It’s been a while since I posted anything to “R Cubed” so since there doesn’t seem to be anything on TV (although it took great discipline not to watch John Wayne in The Green Berets) and I left the book I’m reading out in the car I might as well post something. So to paraphrase my son’s famous quote “what to write? What to write?” You see that is one problem with a blogs you have to write something now and again (as soon as those talking computers come on line look out).
So what to write? During the day I can think of all kinds of “heady topics” but when I get a chance to jot them down I have trouble remembering them. Couple of things, I read a lot. Because of all the different magazines, I read during the week I have gotten pretty good at noticing IT trends and tools before they really get popular. A case in point is wikis and blogs – they seem to have become all the rage lately. I was giving presentations on using them over a year ago. Funny thing is that even though I was out in front of the curve and now that wikis are hot my organization doesn’t know they exist… so much for the prophet business.
I have talked about wikis before. In particular a specific kind of wiki called a Tiddly Wiki. I recently gave a short presentation at the 2006 HEEP International Conference held this past September in Williamsburg Virginia. If you would like to take a look at it (remember power points lose a bit without my unique translation) you can download it and other HEEP presentations at
http://iheep.vdot.virginia.gov/iheep2006presentations.htm
you can find it under Thursday presentations and the title is
“Tiddly Wiki and Things – another internet technology that you never heard of but might find useful.”
I gave two other presentations that day but I think I’ll save them for another posting.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Upgrade advice
Today it seemed like all the cadd newsletters and blogs (most of them anyway) were talking about the latest release of AutoCAD (with the catchy name of AutoCAD 2007) that is due to be released in late March. While the pundits can’t wait, and are touting all the new 3D features I’ll lay money that the average user is thinking – “Oh shit, not another upgrade.”
Having just gone through a major upgrade at work (from MicroStation J to MicroStation V8) in 2005 I can relate. For both users and the support staffs new versions suck. Not that the features aren’t cool, they rarely seems worth the pain. When you think that the average user at most uses 10-20 percent of a program’s features you have to wonder how bad we really need new ones. I know the vendors say that the users demand them but to tell you the truth I’ve never met an average user who has ever been asked about what they need – Have you?
Unfortunately the biggest problem with a new version is all the grunt work you have to do to get them installed and running. Not only are there general problems inherent in any new release, but it is rare that all the other programs you depend on will work with the new release out of the box -- this is where the problems really begin. It seems to me that users tend to skip at least every other cadd release these days. You think the vendors might take the hint…
If I could offer any advice to the cadd vendors of the about upgrades it would be this. Stop worrying about features and make sure that when they release a new version that it solves our problems rather than creating new ones…
Having just gone through a major upgrade at work (from MicroStation J to MicroStation V8) in 2005 I can relate. For both users and the support staffs new versions suck. Not that the features aren’t cool, they rarely seems worth the pain. When you think that the average user at most uses 10-20 percent of a program’s features you have to wonder how bad we really need new ones. I know the vendors say that the users demand them but to tell you the truth I’ve never met an average user who has ever been asked about what they need – Have you?
Unfortunately the biggest problem with a new version is all the grunt work you have to do to get them installed and running. Not only are there general problems inherent in any new release, but it is rare that all the other programs you depend on will work with the new release out of the box -- this is where the problems really begin. It seems to me that users tend to skip at least every other cadd release these days. You think the vendors might take the hint…
If I could offer any advice to the cadd vendors of the about upgrades it would be this. Stop worrying about features and make sure that when they release a new version that it solves our problems rather than creating new ones…
Tuesday, January 03, 2006
Happy New Year
Just a quick note to wish everyone a Happy New Year… I generally don’t make new years resolutions (hard to keep) but I will try to post to my blog on a bit more regular basis this year… So check back soon…
Thursday, December 08, 2005
New CADD Site
A couple of weeks ago I became aware of a new CADD Website that deals mainly with MicroStation but also covers a lot of general CADD topics.
The Name of the site is:
Eat Your CAD and it’s URL is
http://www.eatyourcad.com/
Check it out when you get a chance you won’t be sorry.
The Name of the site is:
Eat Your CAD and it’s URL is
http://www.eatyourcad.com/
Check it out when you get a chance you won’t be sorry.
Friday, October 21, 2005
TiddlyWikis and CADD
Every major CADD program on the market that I am aware of is “Internet Aware” now exactly what this means and what value it actually adds is anybody’s guess. I recently gave a presentation on applying internet technologies to CADD and Engineering and I think several of these technologies could prove very useful to both individuals and organizations. (If you missed it you can download from the sidebar.)
One of the technologies I talked about was a WIKI. I recently came across a variation of this technology after reading a post on Joel Orr’s PLM blog. This variation is known as a TiddlyWiki. While a regular Wiki requires a web server and a database. TiddlyWiki requires only a browser (either Firefox or IE 6.0>) to work properly. Exactly what is a TiddlyWiki? I guess you could say it is a webpage on steroids. By using JavaScript you have basically a self hyper-linking, free form database contained inside a single webpage. I know it sounds a bit strange but take some time and check out a few of the various flavors … I think you will be astonished.
The place to begin is the TiddlyWiki home site at http://www.tiddlywiki.com
You will be glad you did
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Observations from Bismarck
The 46th annual Highway Engineering Exchange Program International Conference is History. I would like to congratulate the North Dakota DOT, HEEP President Diane Gunsch and her staff for putting on a wonderful conference. Not only did they take great care of the conference delegates but they put on a top notch technical program as well.
So what was everyone talking about at HEEP? One word – GOOGLE.
More specifically GOOGLE EARTH. If you haven’t looked at it RUN don’t walk to the nearest browser and take a look at it. It is truly amazing. How do they do it? More importantly how do they make money? Not only is the product amazing in it’s own right but it can be “hacked” very easily to make it do what you want it to. It can become with a little work your own FREE personal GIS. Dilip Dasmohapatra from the Alberta DOT showed me how he was able to use GOOGLE Earth to display, locate and do a fly around of any bridge in the Alberta bridge database by just typing in a bridge number. If I was ERSI I would be worried to say the least.
Next thing people were talking about – The Old Days.
More specifically we miss the competition between CACIE, Intergraph, GEOPAK, and Bentley that we had at HEEPs past. Now that Bentley owns all the civil design packages that are worth anything we are basically at their mercy. Some of you who aren’t involved in the highway design world might say, what about Autodesk? (They did buy CACIE). In the highway design world AutoDesk isn’t even an also ran. Their new Civil 3D product looks interesting but since it can’t (or won’t) read and write MicroStation dgn files, they don’t stand a chance in this market. Unfortunately for AutoDesk highway design is STILL ALL ABOUT THE DATA Files.
If all the vendors would agree on using and supporting a single XML standard then maybe we would be able to select software on the basis of features, performance and support. But I won’t be holding my breath.
Talking about XML if you want to what a single XML standard could look like then check out the TRB TransXML Project NCHRP 20-64 at:
http://www.transxml.org/
That’s it for now.
So what was everyone talking about at HEEP? One word – GOOGLE.
More specifically GOOGLE EARTH. If you haven’t looked at it RUN don’t walk to the nearest browser and take a look at it. It is truly amazing. How do they do it? More importantly how do they make money? Not only is the product amazing in it’s own right but it can be “hacked” very easily to make it do what you want it to. It can become with a little work your own FREE personal GIS. Dilip Dasmohapatra from the Alberta DOT showed me how he was able to use GOOGLE Earth to display, locate and do a fly around of any bridge in the Alberta bridge database by just typing in a bridge number. If I was ERSI I would be worried to say the least.
Next thing people were talking about – The Old Days.
More specifically we miss the competition between CACIE, Intergraph, GEOPAK, and Bentley that we had at HEEPs past. Now that Bentley owns all the civil design packages that are worth anything we are basically at their mercy. Some of you who aren’t involved in the highway design world might say, what about Autodesk? (They did buy CACIE). In the highway design world AutoDesk isn’t even an also ran. Their new Civil 3D product looks interesting but since it can’t (or won’t) read and write MicroStation dgn files, they don’t stand a chance in this market. Unfortunately for AutoDesk highway design is STILL ALL ABOUT THE DATA Files.
If all the vendors would agree on using and supporting a single XML standard then maybe we would be able to select software on the basis of features, performance and support. But I won’t be holding my breath.
Talking about XML if you want to what a single XML standard could look like then check out the TRB TransXML Project NCHRP 20-64 at:
http://www.transxml.org/
That’s it for now.
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