After conducting some initial tests for the mapping project with AutoCAD 2000, I can finally get a real start on the project (and this site) now that my promised copy of AutoCAD 2005 has been delivered.

According to the label, it was shipped via FedEx Ground, but it actually arrived via airmail. While reading E-mail this morning, I heard a loud thud (bounding off the door) then a softer thud (settling on the doormat), followed ¾ second later by the sounds of a truck engine revving and its backup alert beeping, so ever briefly before it roared off, surely in excess of the local 15mph speed limit.

I’m so glad FedEx has saved the hastle of paying health and retirement benefits by outsourcing all delivery operations for its Ground and Home Delivery brands. They must have outsourced those divisions’ customer service monitors, too.

I thought I knew the answer to this question already, but after a little more browsing on the Autodesk Web site, I’m not sure. I already know which civil engineering package from Autodesk is the one best suited towards the type of planning I want to do. I know I need 3D visualization features, terrain modeling, coordinate conversion, and raster support, but which one? It is possible that Raster Design may add enough functionality if I use GlobalMapper for the 3D format conversion, but if not, then do I select Civil 3D, Civil Design, Land Desktop, Map 3D, Envision, or perhaps even CAiCE Visual Construction?

There is no one matrix on the site that gives a potential purchaser a good idea of how these products are related to each other or work together. Clicking on “Solutions” on the home page, then “Civil Engineering & Construction”, then “Planning” and “Start Now”—a farily obvious choice—leads me to a contact form that will surely result in a bunch of product literature showing up in my mailbox, rather than a decent feature matrix or product information.

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.