Yearly Archives: 2018

IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 1

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Welcome to the first in this new series of interviews of Interesting People of CAD (IPoC).

First up, Heidi Hewett. Heidi has a long CAD history and is well known for being outstandingly good at her job. She made big news recently by shifting camps from Autodesk to Bricsys. Here is the first part of Heidi’s interview.

Steve: You’ve been doing this a long time, but was there a pre-CAD part of your career? What did you do before Autodesk?

Heidi: I didn’t have much of a pre-CAD career. I started college at Colorado State University as a Computer Science major. One day I stopped by the Industrial Design lab to meet one of my friends. He was taking a drafting class and had just been introduced to AutoCAD. He wanted me to see it. Using a stylus, he drew an ellipse on the tablet (not today’s kind of tablet, of course). The ellipse appeared in green on the monochrome monitor… like magic! That’s all it took. I was hooked! I realized I didn’t want to program computers, I wanted to draw with them. So, I checked around to see what majors would best let me combine my interest in math with my interest in AutoCAD. The next semester I transferred to the University of Colorado for Architectural Engineering.

After graduating, I moved from Colorado to California to take an engineering position with an MEP firm in San Francisco. They worked exclusively on drafting boards and I soon realized that what I enjoyed most about my engineering education wasn’t engineering, it was using AutoCAD! Within the first year I managed to convince my boss that we needed AutoCAD (I was a horrible manual drafter)! While working with a local reseller to set up our new CAD lab, I learned that the company that makes AutoCAD was located right across the Golden Gate Bridge, in Sausalito. Less than a year later, I was walking down the hall at Marinship Way, passing people like John Walker and Amar Hanspal (my hiring manager). I was in awe that I actually worked there.

Steve: You were with Autodesk for 26 years, right? Were you a Technical Marketing Manager all that time, or did you start at Autodesk with something else?

Heidi: I started in Product Support, as a support technician answering calls from resellers. It wasn’t a good fit for me. Nobody ever calls product support (at any company) to talk about how much they love their product. They only call when there’s a problem and they need help. And, most of the questions weren’t about how to use the software. They were about how to configure plotters and digitizers. I loved AutoCAD and wanted to share my knowledge about how cool it was. So, aside from my first few years in Product Support, my career at Autodesk was focused on educating users on what they could do with AutoCAD. My titles included Illustrator (back when we had printed manuals), Training Specialist, Marketing Support Engineer, Senior Applications Engineer, and Technical Marketing Manager.

Steve: What did a Technical Marketing Manager do, exactly?

Heidi: It’s kind of funny, Technical Marketing Manager was my title for more than half my career, but it was probably the least descriptive of what I did. I was technical and worked under the Marketing organization. But I did the same thing in that role that I did in all my previous roles aside from Product Support. I was a Learner and a Trainer. I worked with the AutoCAD development team to learn what was coming in the next release of AutoCAD. Then I created documents and videos such as the Preview Guides and Launch Demo Videos to help educate Autodesk employees, partners, and customers on the new functionality. Regardless of my official title, it was the perfect job for me because I got show people how cool the software was.

Steve: What did you enjoy most about that job?

Heidi: There were many things I enjoyed about the job so it’s hard to narrow down. I enjoyed working directly with the development team to be one of the first people on the planet to understand and use the newest AutoCAD functionality. And I enjoyed travelling around the world to share what I learned with our partners and customers.

Steve: I’ve noticed that your written materials always show a very high standard of clarity and correctness. What would you put that down to?

Heidi: That’s quite a compliment and I appreciate the acknowledgement.

I graduated from college without having taken a single English class. Back then it wasn’t required for Engineering majors and I was thrilled because I hated to write. As I got further into my career, I realized how crucial writing skills were, even for a math-minded person. That was around the same time I realized my true passions were around training and education. So, after a little research I found two relevant graduate programs at the University of Colorado, Denver. One was a Master in Technical Communication (so I could finally learn to write) and the other was a Master in Information and Learning Technologies. I couldn’t decide between them, so I did both! Having two young children and a full-time job with a lot of travel, it took me almost 7 years to graduate but it was worth it! The technical communication skills that I learned gave me the confidence to write publicly and I launched my original AutoCAD Insider blog, as one of my class assignments.

Steve: Would you say you’re obsessive about the quality of what you put out?

Heidi: Yes, I’m definitely obsessive about what I produce. There are many times I wish I wasn’t because it can be time-consuming. But, if I make a statement (written or oral) I want to know that what I’m saying is accurate to the absolute best of my ability. A perfect example is one of my first blog posts for Bricsys. It started as a quick and simple post about installing the trial version. How complicated could that be, right? But for me it’s not just writing about what I see, it’s understanding it. Writing that simple little blog post produced a string of emails between myself and the BricsCAD development team. Most of the information I learned didn’t make it into the blog post but it helped me fully understand and believe what I was writing.

The greatest value I get from writing is learning. If I want to learn something, I write about it. Because, until I can clearly explain it to someone else, I probably don’t really understand it myself. My first and best experience with the value of writing was when I wrote about sheet sets for AutoCAD. It was such a new, big, and overwhelming topic that I just couldn’t grasp it. Not after discussing with members of the development team and not after trying it for myself. The only way I could fully understand and communicate sheet set functionality was to write about it step-by-step. And so, Sheets Happened!

IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 2
IPoC interview – Heidi Hewett – part 3

Steve at the BricsCAD New Zealand and Australia Roadshow

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Sofoco (Australia) and CAD Concepts (New Zealand) are currently running a series of seminars throughout Australasia demonstrating BricsCAD.

Here are the dates and locations:

Auckland – 9 April 2018, Jet Park Hotel and Conference Centre
Christchurch – 11 April 2018, Christchurch Community House
Melbourne – 17 April 2018, Airport Motel and Convention Centre
Sydney – 18 April 2018, Stamford Plaza Sydney Airport
Brisbane – 19 April 2018, Royal on the Park

Each seminar is in two parts. The morning session is for leaders and decision makers and the the afternoon is less structured and goes into more details, with informal discussions, questions and answers and one-on-one sessions. There will be many short presentations from various presenters to demonstrate the different things that BricsCAD is capable of, with or without third party add-ons.

I’ll be travelling to the Brisbane show. I’ll be there for the whole day but will be doing a brief presentation about BricsCAD’s LISP, with reference to AutoCAD compatibility and the tools available to CAD Managers and developers, including BLADE.

I have experience not only in developing using LISP in AutoCAD and BricsCAD, but also in transitioning from one to the other in a comprehensively modified custom environment. I hope to be of some assistance to CAD Managers and users who are considering such a move. I believe there are still seats available.

Disclosure: the organisers will be covering part of my expenses.

Interesting People of CAD interviews (IPoC)

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A new series is going to be introduced to this blog very soon: Interesting People of CAD, or IPoC for short. I have interviewed two very interesting people already, with another big name in the pipeline and more to come later.

The first instalment will be published within hours. This person has a long CAD history, is outstandingly good at the job they do and has made big news recently. Want to take a guess who it might be?

If you want to suggest other IPoC to interview, please add your comments to this post. If you think you have an interesting story to tell and want to volunteer to be interviewed, feel free to comment here or contact me privately.

Autodesk removes ability to control products and updates by device

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If you’re a CAD Manager controlling Autodesk software through Autodesk Account, make sure you don’t ignore this little notice near the top:

Full details can be found on the page Device Management Discontinued in Autodesk Account, but in short another level of control and flexibility will be removed from you in a month or so.

I hope you’re sincerely grateful for Autodesk improving and simplifying the user management experience.

This only applies if you allow Autodesk desktop app to be installed, which I’ve always advised against. Of course, if you’re in a secure proxy environment there’s a good chance that Autodesk desktop app doesn’t work anyway, so the point is moot.

Autodesk forums return – what do you think?

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Congratulations to the tech team behind the Autodesk forum software for getting the redesigned forums back up well ahead of schedule!

The new forums look very different. My first impression is that it is a standard-issue Autodesk “progression” – it looks prettier but doesn’t work nearly as well. Huge swathes of screen space are wasted for graphic impact (no, I don’t mean the long-dead Autodesk attempt at PowerPoint). Big fonts, huge header, even bigger footer, lots of pretty white space. Yet what is there contains less useful information. On a 1920 x 1200 monitor, I can only see four threads within a forum before I need to start scrolling:

What I can’t see is if there have been any new posts since my last visit. To do that, I have to enter each thread and do a lot of scrolling (again, because of the highly inefficient information-to-screen-space ratio) to get to the end, then try to remember whether or not I had already read the last few posts. I can’t even just hit [End] because that gives me this:

How efficient is that? Signal to noise ratio: 0%. Compared with the old forum where I could see the headers for a whole bunch of threads and scan the number-of-new-posts column in a second or so, I now have many minutes of clicking, scrolling and frustration ahead of me. Like I have nothing better to do. Every click counts, remember.

Typical Autodesk. Marketing appeal over user efficiency, every time. All sizzle, no steak.

What do you think? Have your say here, on the Community Feedback forum, and/or even on dear Autodesk.

What to do while the forums are down, dear Autodesk?

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In common with most online services, the Autodesk forums are down for maintenance from time to time. That will be happening this weekend:

Announcement: The forums will be unavailable starting 1 p.m. on Friday, April 6 (Pacific time) while we implement the forum redesign. We will be back online at 9 a.m. on Monday, April 9, or sooner.

I really wish Autodesk would act like a company with an international focus and use universally understood time standards for its announcements. Allow me to translate for those people outside North America for whom “Pacific time” means nothing.

Pacific Time (UTC-7) UTC
Off line: 1 PM, 6 April 8 PM (20:00), 6 April
On line (latest): 9 AM, 9 April 4 PM (16:00), 9 April

So, what to do if you have something you want to say when the forums are down? R.K. McSwain has already made some suggestions: CADTutor, AUGI and The Swamp. I have one further suggestion:

dear Autodesk

This new forum is an experiment of mine, aimed at providing a place where people can provide feedback to Autodesk with minimal restrictions. I made an attempt at setting up dear Autodesk nearly a decade ago but the technology (Pligg) I used was not up to handling the vast amount of spam and hacker attempts it attracted, so I closed it in early 2009.

Now I’m trying again using a different format and different technology (a conventional MyBB forum).

Disclaimers:

  • The site is, of course, not owned or operated by Autodesk, a fact which is made clear on the site in several places
  • This experiment might also fail, for the same or different reasons
  • The technology I’m using is new to me and it might break due to my lack of experience with it or reasons beyond my control
  • A couple of days ago, attempts to register were generating database errors; this appears to be fixed now, but it may recur
  • There is no guarantee that Autodesk people will read the forums (although some did last time)
  • There is no guarantee that Autodesk will act on any of the feedback, suggestions or wishes made on the site (or anywhere else)

Last time I tried this, I didn’t let on that I was behind it. This may have been a mistake, but I did this because I didn’t want the site to be seen as mine. The idea was to allow a community to develop which could freely express itself, not one which was led or prompted by any individual, myself included.

This time I’m doing things differently in several ways, and one of those ways is to be completely transparent about who’s behind it. I still don’t want it to be “my site”, though. I’d like it to be a community’s home. If you are interested in trying to help form that community, please register on the site. The front page has instructions.

If you run into trouble registering or using the site and can’t communicate that via the site itself, feel free to let me know here.

Right now, the site is a blank canvas. Paint away.

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off has ended

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I reported in January that, “The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.”

Thanks to a policy reversal from Autodesk, this is no longer true. Felice on the Autodesk forums shared the good news:

Hi all, I have an update to share on this topic… we are removing the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limitation. Here are some more details/background:

Overview:
Currently, the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limits the number of collection products that can be used at the same time to two. The terms and conditions related to Industry Collection concurrent title access stated:

2.1.1 Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in the applicable Autodesk License and Services Agreement relating to any Industry Collection software program Benefit, the maximum number of Concurrent Access Titles that You or Your Named User may Access concurrently shall not exceed two (2) Concurrent Access Titles, at any one time.

Effective immediately we are removing this restriction and allowing customers to use as many products concurrently within the collection as they need to support their workflows.

Why we have removed this restriction:
The Industry Collections continue to evolve and are increasingly focused on the support of multi-product workflows. The restrictive nature of the concurrent usage policy does not support this progression.

The Autodesk Knowledge Network page on this has been updated accordingly:

This also applies for license borrowing, but only for 2019 products and later.

While this restriction should never have existed in the first place, it’s good to see it gone now.

Moving when prodded is alive at Autodesk.

Heidi Hewett – Autodesk loses, Bricsys gains

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The most excellent Heidi Hewett was, bafflingly, one of the big-name casualties in Autodesk’s latest experience cull. What was already a big loss to Autodesk has been compounded by her arrival at Autodesk’s most significant AutoCAD competitor, Bricsys.

Heidi has accepted a position as User Success Manager with the Belgian company. I don’t blame her. Bricsys is where the action is. Here’s her opening salvo:

For well over a decade, the world was told that the .dwg file format is not suitable for advanced design workflows. It can’t be used for mechanical design, and it certainly can’t be used for BIM. Bricsys has shown that this old belief is simply not true. The .dwg file format is alive and well and kicking serious butt. I am looking forward to helping Bricsys take .dwg to new, previously unimagined levels, and I’m excited to be part of the team that is doing this for our users.

Is it just me, or does Heidi look more relaxed in her Bricsys photo than she ever did in her Autodesk ones?

Photo credit: Bricsys

Here’s Heidi’s first Bricsys blog post. Can you feel her genuine excitement? Maybe she’s just happy that she’s going to have masses of real improvements to write about, rather than having to stretch out an ever-shrinking set of new AutoCAD features each year.

Given Heidi’s outstanding contribution to assisting CAD users over many years, I’m very happy that she is now going to be able to continue that work. I suspect she’s going to be very busy!

Autodesk loses, Bricsys gains. Big time. What on earth was Autodesk thinking?

Still can’t download AutoCAD 2019? Read this

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Timeline of AutoCAD 2019 events to date

    • 20 March 2018 – Somebody (a reseller?) posts a video on YouTube with a collection of Autodesk video materials describing AutoCAD 2019; this is quickly removed
    • 22 March 2018 – AutoCAD 2019 Released
    • 22 March 2018 – Reports surface of AutoCAD 2019 activation acting as a killswitch for AutoCAD 2018
    • 23 March 2018 – Attempts by myself and others to download AutocAD 2019 are thwarted by the non-availability of links and other issues
    • 24 March 2018 – AVA, Autodesk Account and Autodesk desktop app all know nothing about AutoCAD 2019
    • 24 March 2018 – I report on the various problems including the killswitch issue and lack of download availability
    • 25 March 2018 – subscription customers report up to 2.5 days of AutoCAD 2018 downtime
    • 27 March 2018 – Andrew Anagnost’s apology assures customers the issue is resolved (which of the issues he means is not specified but the context might imply it’s the killswitch one)
    • 29 March 2018 – The Autodesk forums still contain the warning that disruptions to managing users, assigning permissions and downloading software are ongoing
    • 3 April 2018 – Autodesk Account still fails to report availability of AutoCAD 2019 for multiple customers under active maintenance, subscription and enterprise agreement contracts


What to do if you want to get hold of AutoCAD 2019? Well, you can download the free trial version here. I wouldn’t recommend it, though, because that forces you to install and use the nasty Autodesk/Akamai download manager. Kill it with fire. This unpleasant fact now applies to all of Autodesk’s trial downloads, cutting off that formerly useful workaround for Autodesk’s download issues.

To get a straightforward malware-free browser download, you’re going to have to say hello to AVA (Autodesk Virtual Assistant). Yes, AVA is utterly useless at answering support questions and until very recently had no clue about the existence of AutoCAD 2019, but the latter issue is now resolved and you can use AVA as your workaround.

Steps to downloading with AVA

  1. Click this link to get to AVA.
  2. Log on with your Autodesk sign-in if you’re not already signed in.
  3. Type AutoCAD 2019 download [Enter].
  4. Pick Yes.
  5. On the right, pick Next.
  6. Select your operating system and language, then pick Next.
  7. Pick the link under Browser Download.

The download should then start. The AutoCAD 2019 Windows 64 download is 1.7 GB but this will expand to more than another 5 GB before the installation proper takes place, after which the installed software will take up about another 2 GB. If you’re using a low-capacity SSD as your primary drive you might want to check you have enough space before you start.

Why One AutoCAD is smart strategy

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OK, so Autodesk may have blown the AutoCAD 2019 rollout, triggering an apology from CEO Andrew Anagnost.

OK, AutoCAD 2019 may have the smallest set of significant advances in the history of AutoCAD releases. If you’re wondering, I give it 1/10. The “there can be only one” hype could easily refer to meaningful improvements to the product per year. This year’s improvement is… drawing compare!

Still, AutoCAD 2019 is a significant release for reasons beyond the content of the core product. An examination of the One AutoCAD strategy reveals a collective corporate mind that’s smarter than it’s being given credit for.

In case you’ve missed it, the idea behind One AutoCAD is that if you subscribe to AutoCAD, you can now also get a bunch of vertical variants of AutoCAD thrown in, renamed as “Toolsets”. You need to ask for it, and it’s for renters only, no perpetual license owners need apply. Oh, and Civil 3D isn’t part of the deal.

This concept has been received less than enthusiastically among respected independent observers such as Ralph Grabowski and Robert Green. I’m going to go against the trend a little and point out several ways in which this is a smart move for Autodesk.

  • It represents the first time Autodesk has had anything of substance to positively differentiate between maintenance and subscription. Until now, it’s all been negative: give away your perpetual licenses to avoid forthcoming maintenance price increases.
  • It provides some substance to Dr Anagnost’s “give us a year to show the value of subscription” request to customers. OK, it may have taken a lot more than a year, but at least it’s now possible to point to something that customers can gain by subscribing, rather than having the embarrassment of an empty promise hanging around.
  • It acts as an effective distraction from yet another price rise (7% on top of Autodesk’s already sky-high subscription costs). Yes, this new price still applies even if you don’t use the toolsets. Yes, it still applies even if you’re a Mac user who doesn’t have these toolsets available.
  • It will almost certainly be used as justification for future subscription price rises. How can you complain about a few more dollars when you get all those products included in the price?
  • This stuff has already been developed to a point that Autodesk considers mature (web apps excluded), and it isn’t costing Autodesk anything to “give it away”.
  • It means that the glacial or non-existent rate of improvement of AutoCAD and its variants suddenly appears less important. How can you complain that nothing worthwhile has been added to your AutoCAD variant this year when you now have access to hundreds more commands than you used to have? This line has already been tried with me on Twitter.
  • It provides a marketing counter-argument against competitors who sell DWG-based AutoCAD-compatible products that provide above-AutoCAD standards of functionality (e.g. BricsCAD).
  • If an increased number of users start using the vertical variants, there will be increased pressure on those competitors to handle the custom objects created using those variants. This will act as a distraction and reduce the ability of those competitors to out-develop Autodesk at the rate that has been occurring for the past few years.

There are a couple of flies in Autodesk’s One AutoCAD ointment:

  • Critical mass – it has yet to be seen how many customers are so won over by this concept that they sign up for it. Remember that it’s only available to a minority of customers anyway, and if the bulk of customers remain reluctant to give up their perpetual licenses then all this is moot. If the move-to-rental numbers are small, then the anti-competitive nature of this move is negated. The marketing gains still apply, though.
  • Interoperability – traditionally, the AutoCAD-based verticals add custom objects to the core AutoCAD objects, which when opened in vanilla AutoCAD or another vertical, appear as proxy objects that either don’t appear or will provide very limited access. Improved but still limited access can be provided if Object Enablers are installed. Object Enablers are not always available for the AutoCAD variant you want to use. LT? Mac? Old releases? Forget it.This has always been a highly unsatisfactory arrangement. I have worked for a company that explicitly prohibits drawings containing proxy objects and rejects any it receives, and that has proven to be a smart policy. Also, the vertical variants of AutoCAD have always had hidden DWG incompatibilities built in. AutoCAD 2015 user? Try to use a DWG file that has been created in a 2017 vertical variant. Good luck with that, even though all those releases supposedly use 2013 format DWG. Paradoxically, you can expect to experience much better DWG interoperability with non-Autodesk products and their add-ons than you will with AutoCAD and its verticals, because the non-Autodesk products are forced to work with AutoCAD native objects. It remains to be seen how, when, or even if Autodesk addresses these issues.

In summary, this strategy has potential to significantly benefit Autodesk. Will it work? That will largely depend on how many customers are prepared to put aside their mistrust enough to hand over their perpetual licenses to Autodesk. That mistrust is mighty large (Autodesk’s been working hard for years on building it up) and recent sorry-we-broke-your-rental-software events have reiterated just how valuable those perpetual licenses are.

Autodesk has produced what it considers to be a very attractive carrot. Is it big and juicy enough to attract you?

Andrew Anagnost apology for AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost has sent an email to customers affected by the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster that acted as a remote kill-switch for users of earlier releases of subscription software. The email’s subject is We Missed the Mark:

Image credit: R.K. McSwain

Readers of this blog will be aware that Andrew and I have fundamental disagreements on where he has taken the company, but credit where credit is due. An apology was appropriate in this case, and Andrew stepped up and made one.

He has also stated on Twitter that it won’t happen again. I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) awareness

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This post has nothing to do with the usual subjects covered by this blog. It’s more personal than that. My niece Carrie and her two daughters have suffered, and continue to suffer, from a rare, painful and debilitating condition called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS). That suffering could have been reduced if there had been more knowledge of the condition among the medical profession.

I’m somewhat cynical about “awareness campaigns”, but this is different. This awareness can have a major beneficial impact on real people, if the awareness is among the people who can make a difference: medical professionals.

I’m asking you, kind reader of my blog, to forward this link to anybody you know in the medical profession. One day, they might come across somebody with this condition and have something lodged at the back of their minds; something to make them think, “Maybe it could be EDS? I’ll look that up.”

Here is Carrie’s story. This is a reprint of an article on page 22 of Arthritis Today magazine, Autumn 2018 edition.

EHLERS DANLOS SYNDROME – Diagnosis makes a difference

by Carrie Johnson

Some of us are naturally more flexible than others, or hypermobile as the medical people describe it. For many, being hypermobile is not a big deal and may even offer advantages in certain sports and careers. For others, these stretchy tissues can cause serious ongoing health challenges which are painful, unpredictable and sometimes disabling.
My younger daughter Cate hurts her joints very easily doing things other 6-year-olds take for granted. She’s dislocated her shoulder three times at rest. Her jaw is so loose that she struggles to speak clearly, and has been in speech therapy for years. Chewing a steak is out of the question!

My older daughter Lucy is fourteen and has spent the past year dealing with severe nerve pain triggered by a dislocation which tore her hip. She was sitting at the dinner table when it happened. Lucy was bedridden for more than four traumatic months before learning how to function with persistent and often intense pain. She missed nearly two-thirds of school last year.

I’ve always been bendy myself and had my fair share of painful joints and other problems. However, towards the end of my last pregnancy, I suddenly couldn’t weight bear because my hips were dislocating with every step. I’ve had several surgeries, but the repairs didn’t last. The pain and restrictions persist nearly seven years later, and now many other joints have joined the party.

Despite years of unexplained symptoms and endless medical appointments, it wasn’t until Cate was nearly five that we were all diagnosed with the hypermobile type of Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS).

EDS is the name given to a group of genetic or inherited disorders which affect collagen, a vital building block in the connective tissue or “glue” which holds our bodies together. Although EDS is increasingly recognized as causing musculoskeletal pain, collagen is the most abundant protein in the body, meaning there is almost no limit to the places where issues can arise.

Poor eyesight, dental crowding, soft and fragile skin, excessive bleeding, digestive system issues, and autonomic dysfunction are just some of the problems my daughters and I deal with every day. Cate’s skin splits open easily, so a simple scratch will heal slowly and often leave a scar. Lucy recently had a spontaneous nosebleed so severe that blood streamed from her eyes and she bleed through a bath towel in fifteen minutes. In hot weather, if I stand up quickly I lose my vision, get very dizzy, and sometimes faint. To combat this, I am supposed to drink lots of water but I also have gastroparesis (stomach paralysis) and often can’t drink anything at all.

Many health professionals appear reluctant to formally diagnose EDS, perhaps because it is considered rare and has no cure. Since hypermobility occurs on a spectrum, it can also be difficult to distinguish a flexible but otherwise healthy person from someone with EDS or a related disorder.

For my family though, our EDS diagnosis was the first positive step towards us taking back some control over our lives. Not only do we finally have an answer for all the things that were going wrong, but we are also able to meet others in the community with the same condition, and to seek treatments which have the best chance of improving our quality of life.

We see occupational therapists, pain specialists, and have a phenomenal physiotherapy team to help us build strength using techniques appropriate for our hypermobile joints. Now we know about EDS we avoid certain activities, and my daughters are very fortunate to have a wonderful paediatric rheumatologist to coordinate their care. Because of our diagnosis, we’ve been able to access some sources of assistance to help a little with the significant financial strain on our family.

Although it’s considered rare, some experts believe EDS and related hypermobility disorders may be underdiagnosed. Symptoms can vary dramatically, even within the same family.

“Carrie’s story is all too familiar to me as a specialist clinician in this area of Medicine, but I suspect on reflection, colleagues will realize they too have patients with similar histories in whom the diagnosis has not been considered.” said Dr Alan Hakim, Consultant Rheumatologist and Clinical Lead of the Hypermobility Unit at London’s St John and St Elizabeth Hospital.

“The value to individuals and families of a diagnosis, and our then ability to adapt and better treat them should not be underestimated. The challenge internationally is to both help non-specialists recognize these conditions, and to develop more multi-disciplinary teams with resources to support people like Carrie and her family.”

For more information about hypermobility disorders and Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, visit the websites Hypermobility.org or www.ehlers-danlos.com.

Original article: https://www.arthritiswa.org.au/useruploads/files/arf5527-arthritistodaymagazineautumn2018.web.pdf

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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If you’re an AutoCAD user, you may have been intrigued by the news about the new way Autodesk is bundling up AutoCAD 2019 with various verticals (perpetual license owners need not apply). This is Autodesk’s latest attempt to promote its subscription model and raise prices again. 7% this time, but much more to come. But never mind that, the main point is that you’re getting a whole lot of stuff, and who could say that’s not a good thing?

So it’s most unfortunate for Autodesk that the AutoCAD 2019 rollout has been an unmitigated disaster.

My own experiences in trying to download the product were sub-optimal, but I later learned that I was one of the lucky ones. Subscription users not only had problems with AutoCAD 2019, they found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken too, victims of an Autodesk licensing system meltdown. That’s right, the AutoCAD 2019 launch acted as a remote kill-switch for people’s production software.

Perpetual license users were fine, of course. Only subscription customers suffered. There’s a lesson there that should not go unnoticed.

Back to my own experiences, to begin with I couldn’t download AutoCAD 2019 anywhere, despite it being having been announced everywhere some hours earlier. Autodesk Account wasn’t showing 2019, but it was showing this:

The usual workaround method of downloading the free trial wasn’t any better; that was still on 2018. I even tried installing the execrable Autodesk desktop app (temporarily!), but there was no sign of AutoCAD 2019 there either.

I’ve never had any success using Autodesk’s AVA bot for any real questions, but there was a time when it served as a gateway to Akamai-free downloads, so I tried that. Unfortunately, AVA has been “improved” and that once-excellent feature is gone. I did try asking AVA for the download link to AutoCAD 2019, but that didn’t go well.

First attempt:

Second attempt:

I mentioned my difficulties on Twitter and a few hours later the long-suffering but always-professional @AutodeskHelp people offered this:

Despite appearances, this actually turned out to be helpful because by then the product trial download had been fixed and was offering 2019 rather than 2018. I still didn’t see a direct link and against my better judgement tolerated a very temporary installation of Autodesk’s nasty Akamai download manager. About 5 minutes into the download it said it was going to take about 9 hours so I went away and left it. I returned within the hour to find it was finished, so I have no idea how long it actually took. After immediately uninstalling all traces of Akamai and Autodesk desktop app, I was able to start my evaluation.

So how’s the product? Pretty much the same as 2018, except with a better drawing compare tool. Oh, and the icons are better. The first command I ran in the new release reminded me that some things never change. The ancient rectangular pickbox bug popped in to see me, just like an old friend.

I’ve been warmed by the familiar, comforting experience of this and various other early 90s-era bugs and limitations, where the easiest workaround is to use a competitor’s product to do those bits. More on that in a future post.

An hour or so into using the product saw it crash and burn for the first time:

Don’t take my word for it, though; here are some comments from various users, CAD Managers and long-term Autodesk fans, most of whom had a worse time of it than I did. It’s not just AutoCAD; LT and Navisworks are definitely affected and there may be others. Comments here have been reproduced from various sources under fair use; names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I think it is safe to say that Autodesk are having a very bad day. Account and activation issues, subscription access issues, forum login issues, kudos and comments blocked to some users…

I installed the brand new @Navisworks Manage 2019 last night, and this morning I get the “Your trial has expired” !!!

I can safely say that ‘unimpressed’ is my status right now with the licencing idiocy going on. Not only can I not get the 2019 version, but my 2018 version has stopped working too.

Looks like all subscription (not maintenance or legacy) software is affected this way: logging in and out as well as workarounds posted are not working. Now this is a good reason to abandon Autodesk subscription model.

Good news: Autodesk began rollout of 2019 licenses! Bad news: It might break your 2018 licenses.

Hard to imagine this rollout going any worse.
[Autodesk]”Hold my beer….”

2.5 days without AutoCAD available. I just wish Autodesk would have told us so I could have gone on vacation. Instead, I will have to work thru the weekend to make up lost time.

I love Autodesk and their software, but they have just ditched an entire generation of Autodesk ‘rockstars’ and their subscription portal isn’t working. It really doesn’t look good, does it?

my 2018 is hosed on 3 devices

Unfortunately the situation has lasted for nearly 24 hours and no work done. Can we send the bill to Autodesk?

so I thought I’d try and activate LT
LOL

Although some parts of this are supposedly fixed, it’s not over yet. As I type this, people are still reporting problems and Autodesk is still offering apologies:

Even now, AVA is still completely in the dark about the current release of Autodesk’s traditional flagship product.

It’s great to see users helping each other, though. You may find this Autodesk Forum post by Travis Nave useful as an interim workaround. Also, in a marvellous continuation of McNeel’s free service to the AutoCAD (and BricsCAD) LISP community, DOSLib has been made available for AutoCAD 2019 even before many people were even able to get hold of the software it runs on. That’s what I call service!

All in all, this has not the best start to AutoCAD’s brave new world of oneness. How did it go for you?

How to get your Wacom Graphire 4 tablet working in Windows 10

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I’ve been setting up a new PC at home and one of the things I struggled with was getting my Wacom Graphire 4 tablet working. This isn’t a CAD tablet (remember those?); instead, I use its pressure-sensitive stylus for image creation and editing. Press harder and you get more ink. Turn the pen over and you automatically erase instead of drawing. Press the eraser harder and you get more erasing.

I use PaintShop Pro for my image work, by the way, not Photoshop. You can still buy and optionally upgrade PaintShop Pro perpetual licenses, which is how it should be. You’re probably aware that I don’t rent stuff unless there’s no realistic alternative.

According to the Wacom FAQ, I was severely out of luck.

What is the latest driver for the Graphire 3 & 4 (CTE) tablets?
The Graphire 3 & 4 CTE tablets made from 2003-2007 are no longer supported by Wacom and will not work with a current tablet driver. Below are links to the latest drivers available for these tablets.

Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista & XP Download Here
Mac 10.8, 10.7 & 10.6 Download Here

Not one to give up so easily, I tried a variety of drivers for my tablet (model CTE-440). They were either blocked from installation by Windows 10×64, or in the best case scenario failed to provide any functionality other than acting as a basic mouse. The tablet failed to appear as a WinTab device, so I couldn’t configure PaintShop Pro to use its pressure-sensitivity, defeating the object of having the thing in the first place.

So I did what I thought was best and put the tablet out on the verge with the other junk awaiting council collection and investigated a replacement. Not from Wacom, obviously! I don’t want to reward a company for abandoning its products. I was checking out Huion tablets, which are so much cheaper than Wacom’s that it’s probably worth taking a punt and buying one anyway.

But then the stubborn streak in me (have you noticed?) kicked back in and I had one last go. A bit more in-depth Googling led me to this page. This is an old, non-maintained, leftover page from Wacom Europe. Let’s hope it stays there. On that page I found the driver I needed: DRIVER 5.30-3 RC FOR WINDOWS 8, WINDOWS 7, VISTA, AND XP. The direct link to the driver installation executable (cons530-3_int.exe) is:

http://downloadeu.wacom.com/pub/WINDOWS/cons530-3_int.exe

I retrieved my tablet from the junk pile, installed that driver, cleaned off my tablet while my system rebooted, plugged it in and away I went! In PaintShop Pro 2018, the setting is found at File > Preferences > General Program Preferences in the Miscellaneous section.

Wacom’s FAQ gave me a bum steer. Yes, the driver I used isn’t supported in Windows 10 and it isn’t current, but I don’t care. It works just fine and means my perfectly good as-new tablet isn’t landfill. Wacom needs to do better both in terms of supporting its hardware with current drivers and providing more useful information to its customers.

Video – 3Dconnexion fine tuning in BricsCAD and BricsCAD Shape

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The second video in the cad nauseam YouTube channel is more typical than the first in that it’s a tips and tricks video. In this case it only applies to BricsCAD and Shape users, but future videos will provide information for AutoCAD and other DWG-based CAD applications.

Bricsys 2018 comes to London

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I’ve had the pleasure of attending the Bricsys Conference in 2016 (Munich) and 2017 (Paris). This year’s conference will be in another great European city, London, on 23 and 24 October.

Other details have not yet been revealed, but will be posted on the Bricsys Conference page as time goes on. You can sign up on that page for email notifications.

This is a great opportunity for British companies looking at reducing costs and improving efficiency in their CAD and BIM operations to get an idea of what BricsCAD and related applications can do. If you’re further afield, it’s still worth the effort. I was certainly blown away by what I learned at my first conference, and I’d already been evaluating the product for a couple of years before that. It was well worth the journey from Australia.

Disclosure: Bricsys covered my travel expenses for the 2016 and 2017 conferences.

Rock on, Robert Green!

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I’d like to offer my congratulations to Robert Green on his landmark of 400 issues of the CAD Manager’s Newsletter. There’s a interview with Robert here.

As a fellow CAD Manager and Cadalyst contributor, I’ve admired Robert’s work for many years. I finally got to meet Robert last year at the Bricsys Conference 2017 in Paris, and it was a pleasure.

Legends on stage – Robert being interviewed by Don Strimbu at Bricsys 2017
Robert, R.K. McSwain and Steve enjoy lunch at the Carrousel du Louvre
No pictures! R.K. McSwain, Nancy Johnson and Robert
Robert rocks out

Some of you will already be aware that Robert is a seriously good guitarist, and he did not disappoint at the after-conference party. I look forward to seeing Robert again, and to reading many more of his insightful articles.

CAD Panacea tip – startup files in BricsCAD

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One of the things that might initially baffle a CAD Manager or power user when investigating switching from AutoCAD to BricsCAD is how to set up the startup routines. Head over to CAD Panacea for R.K. McSwain’s concise, handy description of how to do it.

Due to BricsCAD’s high level of compatibility, you can maintain a common folder or set of folders containing LISP and other custom files for both applications. That way, you don’t need to do double maintenance during the transition period. I’ve done this successfully in a highly complex custom environment. Some code and other adjustments were required in places, but all but a handful of my hundreds of AutoCAD LISP files worked as-is in BricsCAD with zero effort.

Having added your AutoCAD custom folder(s) to BricsCAD’s search path, I suggest you make a common startup LISP file (e.g. rename your old acaddoc.lsp to something like CADStartupDoc.lsp) and have tiny stub startup LISP files for each application (acaddoc.lsp and on_doc_load.lsp) that each loads the common startup file.

acaddoc.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

on_doc_load.lsp contents:
(load "CADStartupDoc")

You can add error checking and messaging if you like, but if you have control of your environment you probably won’t even need that. If you find you do need any application-specific code, you can just add it or load it from the acaddoc.lsp or on_doc_load.lsp stubs as appropriate.

BLADE – putting things back to “normal”

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Disclaimer: I’m making money using BLADE. I’m using it on a paying project right now (well, not while I’m typing this, but you get the idea). I’m developing a routine to automate a massively repetitive task for one of my AutoCAD-using clients, and I’m developing it in BricsCAD and BLADE rather than AutoCAD and VLIDE.

I can simply develop faster in the more modern environment, and BricsCAD’s significantly quicker start-up time helps with that. So does the fact that the routine runs several times faster in BricsCAD, making testing the large data sets much more efficient. I’m getting paid on results and not by the hour, so using BLADE is putting cash straight into my pocket while giving me more time to walk my dog.

Using BLADE in production, I’m discovering a few bugs, quirks and things I don’t like. That’s totally understandable with a new feature of this level of complexity and functionality. Where I think it makes sense, I’m submitting problem reports or feature requests to Bricsys. I’m sure Bricsys already has a bunch of these from other developers, so they’ll be very busy for a while. From past experience, I know my reports will be taken seriously and acted on appropriately in a timely manner, if it’s feasible to do so. Your LISP IDE feedback won’t be ignored for decades by Bricsys.

One of the things Torsten Moses mentioned to me that didn’t make it into the published interview was that many developers are very conservative. There’s some truth in that. I’m missing certain keystrokes, for example: 1978-era WordStar Ctrl-Y to delete a line, anyone? It’s a reasonable expectation that as more VLIDE users migrate to BLADE, many requests will come in for VLIDE-like things. I’m told that some of these things will be provided in coming months.

In the meantime, there are things we conservative developers can do to make ourselves feel more at home. One of these is to configure the editor appearance. Here’s the VLIDE editor:

Here’s the BLADE equivalent:

One of the great things about BLADE is how configurable it is, and I know Torsten’s working right now on making it even more so. Configurations are stored in the Registry in a version-independent location (HKCU\Software\Bricsys\BricsCAD\VLispDbgEditor). These can be exported and imported directly or via BLADE, so multiple complete setups and configurations can be managed.

In this post, I’m going to be going through the process of configuring BLADE’s editor appearance to make it look more like VLIDE. I’m not suggesting that’s necessary or even a good idea in most cases, but if you really want to do it, here’s how.

Note: before you do all this manually, please note that at the end of this post I will provide a configuration file that will do it for you.

  1. Start up BricsCAD V18.2 or later and start BLADE using either the BLADE or VLIDE command.
  2. Open a LISP file in BLADE so you can check the effects of the changes we’re going to make.
  3. Use Preferences > Show preference dialog…
  4. In the Preferences & Settings dialog, pick the Styles tab and the Lexer Styles sub-tab.
  5. I’m perfectly happy with Courier New 10, but if you want the VLIDE look, change 1 – Default text to Fixedsys 11.
  6. Click next to 3 – Comment, turn on the Background color toggle and change the Back Color to mid-grey (192,192,192) and Fore Color to dark magenta (128,0,128). You’ll need to specify that RGB value in the lower right corner and use Add to Custom Colors to do this.
  7. Click next to 5 – String and change the Fore Color to magenta (255,0,255).
  8. Click next to 7 – Operator and change the Fore Color to red (255,0,0).
  9. The 8 – Keyword 1 setting should already be blue as in VLIDE. If you want system constants such as T, nil and pi to also be that shade of blue then change 9 – Keyword 2 accordingly. Personally, I prefer a different shade so they stand out. Mid-dark cyan (0,128,192) works well.
  10. I like the pale grey background in BLADE that helps identify the current line. If you don’t, click next to 8 – Caret colour and turn off the Background color toggle.
  11. Switch to the Editor Colors sub-tab, click next to 5 – Selection colour and change the Back Color to a custom mid-blue (0,120,215).
  12. While you’re in the Editor Colors sub-tab, there are a few other non-VLIDE things you can play with. 1 – Brace hilight and 2 – Brace mismatch are dynamically applied to matching and non-matching parentheses respectively. I like my Brace hilight setting to be plum and bold (turn on the Attributes toggle to enable this):

I like my non-matching setting to be white on red (the inverse of a normal parenthesis so it shows up):

Changing all that should give you something that looks like this. Familiar enough?
There are several things in the above image that might be unfamiliar but which I suggest you leave turned on because they’re useful. If you really insist, here are the locations for these settings in the Preferences & Settings dialog:

  1. Line numbers  – View > Margins, Show line number margin
  2. Marker margin – View > Margins, Show marker margin. If this is turned off, bookmarks show up using the settings under Styles > Editor Colors > 13 – Bookmark marker.
  3. Edge marker (that vertical line on the right indicating 80 character width) – View > Edge marker > Type, No background.
  4. Indentation guides (those vertical lines that show you what your code is lining up with) – Tabs and EOL > Indentation, Show indentation guides.
  5. Code folding margin (the margin on the left that allows you to collapse functions, etc. – Folding and Wrapping > Show code folding margin.

Unlike VLIDE, the default in BLADE is to use spaces for indentation, not tabs. As I don’t know of any LISP developer who uses tabs except by accident, this is a much more sensible default. But if you really want to use tabs, turn it on using Preferences > Use tabs and set the width to the VLIDE default of 8 in Preferences > Set tab width.

If you’ve left opening parentheses on previous lines and have indented the following code as usual, then as you go on to finish off the code with closing parentheses, in BLADE a single backspace will take you back your indent width (2 spaces by default) rather than a single space as in VLIDE. If your coding finger can’t get used to this keystroke-saving feature, you can turn this off with Preferences > Backspace unindents.

Having done all that, and having arranged the rest of the interface to your needs (overall window size, pane and field widths, etc.), make sure you save it! It’s as simple as Preferences > Save preferences, but it’s not done automatically. If you want to keep a safe copy of your settings, you can do so with Preferences > Save preferences to file. This simply exports the relevant part of the registry to a .reg file of your choice. This is a text file you can hack about with at your leisure (using BLADE if you like!), and you can even make files that represent subsets of your preferences.

For example, I’ve removed all but the style settings from a .reg file I exported. I’ve uploaded it renamed as a .txt file because .reg files are considered dangerous by browsers, etc.

If you want to use this to give BLADE that old familiar VLIDE look, here are the steps.

  1. Download SteveVLIDE-likeBLADEStyleSettings.reg.txt.
  2. Rename the file to remove the .txt extension so it becomes SteveVLIDE-likeBLADEStyleSettings.reg.
  3. In BLADE, use Preferences > Load Config from File
  4. Close BLADE and BricsCAD.
  5. Restart BricsCAD and BLADE.

That should do it. Happy BLADEwork!