As I described earlier, on 19 March I attended and presented at the Australasia BricsCAD Conference 2019 (ABC2019) at the Brisbane Conference and Exhibition Centre.
I’d like to point out that despite what it says on the Bricsys Blog, I covered a lot more about what’s new in BricsCAD V19 than just BLADE! I’d also like to thank Heidi Hewett for going at breakneck speed to ensure her presentation finished on time, which allowed me to do the same for Michael Smith’s all-important closing address. This was the second time Heidi did this in one day!
The presenters were Michael Smith, Heidi Hewett, Pieter Clarysse, Damian Harkin, Jason Bourhill, Ralph Grabowski, Jonathan Taylor and myself.
I wasn’t entirely happy with my own presentation, which I shared with Heidi Hewett. It started with an uncooperative PowerPoint wasting too much of the short time I had available. This led to me abandoning my painstaking preparations and winging it in order to finish in time for the closing address. I hope my talk was informative nevertheless.
To see what went on, check out these three threads that I live tweeted:
Presenters will be arriving from USA, Canada, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand. These include Ralph Grabowski, Michael Smith, Pieter Clarysse, Damian Harkin and Jason Bourhill.
If you’re using BricsCAD or contemplating moving to it, I believe the day of your time and the $100 ticket will be a sound investment. Among the subjects covered will be the business case for BricsCAD, parametric constraints, mechanical design, BIM, structural steel and site design. Heidi and I will be demonstrating some of the new features in V19. Third-party products will also be on display.
Last year there was no Autodesk University Australia and I don’t expect we’ll see one in 2019 either. So if you’re in Australasia and interested in attending a CAD or BIM conference this year, you should give this one serious consideration.
Disclosure: Sofoco will be covering my flight and accommodation expenses and providing a per diem payment.
I did my third and final (for now) BricsCAD Unplugged webcast about BLADE last Wednesday. Here’s the video:
Before I dig into DCL, I start with a brief description of an absolutely brilliant feature that was added to BLADE in V19. If you code in LISP, you’ll love this feature.
Then I move on to some ancient history. Did you know that we can thank the far-sightedness of some slightly renegade Autodesk OS/2 developers in the early 1990s for the dialog boxes we use today? Did you know that you could program dialog boxes for AutoCAD for Mac in 1993 but you can’t today? Can you spot the items of interest in the background?
The rest of the video is dedicated to describing DCL programming and debugging, and I explain how BLADE is the best tool for that job using examples.
If you want to watch all three of the BLADE videos in a row (that’s 1 hour 49 minutes of viewing), Matt Olding has created a YouTube playlist for this series.
It has been an absolute pleasure working with the Bricsys people in putting this series together. Torsten Moses has informed me about yet another bunch of enhancements that are coming very soon to BLADE, so maybe you haven’t heard the last from me on this subject on BricsCAD Unplugged.
As mentioned previously, In December I made a guest appearance on the BricsCAD Unplugged webcast series to discuss the LISP development environment, BLADE (YouTube link).
I made another appearance last week describing debugging using BLADE (YouTube link):
If you’re dealing with LISP code for AutoCAD and/or BricsCAD, you really should be doing it in BLADE. It’s the best development environment for AutoLISP/Visual LISP that you’re ever going to get.
I have another appearance scheduled for later today (13 February) in which among other LISPy things, I will be discussing using BLADE for DCL programming. Again, even if you’re AutoCAD-only, I believe this is worth a watch. BLADE is better for DCL programming, too.
Even if you’re AutoCAD-only and not a programmer, you might find my brief ancient history lesson of interest. Did you know that BricsCAD for Mac users can thank a far-sighted early 90s Autodesk OS/2 team for the dialog boxes they use today?
The BricsCAD Unplugged webcast broadcasts run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube. Today’s session will start at about UTC 14:15 (2:15 PM) on Wednesday, 13 February 2019 (click here for your local time)
Last night I made another guest appearance on the BricsCAD Unplugged webcast series. This time I was discussing the LISP development environment, BLADE. Here’s the video:
Bonus points will be awarded for identifying three items of interest in the background. No, not counting my dog Sunday asleep at lower left.
Despite going way over time, there was still nowhere near enough opportunity to describe the full LISPy awesomeness that BLADE represents. I am therefore scheduled to return for another two or three episodes beginning in February. In those, I’ll be doing more of a step-by-step demonstration rather than the overview and V19 new feature description I did in this episode. If you have any particular requests for what you want covered, please comment on this post.
I also showed how the tools in BLADE (e.g. the (inspector) function) are still worth having for any DWG-based CAD Manager or power user, even if you’re not a full-on LISP programmer. If you have to work out what’s going on with dodgy DWG files, you’ll want to have (inspector) in your set of tools.
The BricsCAD Unplugged webcast broadcasts run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube. This was the last episode for 2018 because of Christmas and New Year.
In September I was the special guest on the BricsCAD Unplugged episode BricsCAD Unplugged – Steve Johnson 5 surprises moving to BricsCAD. Next Wednesday I will return, this time to wield BLADE, the best thing to happen to CAD LISP in nearly 20 years. I’ll be introducing it and demonstrating a few things, including the new features that came with V19.
These live broadcasts are run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube. This broadcast will start at UTC 15:00 (3 PM) on Wednesday, 19 December 2018. Here’s that time in a few handy time zones:
You may have noticed things being a little quiet around here lately. Don’t worry, things are going to ramp up again soon. I have had about a dozen things on the go and for various reasons, some to do with travelling and some technical, I haven’t quite finished any of them. But you should see a flurry of activity before too long.
Here’s some of what I’ve was doing while I was travelling and hoping in vain to get some work done:
Australian and Oceania Veteran Sabre Final 2018
Bling haul from 2018 Australian and Oceania Championships – retained my 50+ Australian and Oceania sabre titles
Competing in the Commonwealth Veteran Sabre Team event
Commonwealth Veteran Sabre Team podium
Commonwealth bling – Retained my Championships in Veteran Sabre (50+) and Veteran Sabre Teams
Also, my daughter Emma capped off a great fencing year by competing for Australia for the first time, finishing with a bronze medal in the Commonwealth Women’s Sabre Team Championship. She’s now ranked 1 in Australia in both Under 17 and Under 20 categories and won three more Western Australian Championships this year, taking her total up to 22.
Me drinking a glass of wine (parental guidance advised – alcohol consumption depicted). If you care, it’s a Shiraz (that’s Syrah if you’re American) from South Australia’s Limestone Coast region.
Total lack of coordination from everyone in raising our drinks at the end.
Thank you to the Bricsys crew for the invitation, it was a blast! If you ever want me on again, I’ll be happy to oblige.
For future reference, these live broadcasts run on the Bricsys Facebook page and are then quickly transferred to YouTube.
Sofoco (Australia) and CAD Concepts (New Zealand) recently ran a series of seminars throughout Australasia demonstrating BricsCAD. I attended the last of these in Brisbane on April 19 and gave a presentation about BricsCAD’s LISP, with reference to AutoCAD compatibility and the tools available to CAD Managers and developers, including BLADE. The talk was aimed at anybody who is writing or maintaining LISP code for AutoCAD or BricsCAD.
I had the just-before-lunch slot, which is never desirable for a presenter. People are dozing off and/or bursting to go to the toilet, and time adjustments have to be made if earlier presentations run over. I started 10 minutes late and therefore had to remove the demonstration part of the presentation on the fly, but I had planned to allow for that eventuality. It’s been a while since I have presented like this before an audience so I was a bit rusty and it wasn’t as free-flowing as I would have liked. Too many ‘erms’!
Steve’s invisible accordion is impressively large
I did manage to keep the whole audience in their seats until the end, though, so that’s something. Maybe the fact that I was waving a sword around had something to do with it.
Here’s my video, which is 21 minutes long. The sound is a bit muffled and my accent is Australian, so you might want to turn on subtitles using the CC option in the YouTube player.
Disclosure: the organisers covered part of my expenses.
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.
For the first video in the new cad nauseam YouTube channel, I’ve had a bit of fun. I unearthed a bunch of my old stuff to show you. Does any of this take you back? Enjoy!
I recently updated my resume, and I thought it might be relevant to include an episode from my early career. This post is an expansion on what I had to say about that episode.
I was managing a tiny CAD training and development company, Educad. Much of my time there was spent developing software called NIDIS (originally called NEEDS), a project that was started in 1987 or 1988 with Nixdorf Computer as the client. It was intended to take over the market among first the home building companies of Western Australia, then Australia, then the World!
What’s special about NIDIS is that it was a precursor to BIM. Using a 3D-adapted version of the 2D Educad architectural software within AutoCAD, designs of domestic homes could be efficiently created and infused with a degree of intelligence. This was then linked to the Nixdorf minicomputer-based software that contained pricing and other information about the various building components. This combined system enabled accurate quantity take-offs to be performed.
This was supposed to be a short project, but due to a massive amount of “scope creep” it took two years. I was really pushing the limits of what AutoCAD could be persuaded to do at that time and had to break new ground in several areas. Some of it was a kludge, but I made it work. Finally, the software was essentially completed, with a custom tablet menu (remember those?), full documentation and everything. Nixdorf CAD-spec PCs with big screens, tablets, AutoCAD and NIDIS were installed in the drawing office. It was successfully tested in Beta. The take-offs were very accurate. Everything looked good to go.
Then, two weeks before it was due to go into production, this project died. The building company that was sponsoring it, Mansard Homes, went into liquidation as it struggled unsuccessfully with the combined effects of very high interest rates and bad publicity about poor building quality and cost overruns. Nixdorf dropped the whole project like a hot potato and the product was never sold. I didn’t have any rights to the software and couldn’t do anything with it.
But it was software that was based around a 3D model of a building that contained some intelligent information, albeit extremely crude by today’s standards. I wrote, quite literally, Building Information Modeling software. It was completed in 1989, before the name BIM had even been used. The idea had existed since the mid 70s, but I didn’t know that at the time so I made it up as I went along.
I didn’t actually invent BIM, but I made something that resembled BIM that actually worked. And then it didn’t.
This is easily the most spectacular failure of my career. Still, I’m kind of proud of it.
Edit: for historical context, this video shows an unrelated system that was developed at about the same time as NIDIS.
Some of you may be aware I’m an activeveteran fencer. I’ve been a bit quiet over the past month because I’ve been away, attending two major fencing tournaments. I’ll post some video later, but here are my national and international medal results this year:
Open Men’s Sabre Teams (Western Australia) – Silver
Veteran Men’s Sabre – 50+ Gold
Veteran Men’s Foil – Silver and 50+ Gold
Veteran Sabre Teams (Western Australia – Captain) – Gold
Veteran Epee Teams (Western Australia – Captain) – Gold
Veteran Foil Teams (Western Australia – Captain) – Bronze
** At these Championships I fenced in 11 events and came away with 7 medals, which I believe is a men’s record for Australian events.
So among other things, I’m 50+ Sabre Champion of Australia, Oceania, Asia and the Commonwealth. The Western Australia Championships were also awarded a couple of weeks ago, where I won Veteran Championships in all three weapons and the Master-at-Arms (all-rounder) Championship. All-in-all, a pretty good year!
