I have long been a fan of the Mozilla browser, ever since the Netscape browser nearly died, spinning off the open source Mozilla foundation in the process. Since well before version 1.0, it has been a better browser than Internet Explorer

But the Mozilla Suite will not be developed further. The Mozilla Suite was a hold-over from the days of Netscape communicator, which was focused on being an alternative to Microsoft’s Outlook integrated calendar/E-mail client, and while I and many others loved the integration, it made updating just the browser or just the E-mail features problematic because the whole suite had to be updated, tested, and launched.

With the overwhelming success of the Mozilla Firefox browser—a lean, mean, fighting machine, the Mozilla Foundation developers have decided to put the Suite on life support. Future enhancements will consist of bug fixes, security patches, and perhaps an occasional update of the core rendering engine.

So the main development focus has switched to the stand-alone applications—the Firefox browser, Thunderbird E-mail client, and Sunbird Calendar. There are enough differences in the interface between the integrated suite and the individual applications that I’ll be relearning and lamenting the death of the suite for a little white, but I think the end result will be far better in the end.

In fact, because of the coming integrated support for SVG in version 1.1, I’ll soon be making Firefox the target browser I design this site for. Users of IE and older versions of Mozilla will find some pieces of content missing or duplicated, but it’s time to leave the old browsers in the history books.

Especially for anyone in any of the design industries.

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’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.

Since I knew vanilla AutoCAD wasn’t up to the task of merging 2.5D contours with an aerial photo to create a cool 3D map, I set about deciding what program should be the first obvious candidate to test.

Since I was ultimately getting the imagery from the USGS, it made sense to see what they offered. The answer is not much—dlgv32 Pro is an upgrade to the earlier dlgv32 software the agency previously offered. Although the free package will do some of the things I need, its inability to export the results made it clear that its commercial sibling was the next logical choice.

GlobalMapper sells for $219, and should allow me to create many of the initial maps I need for planning, as well as providing some much-needed data conversion.

After cleaning up the contours in AutoCAD (deleting the text and filling in the resulting gaps, and correcting a few contour elevation values) I’ve exported them as a DXF file, but since there is no projection or datum information stored in an AutoCAD drawing, and since the city engineer that provided the contours couldn’t tell me either, I’m forced to resort to assume a few things and find the correct values elsewhere.

So I’ve assumed State Plane Coordinates, with the NAD27 datum, and California Zone 3. If I’m wrong, and it’s really NAD83, then I’ll have to re-do all this later. For the aerial image, I had to go digging through the USAPhotoMaps documentation to determine that the exported image was UTM Zone 10, NAD83 datum.

Yep; I’m wrong. When I specify NAD83 as the datum, the DXF file matches up with a lower-quality GeoTIFF I have of the site. I still can’t get the JPEG from USAPhotoMaps to register, so I must have guessed wrong there as well. But that task can wait until 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.

Despite being Web-based—or likely because of it—the various USGS facilities for downloading digital images are painful and tedius to use. But a free mapping application makes it easier and quicker.

USAPhotoMaps, written by a retired airline pilot, lets you download images, one tile at a time, from Microsoft’s free TerraServer Web site, creating a seamless image database that you can pan and zoom with, switching between USGS quads, ancient grayscale aerial photos, and for some urban areas, brilliant high-resolution color aeral photos. Although you must install and use a separate command-line utility, you can also export any rectangular region as a JPEG image, along with a matching world file to enable georeferencing.

It may be possible to get a GeoTIFF directly from the USGS site, but it won’t be a pleasant experience.

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.