extract geo-referenced images easily, view the content in stereo, and use my SpaceBall to manipulate the view.

This might keep me busy long enough to get an answer from Autodesk and Bentley about including their mapping software in the Field Day mapping project/software review.

After successfully instructing Global Mapper to download the high-res color aerial photo I had struggled with downloading and importing via USAPhotoMaps and the USGS site, I’ve now been able to match it up with the DXF contours I exported from AutoCAD, and get an initial 3D rendering of the terrain.

I’m not real happy with the results, however. The image and contours don’t align exactly, and moving things in GM is more difficult than it would be in AutoCAD. I think Global Mapper may turn out to be invaluable for data conversion and some visualization, but for now, it’s time to begin looking at more sophisticated tools. This is a case where having a command line would really make things a lot easier.

And while I can view the terrain in 3D, the user interface and export options are cumbersome. There is no support for the SpaceBall, the zoom/orbit controls are a bit awkward, and the 3D view defaults to a high vertical exaggeration factor, with no indication of what the factor is. I also can’t export to a movie or VRML file, and both the resolution of the texture map applied to the terrain and the extents rendered in 3D vary according to your zoom level, making it difficult to get high-quality images in the separate 3D window.

Since many of the documents I view and create on my computer claim to be based on real-world sizes (drawings in inches or mm, text in points, etc.), I’ve decided to finally calibrate my computer’s monitor, using the built-in Windows display control panel features.

For my CRT, with its current settings, the correct value turns out to be 85% of normal size—82dpi. I determined the value by holding a tape measure up to the screen, and adjusting the value until the on-screen scale matched the real one.

This feature has existed in Windows as far back as I can recall (at least back to Win98, and probably Win95), but its existance is little known, and rarely used correctly by applications. My use of it will allow me to test any application that has a “show actual size” feature. I’m not expecting it to be pretty, but it is the only way you should ever expect such a feature to display your work in its “actual size”.

There are many problems with its implementation, all the way through Windows XP:

• The on-screen ruler is too short to be entirely accurate. It should extend the entire length of the screen, to ensure the correct value can be entered.
• Windows only allows you to set this value globally, even if you need a different value for each monitor.
• The Custom DPI Setting is also burried where few people will ever find it. You must open the Display Properties control pannel, select the Settings tab, press the Advanced button, choose the Custom Setting… from the DPI Setting drop-down listbox, and then have a ruler handy with which to compare the on-screen ruler agains.
• Although you can adjust the calibration using either the percentage drop-down listbox or by dragging the ruler, you can do so only in whole percentage steps—which is usually more than one pixel—so the result might not be as accurate as it should be.
• Many of Windows’ built-in display items, including system fonts and icons, are pixel-based and don’t scale well when you choose a DPI setting other than the built-in ones, which are rarely accurate.

So far, the problems I have found that appear to result from using the correct value include:

• Windows scaling of some icons and text (the icons in the quick launch bar and the task bar) to the point of being distorted, when they shouldn’t be scaled at all, since they are designed in pixels.
• Some text and hyperlinks in the Mozilla browser being cut-off incorrectly at the top, bottom, or in the middle.
• A similar problem with images, with multiple white horizontal lines tarnishing some images, some of the time. In either case, highlighting and un-highlighting the text or graphics displays them properly, until you scroll the page. I’ve not seen this problem in Internet Explorer yet, just Mozilla.

I’ve installed @Last Software’s SketchUp application, with a goal of determining how suited it is to the task of site planning. Having spoken with the company at MacWorld, I’m not sure it has the necessary features yet, but they are planning on expanding the ways in which the application can be used, and this will make a good benchmark for that task.

Launching it for the first time, I’m presented with a Windows Firewall warning that the application is requesting access to the Internet. I’ve not seen this warning before with any other CAD software, so we’ll have to see what feature triggered the warning.

I’m able to import both the GeoTIFF and DXF contour files, but there are no provisions for aligning them or even ensuring their coordinates are preserved. This was expected, given my conversation with the company. The SketchUp ESRI ArcGIS extension does offer the ability to georeference SketchUp models in real-world coordinates, but since I don’t have ESRI’s GIS software, that doesn’t do me any good at the moment.

So, at the moment, SketchUp’s capabilities are not sufficient for me to use it for this phase of the Field Day planning. I’ll give it another try down the road, though.

After taking a second look at the USGS National Map interface, and after struggling with getting the JPEG output from USAPhotoMaps to align with anything, I’ve decided to not recommend USAPhotoMaps for anyone wishing to extract an image with coordinates.

When the author adds support for GeoTIFF, or any other format that includes the coordinates, projection, and datum in it, then I’ll change my mind.

I shouldn’t have to play guessing games importing an image because the software that created it decided to use a format that leaves out critical metadata.

With Global Mapper, I can import the GeoTIFFs that I downloaded from the USGS—including both the aerial photo and the elevation data—and they just magically align, giving me a high-resolution photo draped over a low-resolution terrain map. I expect my 2-foot contours to produce better results once I figure out how to perfect the terrain generation settings, but this is a quick-and-dirty way to get an initial view of the site.

And, as Mike from Global Mapper reminded me, his program can perform the same feat, and download images from TerraServer. The user interface isn’t the best (you can draw a window of the area you wish to download, but only on a smaller thumbnail image in the dialog box, not the existing map window), but it resulted in exactly the image I wanted being added to my map almost instantaneously.