The Ides of March markes a turning point for Autodesk—one that has been brewing for some time.

If it weren’t already clear that AutoCAD is no longer viewed by Autodesk as its most important product, today’s press releases drive the point home. There are six major releases posted, and though AutoCAD 2005 is the first of those, this, the 20^th release of AutoCAD, is but one of over 25 applications that Autodesk has announced today. Of course, all or nearly all of the vertical market applications that use AutoCAD as the core engine have been updated to the 2006 version, including Architectural Desktop 2006, AutoCAD Mechanical 2006, Civil 3D 2006, Land Desktop 2006

But also noteworthy are the many applications also launched today that do not use AutoCAD as the core engine: Revit 8 and Inventor 10, the company’s preferred products for architects and mechanical engineers; and VIZ 2006, the company’s main engineering visualization product.

In fact, just visiting the Autodesk home page drives the point home. There is no mention of AutoCAD at all—just the “2006 Portfolio”.

In some ways, this shifed focus is a good thing—I have long held the opinion that most people using vanilla AutoCAD really need to be using something more specific to their industry. (My recent attempts to use vanilla AutoCAD for my Field Day 2005 project bears this out.)

But if Autodesk shifts too many development resources from AutoCAD to the vertical products, the result might be fewer innovations, less interoperability, and lower productivity gains in core AutoCAD, and thus for the vast majority of users who are still mainly working in 2D. As important as I feel 3D and the advanced design capabilities the vertical market applications offer are, there are still some very basic features that need to be added to AutoCAD.

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.

My initial attempt at merging the contours I got from Menlo Park, and the aerial image I snagged from Terraserver has pointed out a few weaknesses with AutoCAD, and the need, as I anticipated, to use other, more capable programs.

The first limitation is that even though both the contours and photo have coordinates associated with them, they are different coordinate systems (state plane vs. WGS-84), and not only does ACAD 2005 provide no means of converting between the two, it completely ignores any coordinates associated with raster images (GeoTIFF images or TIFF/JPEG images with a world file). I’ve manually overlaid the photo, scaling and rotating it to get it close enough to do some initial planning, and to confirm that vanilla AutoCAD isn’t the right tool for this task.

The second limitation is a great example of AutoCAD’s lack of built-in support for 3D input devices. First, since the controller’s action is grafted onto AutoCAD, every movement of the controller pollutes the command line and the undo history with its commands, and when you stop moving, the display flashes annoyingly as AutoCAD’s “real” view is updated to match.

Second, the performance of the realtime 3D viewing sufferes dramatically once the image is attached—even if I unload the image to remove it from the display and memory. Even on my 3.0 GHz Pentium 4 and GeForce FX 6500 graphics card, the slowdown was enough that I had to revert to a version of the file without the image attached to check the contour file.

The great thing about the SpaceBall is the ease with which it lets you change your perspective. I found gently twisting the drawing around in 3D allowed me to quickly find contours that had the improper elevation and fix them. Although when I needed to highlight an out of place contour and then change the view again to get a better perspective, the highlighting disappeared—also an artifact of AutoCAD not having built-in support for the SpaceBall.

For the countless time in my years using AutoCAD, I’ve had to change VIEWRES from its horrible default of 100 to a more reasonable 1000.

At the default setting, even small zooms cause circles to become polygons. Why does Autodesk insist on setting such a miserable default? Computers are fast enough today that it can’t be because of performance.

Launching AutoCAD 2005’s Communications Center for the first time, the configuration screen is disfigured in the same way as the Activation dialog:

After getting past that annoyance, the Communications Center is displayed properly, but presents me with a dilemma. The lightning bolt indicates that a maintainence update is available, and links me to Service Pack 1. Clicking on that link opens up Internet Explorer (not my default browser!) to a page that is blank because it contains “Active Content” that IE has blocked. Unblocking the content requires three mouse clicks, and displays a page that is labeld “Autodesk Live Update” and includes no obvious content that should be blocked.

But SP1 is also listed explicitly at the bottom of the dialog, and it opens to a page that has no such warnings, has no blocked content, and has much more useful information, such as links to all available language versions of SP1, their readme files, and a feedback form at the bottom. Annoyingly, it too opens with IE, even though my system default browser is Mozilla.

I’m further confused by the fact that the links for the actual SP1 download on the two pages are completely different URIs—which one is correct? With the hope that they are actually the same, I’m choosing the second one—the one without the needless “active content” page.

I’m of course installing everything but the French–Canadian dictionary. I’m also changing the text editor from Notepad.exe to up.exe—the SC Unipad Unicode text editor I own. Interestingly, the other choices include Excel, Mozilla, Notepad, Winword, and Wordpad.

While I’m waiting for the install to finish, I think I’ll fire up iTunes and listen to some Billy Joel…

Happily, no reboot is required when the installation is complete. However, the Activation dialog is disfigured. The pretty image on the left partially obscures the text and radio buttons, until you mouse over the radio buttons, whereupon they become visible, and partially obscure the pretty image. I’m betting this problem is a result of me having calibrated my display size (see future posting):

Other than that, everything went smoothly.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but the most recent version of AutoCAD I have installed is 2000. No, not even 2000i—just AutoCAD 2000. Theoretically, I should upgrade my installation and migrate the settings, but since I don’t really have much in the way of customized settings, I’d rather just installe 2005 fresh, so that my commentary here is unecumbered by any historical cruft. So, I must first uninstall the old ACAD…

So far, Windows has asked my permission to remove several “unused” DLLs. I missed writing down the first one, but the others are: ACADFICN.DLL, MTSTACK.EXE, iecalswr70.dll, ieflicwr70.dll, iepcxwr70.dll, iepngwr70.dll, ietgawr70.dll, ietiffwr70.dll, iebmpwr70.dll, ac1st15.dll, atlast15.dll, iejfifwr70.dll, ShareDBENU.dll, axENUres.dll, ierlcrw70.dll, ofst42.dll, adsk42.dll, blnd42.dll, bool42.dll, cstr42.dll, covr42.dll, eulr42.dll, fct42.dll, intr42.dll, ieig4rd70.dll, lop42.dll, iespotrd70.dll, oper42.dll, rem42.dll, shl42.dll, spline42.dll, swp42.dll, crt142.dll, ShareDB15.dll, achapi15.dbx, dboleutl15.dll, crt242.dll, kern42.dll, iecalsrd70.dll, acismENU.dll, acutil15.dll, acrx15.dll, acdb15.dll, acIsmObj15.dbx, and evidently many more. Let’s hope none of them are needed by other stuff I have installed, because I’m going to let Windows kill ’em all.

And of course, I have to reboot to finish the uninstall.

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.

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.