Category Archives: Bug

Missing language pack fixes compared

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Having tried out the cleanup fixes from both Autodesk and Owen Wengerd, they both appear to work fine. Here are some points of comparison:

  • Owen’s utility will work with any AutoCAD variant from 2007 on; Autodesk’s fix is currently restricted to Civil 3D 2009, 2010 and 2011. As this problem is definitely not confined to Civil 3D, and may need to be dealt with by non-Civil 3D users, that could be the dealbreaker right there.
  • Owen’s can be installed by anyone by simply copying a file and loading it when needed or in the Startup Suite; Autodesk’s requires admin rights to either run an installer program or manual replacement of a program component, depending on the release.
  • Owen’s loads and runs as the user requires; Autodesk’s runs automatically when opening and saving a drawing.
  • Owen’s provides some information about what is getting cleaned up; Autodesk’s operates in total silence.
  • Owen’s utility can take a while to scan through everything in a complex drawing; Autodesk’s appears to take no longer to open the drawing than normal. To give you some idea of the times involved, in one test in Civil 3D 2011, opening a blank ( but 2.2 MB!) drawing based on the Civil 3D template took 3.6 s with or without the fix; Owen’s cleanup took 0.7 s. In another test on an oldish PC with AutoCAD 2010, cleaning up a drawing with 2.8 MB of real content took Owen’s utility about 15 seconds.

For my purposes, Owen’s utility is what I need, because the users who need to clean up these drawings use AutoCAD, not Civil 3D. I’ve set up a batch process for these users, which opens each selected drawing, runs Owen’s utility and saves the drawing. However, I suggest Civil 3D users install the relevant updates and patches anyway, as they fix more than just this problem. In addition, in Civil 3D 2011 without the Autodesk fix, one of the problems fixed by Owen’s cleanup (a AeccDbNetworkCatalogDef one) is then immediately recreated by Civil 3D.

The upshot is that Civil 3D users should at least apply Autodesk’s fixes; everybody else should use Owen’s.

Using Owen’s fix, it is interesting to see what it reports as being the problem in particular drawings. Here’s what one of my non-Civil 3D problem drawings shows up:

Command: cleanlanguage
Scanning drawing for corrupt objects...
Corrupt object AecDbScheduleDataFormat<2F84> CLEANED
Found 1 corrupt object

Here’s what the Civil 3D 2011 ANZ template shows up when cleaned:

Command: cleanlanguage
Scanning drawing for corrupt objects...
Corrupt object AeccDbNetworkCatalogDef<8B7> ERASED
Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<1619> CLEANED
Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161B> CLEANED
Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161A> CLEANED
Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161F> CLEANED
Found 5 corrupt objects

It looks like every Civil 3D 2011 drawing based on these templates has been going out corrupt in 5 different places. Hopefully, Autodesk will quickly get on to fixing up the Civil 3D template situation, and will incorporate the automated open/save cleanup in future updates to AutoCAD itself and all the other AutoCAD-based verticals.

Another language pack cleanup solution

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My CADLock, Inc. colleague, Owen Wengerd has posted about a fix utility he has written to help clean up drawings infested with the language pack problem discussed here. I have not yet tested Owen’s utility*, but as this should run in any AutoCAD-based product from 2007 on, it could well be a better partial solution than Autodesk’s Civil 3D-only (so far) patches. Autodesk still needs to sort out its dodgy templates, of course, and should probably provide its own non-Civil 3D fixes, if only to maintain a little corporate self-respect.

As Owen has a long and distinguished history of being consistently and demonstrably better at AutoCAD programming than Autodesk’s own programmers, I’d be tempted to try this one first. However, Civil 3D users should probably apply the patches and updates anyway to help resolve other issues.

To find Owen’s utility, go to the ManuSoft ARX freebies page and look for CleanLanguage.zip. While you’re there, use the Software menu to check out some of the other stuff Owen has done.

* Edit: I have now tested it, and it works beautifully in both AutoCAD 2010 and Civil 3D 2011.

Partial fix for language pack problem

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The Civil 3D group within Autodesk has moved impressively quickly in providing a partial solution to the language pack problem I described earlier. What has been provided so far is a set of patches for Civil 3D 2009, 2010 and 2011 that allow Civil 3D users to remove the spurious language pack flag by opening and re-saving the affected drawings. I have not yet tested this, but I am informed that it works.

What’s left to do? Obviously, not all recipients of these drawings are going to have Civil 3D. In fact, prior to isolating Civil 3D as one definite source of the problem, I had spent a lot of time helping out AutoCAD users clean up language-pack-infected drawings, using awkward and dangerous copy-and-paste methods. So Autodesk has AutoCAD and all its vertical variants to work through yet as far as a cleanup mechanism goes. Also, the problem needs resolving at the source end. All “infected” templates (in Civil 3D and any other verticals that may have the problem) need fixing and distributing to users as quickly and effectively as possible, in order to reduce the number of drawings being created with the problem. I know individual users can do this for themselves, but large numbers of users won’t do so if left to their own devices, causing problems for everyone else. As the originator of the problem, Autodesk has a duty to do its very best to resolve it.

Thanks, Autodesk, for quickly getting started on fixing the problem and providing a partial solution in a timely manner. I hope you can provide the rest of the solution equally efficiently.

Civil 3D 2011 ANZ comes complete with “virus”

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If you install Civil 3D 2011 using the ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) profile, when you start it up for the first time, you will see a large warning indicating that the drawing requires an Asian language pack to be installed. It also warns that this is a symptom of the acad.vlx virus:

Language Pack warning

Now I know that in this case it’s not an actual virus causing the problem, but rather the ANZ template drawing being “infected” with this Language Pack requirement. I have had to deal with quite a few incoming drawings in this state, and that’s painful enough without Autodesk also infecting every Australasian Civil 3D drawing with the problem. Other profiles may be similarly infected, but at the moment I don’t know. Edit: Matt Anderson reports that the problem occurs on US systems too.

Autodesk, I suggest that as a matter of great urgency you create a clean ANZ template file, post it as a hotfix and warn all your Civil 3D customers of the SNAFU. Neither “install the language pack” nor “turn off the warning” are adequate workarounds. Your customers do not want to send out or receive any drawings in this state.

Beyond the immediate issue of Autodesk shipping software that on first use warns the user that they may have a virus (and encourages the creation of drawings that spread that warning far and wide), I would appreciate some assistance in dealing with “infected” drawings, whether in Civil 3D or plain AutoCAD.

First, I need to be able to detect such drawings using LISP so I ensure they are rejected rather than allowed into our drawing management system, and this detection will need to work in releases at least as far back as AutoCAD 2004.

Second, I need a mechanism of cleaning up such drawings. The only thing I have discovered that works so far is the manual, time-consuming and dangerous process of recreating the drawings by starting from scratch and Copy/Paste in each layout. With big jobs using nested xrefs, this is fraught. I need to be able to provide a LISP-based cleanup mechanism that I can set up to work in batch mode on a set of drawings.

I would be grateful for any clues anyone might have about the above detect & cleanup needs.

Edit: see the comments for further important information.

Filling the holes in Autodesk’s CHM Help stopgap

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It was good to see Autodesk react to criticism of AutoCAD 2011’s browser-based Help with an acknowledgement of the problems and an attempt to provide a workaround by making a zip file of CHM files available for download. That’s much better than ignoring people’s concerns, denying the validity of those concerns or shooting the messenger, which has been known to happen in the past.

However, there are some holes in the workaround, only some of which can be filled.

  • Under 64-bit Windows 7, the Search pane is blank, as it is in the CHM Help for earlier releases on that platform. This is stated on the download page. Index works well, but Search doesn’t. As Search is one of the worst aspects of the browser-based Help, this is a rather unfortunate.
  • There is no obvious way of making the CHMs provide contextual help. Don’t bother pointing at acad181.chm in the Files tab of Options, it doesn’t work. Edit: See Chris Cowgill’s post on the AUGI forums for a partial workaround.
  • Even without contextual help, no advice is provided for calling the CHMs from within AutoCAD; you are only told that you can set up a shortcut on your desktop and double-click on that when you need it. However, you can set up an alias command in AutoCAD. To do this, edit the acad.pgp file or use the Express Tools Aliasedit command to set up a shell command. The alias name can be whatever you like (e.g. HEL), the command name should simply be the path and filename of the main acad181.chm file.
  • The CHM files are currently available only in English.
  • The set of CHM files is incomplete. See below for more details and what you can do about it.

These are the CHM files provided with AutoCAD 2011:

acet.chm – Express Tools
AdRefMan.chm – Autodesk Reference Manager
adrefmanctxt.chm – Not to be launched manually
ole_err.chm – Not to be launched manually
webbrw.chm – Not to be launched manually

These are the CHM files provided in the zip file download:

acad181.chm – Main AutoCAD 2011 Help file
acad.readme.chm – Readme
acad_acg.chm – Customization Guide
acad_acr.chm – Command Reference
acad_aug.chm – User’s Guide
acad_dpg.chm – Driver and Peripheral Guide
acad_install.chm – Installation
acad_nfw.chm – New Features Workshop
adsk_lic.chm – Licensing

These are the CHM files that are missing:

acad_aag.chm – ActiveX and VBA Developer’s Guide
acad_alg.chm – AutoLISP Developer’s Guide
acad_alr.chm – AutoLISP Functions
acad_alt.chm – AutoLISP Tutorial
acad_car.chm – Connectivity Automation Reference
acad_dev181.chm – Developer Documentation
acad_dxf.chm – DXF Reference
acad_sso.chm – Sheet Set Objects Reference
acadauto.chm – ActiveX and VBA Reference
adsk_brw.chm – Licensing – (this appears to be a later version of adsk_lic.chm).

Do you need any of the above? I did. To obtain a full set of AutoCAD 2011 CHM files, I had to do the following:

  1. Download a vertical AutoCAD 2011-based variant. I used AutoCAD Civil 3D 2011, because I am entitled to download that from the Subscription Center. You may need to download an evaluation copy of a vertical. If so, make sure you delete the files after your evaluation period of 30 days, won’t you? Hopefully, Autodesk will have provided a better workaround by then.
  2. Double-click on the downloaded executable (which is actually a self-extracting archive). You will be prompted for a location for the files to be unzipped to. I accepted the default of C:\Autodesk\AutoCAD_Civil3D_2011_English_32bit.
  3. After the unzipping process is complete, the installtion window will appear. Pick Exit; you do not need to go ahead with the whole installation.
  4. Search for the CHM files in the unzip location. There are a variety of locations, some of them containing duplicate files, but I was able to find what I needed in C:\Autodesk\AutoCAD_Civil3D_2011_English_32bit\x86\en-US\C3D\Acad\Help.
  5. Copy the files from here to a safe location, and set up shortcuts and/or alias commands to access them.

Note that I can’t vouch for the completeness or correctness of these files (which may be why Autodesk didn’t include them), but I can’t do that for the HTML versions either. For those of you in non-English-speaking locations, I would be interested in finding out if you can use this method to obtain non-English CHM files. Are there non-English AutoCAD 2011-based verticals available for download yet? If so, are the CHMs in your language?

Finally, if you are having trouble reading CHMs over a network, check out this Microsoft document on a security update that may be the cause.

Autodesk shows Dassault how to treat customers

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There are areas of Autodesk’s treatment of customers that leaves much to be desired, and I will most likely continue to be critical of that until a) I die; b) Autodesk dies; or c) the bad stuff stops happening. One thing for which Autodesk deserves praise is the distribution of bug fixes to its customers, without imposing the sort of conditions that SolidWorks customers have to put up with.

  • Do Autodesk customers need to be on Subscription to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.
  • Do Autodesk customers need to have purchased the software within the last 90 days to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.
  • Do Autodesk customers need to have reported certain specific bugs to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.
  • Do Autodesk customers even need to be running the current release to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.

AutoCAD 2010 Update 2 (that’s Service Pack 2 in the old language) has just been released for the users of last year’s software. This includes the Update 1 changes. The usual caveats apply, including reading the Readme first. As usual, Autodesk’s oddball numbering system means that after installation, Update 1 shows up as Version 2 and Update 2 shows up as Version 3 in the About screen.

This Update applies to straight AutoCAD (and LT), not the vertical variants. I have no news about non-English versions. Patrick Emin informs me these updates are language-independent.

AutoCAD 2009 & 2010 users – out of memory errors?

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Some of the users I support have repeated out-of-memory errors while editing fairly simple drawings. I have some 2010 users who suffer from this problem while others using the same drawings on the same hardware get by without ever seeing it. When swapping users to differerent PCs, the problem seems to follow the user. Despite various experiments, I have no idea what is going on here.

Is this happening to you or anybody you work with? Have you managed to work out if there is something that triggers it? Is there a user interface setting or method of drawing that you suspect of being the culprit?

Does your AutoCAD get its wrods worng?

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A problem I’ve seen affecting keyboard users (particularly fast ones) in recent AutoCADs (since 2006) is that the characters entered into the command line are not always the ones you typed. Or rather, they are the ones you typed, just not in the right order. In particular, I’ve seen the first couple of characters get messed up, so you might get ILNE instead of LINE. In addition to the annoyance factor, this is something of a productivity killer.

Has this happened to you? If so, please comment. Any comment is welcome, but it would be great if you could provide the following information:

  1. AutoCAD (or vertical) release(s) where you have seen this happen. Also mention any recent releases where you have seen it not happen.
  2. Command line status when you have seen this happen (docked, floating, off, all of the above).
  3. Dynamic input status when you have seen this happen (on, off, on but with some options turned off, all of the above).
  4. Screen configuration when you have seen this happen (single, dual, either).
  5. AutoCAD main window status when you have seen this happen (maximised, floating, either).
  6. Other than this problem, does AutoCAD’s general response to input seem “sticky”? Sticky keyboard, mouse, or both?
  7. Other than AutoCAD, do any other apps give sticky response on the same PC?
  8. General PC stats (OS, CPU type and speed, RAM size, graphics card).

Please add anything else that you think might be useful in tracking this down or working around it. If I learn anything that might be useful, I’ll report back in a later post.

AutoCAD virus protection update

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As I mentioned in my last post, I had some reservations about the code provided by Autodesk to deal with suspect acad.vlx and logo.gif files. Based on a suggestion from Jimmy Bergmark, I have written my own, safer version which you can download here: clean_virus_safe.lsp.

The comments at the top of the clean_virus_safe.lsp file explain what to do with it, but I will reproduce some of the relevant points here.

  • Purpose: Checks for existence of acad.vlx and logo.gif files, which are associated with virus AL/Logo-A, also known as ACAD/Unexplode, ACAD/Agent.A or ACM_UNEXPLODE.B. Written as a safer alternative to Autodesk’s code which deletes suspect files without prior warning. This code renames the files instead.
  • Legal: Provided as-is with no warranty whatsoever, use at own risk. May be distributed freely.
  • Usage: Append the contents of this file into a startup LISP file (e.g. acaddoc.lsp in your search path – create such a file if it does not exist). Autodesk’s suggestion to modify the acad20xx.lsp file should not be followed: this is bad practice. The acad20xx.lsp file is Autodesk’s file and any modifications you make to it are likely to be lost when updates and patches are applied.
  • Effects: Any and all files named acad.vlx and logo.gif and located in AutoCAD’s search path will be renamed, e.g. “acad.vlx” will become “[Suspected Virus] acad.vlx0”. The name will end in a number starting with 0. If other suspect files are later found in the same location, those files will be renamed to end with 1, 2, 3 and so on.

I don’t have a copy of the actual virus, and would like to get hold of one with a view to possibly improving this code. If you have a copy, I would be grateful if you could contact me so I can dissect it.

Another AutoCAD malware warning

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Shaan Hurley has posted some useful information about another AutoCAD-based virus that is doing the rounds, and I strongly suggest you read it. However, I have some reservations about the solution that is posted there and in the Autodesk knowledgebase.

The LISP code suggested will delete any files called acad.vlx or logo.gif that are located in the current user’s current AutoCAD search path. There are a couple of problems with that.

  • The search path will change depending on the user, the profile, the startup folder and the drawing folder. That means you can’t just use the code once and expect the problem to go away; the code will need to remain in place permanently to ensure it does not recur. That may not be a huge problem, although it will have a performance penalty (particularly where the search path is long and/or includes network paths) and it is one more thing to remember to carry over to future releases.
  • More importantly, the code has no idea if the files it is deleting are legitimate or not. It is quite possible for a custom environment or third-party utility to make use of a file called acad.vlx, and there are all sorts of reasons you may have a logo.gif file floating around. The Autodesk code will just erase such files without prior warning, which is a bit naughty.

I commend Shaan and Autodesk for posting this information and proposed solution. However, I recommend caution before using this code as suggested. Check with your CAD Manager (if you have one) first to ensure there are no legitimate acad.vlx files in your environment. Do a search for these files yourself and see if there is a legitimate reason for them being where they are.

As with most malware attacks, taking care with incoming files is a very important part of the solution. Don’t just blindly use the contents of a zip file full of drawings, even from a trusted source. If somebody sends you a zip file containing an acad.vlx file, let the sender know about the problem and ask for an uninfected set of files.

Hotfix available for Raster Design licensing issue

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Thanks to Brian and Rick for pointing out the availability of a hotfix for Raster Design 2010’s standalone/network license incompatibility. As a bonus, it also fixes some Raster Design / Civil 3D stability issues.

The hotfix is available here, and as always with patches, fixes, service packs and updates, read the readme first.

Note that although this fixes the most common scenario where a network Raster Design needs to work on a standalone AutoCAD, it does not fix the opposite scenario. So if you have a bunch of network licensed AutoCAD variants available to you and you have a standalone license of Raster Design because you’re the only person in the office who needs it, you’re still out of luck. If you’re in such a position, I think you have a very strong case for a no-cost change from standalone to network licensing for Raster Design. If you ask for this and are refused, let me know and I’ll let everyone else know.

The 12-month cycle and shipping software with known bugs

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In a recent blog post, Deelip Menezes appears to be shocked by the very idea that a particular CAD company (no, not Autodesk) would ship software that contains known bugs. I thought he was joking, because he’s surely aware that practically all software companies with highly complex products release software with known bugs. As Deelip points out, those companies with 12-month cycles are particularly prone to doing this. There is no possible way any company can release something as complex as a CAD application within a fixed 12-month cycle without it containing dozens* of known bugs (because there isn’t time to fix them after discovery) and dozens* of unknown ones (because of insufficient Beta testing time).

Reading Deelip’s post and subsequent comments more carefully, it becomes clear that he doesn’t mean what a casual glance might lead you to believe he means. Deelip makes a specific distinction between “bugs” and “known issues”. He states that if a bug is discovered and the software is then adjusted such that it does not abort the software in a badly-behaved way, and this is then documented, then the bug ceases to be a bug and becomes a “known issue”.

I disagree. Bugs can cause crashes or not; they can cause “nice” crashes or not; they can be known about prior to release or not; they can be documented internally or not; they can be documented publicly or not. As far as I’m concerned, if the software doesn’t act “as designed” or “as intended”, then that’s a bug. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say, and I concur:

A software bug is the common term used to describe an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect or unexpected result).

That doesn’t mean that software that is “as designed” (free of bugs) is free of defects. Defects are things that make the software work in a way other than “as it should”. They can be bugs, design errors or omissions, performance problems, user interface logic failures, API holes, feature changes or removals with unintended undesirable consequences, and so on. Unfortunately, defining “as it should” isn’t a precise science. You can’t just compare the software to the documentation and say that the differences are defects. The documentation could be faulty or incomplete, or it could perfectly describe the deeply flawed way in which the software works.

While I disagree with Deelip’s definition of bugs, I couldn’t agree more with a more important point he makes in his blog post. That point is of a fixed 12-month cycle being the root cause of a plethora of bugs/issues/whatever making it into shipping software, and this being an unacceptable situation. This is a view I expressed in Cadalyst before I started participating in Autodesk’s sadly defunct MyFeedback program, and it’s a view I hold even more strongly today.

In conclusion, I would have to say that the fixed yearly release schedule is not good for AutoCAD. It is good for Autodesk, certainly in the short term, but that’s not at all the same thing as being good for AutoCAD or its users.

I’m not alone in thinking this. The polls I’ve run on this subject, discussions with many individuals on-line and in person, and many comments here and elsewhere, indicate that a dislike of the 12-month cycle is the majority viewpoint. For example, when asked the question, “Do you think the 12-month release cycle is harming the quality of AutoCAD and its variants?”, 85% of poll respondents here answered “Definitely” or “Probably”. In another poll, 71% of respondents indicated a preference for AutoCAD release cycles of 24 months or greater.

Somebody please tell me I’m wrong here. Somebody tell me that I’ve misread things, that customers really think the 12-month cycle is great, and that it’s not actually harmful for the product. Anyone?

* Or hundreds. Or thousands.

AutoCAD’s magic vanishing attachments

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There are now quite a few file types that you can attach to an AutoCAD drawing as a reference, in the same way that you can attach other drawings as xrefs. We’ve been able to attach other drawings since Release 11 (1990) and images since Release 14 (1997), but every release since 2007 has introduced a new kind of attachment. In AutoCAD 2010, you can now also attach PDFs, MicroStation DGNs (v7 and v8), DWF and DWFx files.

But should you? Maybe not. It depends who is going to use those drawings after you. If you know for certain that every user of that drawing is going to be using 2010 and later, that’s no problem. But if there is the possibility of earlier releases being used, your fine-looking attachments could vanish silently in the night. Attach a PDF to your drawing in 2010, give it to a user of last year’s AutoCAD 2009 (you’ll need to save it as a 2007 DWG) and what will he see? Nothing. There is no text-screen warning, no bounding box, no piece of text indicating the file name, nothing. Just a blank space where there should be useful drawing content.

This problem isn’t new to 2010, because there are similar problems with the other recent attachment types. Let’s examine them one by one:

  • PDF – visible only in 2010 and later (except for the special case of 2009 with the Subscription-only Bonus Pack 2).
  • DWFx – visible only in 2009 and later.
  • DGN v7 – visible only in 2009 and later.
  • DGN v8 – visible only in 2008 and later.
  • DWF – visible only in 2007 and later.

It’s important to note that the attachments don’t actually disappear from the drawing. They are still stored there, even if you save to an earlier DWG format like 2000 or 2004. The attachments survive the round trip to an earlier DWG format intact; they will reappear just fine if reopened in 2010. (Round-tripping of new object types is something that Autodesk has done extremely well over the years).

In most cases, the objects are stored invisibly as proxy objects (object name ACAD_PROXY_ENTITY, known in the early days as zombies). In some cases, they are listed as special Underlay objects (e.g. DGNUnderlay, DWFUnderlay). In 2000 to 2006, they all list as proxies. How can you list these objects in earlier releases when you can’t see them? With a bit of LISP, or old tricks like LIST ALL Remove Crossing.

The moral of the story for drawing creators is to look before you leap whan attaching new object types. For drawing recipients, it’s something to carefully watch out for. If you’re the customer and you use an earlier release, you may even wish to include a don’t-use-this-attachment-type clause in your specifications.

Bug watch – identify this insect

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No, not the Bug Watch, just a bug you can watch. Does anybody know what this insect is? It is the second one of these we’ve found in our home in Western Australia. It’s very active and it smells horrible.

YouTube Link

For those of you who can’t access YouTube, here are some photos of the bug:

Mystery Bug

A higher resolution version of the above picture is available here. This is the bug about to be given its freedom:

Mystery Bug

On release, it buried itself in our lawn:

Mystery Bug

In 25 years in Australia, I had never seen one of these until recently. Any ideas?

Older AutoCAD loses (part of) the plot

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I know there are plenty of people still using AutoCAD 2007 and earlier, so this bug warning may save some of you some grief. I have no idea how widespread or isolated this problem is, but under some circumstances I haven’t worked out yet, AutoCAD 2007 fails to plot all of certain dynamic blocks. Some attributes have a habit of being plot-shy. Even if you don’t use dynamic blocks yourself, you could receive a set of drawings, check them on-screen, approve them, plot them and send out paper drawings without all of their parts. Unless you’re carefully manually checking the paper plots, this situation is obviously a little dangerous. Fortunately, Plot Preview also shows up the problem, so it is at least possible to check things without wasting trees.

Here’s an example. This is part of such a drawing displayed in AutoCAD 2007, with all of its parts in place. One of the dynamic blocks is highlighted:

Drawing in AutoCAD 2007 with all its parts in place

Here’s that drawing plotted using AutoCAD 2007, showing the missing parts:

Drawing plotted in AutoCAD 2007 with parts missing

Earlier releases do the same, including pre-dynamic block releases. As DWF files are just electronic plots, the same problem applies to them. Yes, I’ve checked for non-plotting layers and looked into the visibility states within the dynamic blocks. An audit of the drawing indicates no problems. Attribute visibility settings are not an issue.

Here’s the same drawing plotted using AutoCAD 2009 (2008 and 2010 are fine, too):

Drawing plotted in AutoCAD 2009 with parts intact

What to do? Using a later release would solve it, but might not be a practicable solution in your office right now. Instead, you could consider using DWG TrueView for your plotting. That may not be ideal either, but it could be better than risking the consequences of an unknown number of your plots containing an unknown number of missing parts in unknown places.

Have you come across this problem? If you have any more clues about the circumstances that trigger it, please add a comment.

What a crock!

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Just when I thought it wasn’t possible for my Autodesk discussion group experience to get any worse, it has. Much worse.

I stated before that in the 15 November update, some Einstein decided it would be fun to copy my private work email address over the top of my public user ID, automatically making it visible to all and sundry in many places. I should note at this point that publishing somebody’s email address without consent is illegal in some locations, including here in Australia. So to the best of my knowledge (not that I’m a lawyer), Autodesk is not only perpetrating a grossly irresponsible breach of privacy, it’s also breaking the law.

Attempting to fix this myself failed, because of some new introduced bug in the login system. When changing my user ID from my email address to “Steve Johnson”, the screen falsely claimed that the data entered was invalid. I have reported that here, on the newsgroups themselves, and as an official top-priority Subscription support call.

During one of my user ID fix-up attempts, a popup screen asked if I was changing the password (I wasn’t, I was trying to change the user ID) for user “Steve Johnson” or user “my email address”. I tried both in turn, but neither worked. That got me thinking that maybe the update may have created two versions of me; one with the correct name and one with my email address, with the latter being associated with my discussion group messages. So I tried changing the email address one to a name that wasn’t my email address and wasn’t Steve Johnson (SteveJohnson-blognauseam), in the hope that this would at least remove my email address from public view.

I was pleasantly surprised when this change was accepted, but my elation was short-lived. The change process logged me off automatically, and then refused to let me log back on. I can’t log on as SteveJohnson-blognauseam, I can’t log on as Steve Johnson, and I can’t log on as my email address. All attempts are refused as invalid. I can’t log on to chase up my Subscription support call. I can’t log on to erase my email address from the body of a discussion group message, which was automatically infected with my full-text email address when I edited it in an attempt to fix up some of the new formatting issues introduced to the awful editor by the recent changes. Not only that, but after all that, the change of my user ID didn’t “take” in the discussion groups themselves! It was all in vain! Strewth.

I’m stuck in the worst of all worlds. My Subscription access is broken. My email address is still visible. If anyone replies to any of my messages, that email address is likely to be reproduced in plain text in their message, and I’m not going to be able to edit it. I can’t even log on and complain about it on the discussion groups themselves. I don’t have access to my work email account for another 36 hours so I can’t chase up the Subscription people that way, and if they email me with instructions or a request for information I won’t see it. So the chances of this being fixed in a reasonable timeframe (i.e. before the spambots do their harvesting) are slim, to say the least.

Would the dolt or dolts responsible for this SNAFU care to come forward? No, I didn’t think so.

I am struggling to find words that adequately express my displeasure at Autodesk right now. It wouldn’t be quite so abysmal if it wasn’t a repeat of the exact same situation just a few weeks ago, for which I and many others roundly and justly slammed Autodesk at the time.

Autodesk is listening? Yeah, right. In this case, Autodesk is doing a great impersonation of a fence post.

Edit: overnight, my name change to SteveJohnson-blognauseam did actually “take”, so most of the email address instances are gone. Unfortunately, a spambot only needs one instance, and I’m still left with at least one message containing my email address in plain text. I still can’t log on using any of my 3 possible user IDs, so I can’t fix it up myself.

Edit 2: an Autodesk person kindly emailed me (which must have taken significant intestinal fortitude) to inform me they had reset my password, which allowed me to log on and remove what I hope is the only plain text instance of my email address. Other than a few marginal technicalities I described to the Autodesk person, that’s my email address hidden again. Now, what about everybody else in the same boat?

Autodesk discussion group maintenance failure

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I must admit that I wasn’t really expecting the November 15 Autodesk discussion group maintenance effort to come up with the goods and make everything all better again. However, it appears that even my lowly expectations were nothing but naive optimism.

Here are the changes I see:

  • The old messages and Plain Text new messages that had their paragraphs stripped out have had them returned. This is the end of the good news, as far as I can tell. If you only ever like reading positive things, particularly about Autodesk, I suggest you stop reading now.
  • Rich Text messages have had superfluous paragraphs introduced, and other formatting issues. The more you edit a message, the worse it gets. Try switching back and forth between Rich Text and Plain Text a few times, it’s a crock.
  • My email address has been newly exposed to the spambots as my user ID, and I’m not alone. WTF? Totally unforgivable! Heads should have rolled the first time this happened. Doing it again is way, way beyond endurance.
  • The Edit Account page refuses to allow me to make changes, falsely claiming that several fields contain incorrect data. This means I can’t fix the email exposure problem myself, and have to wait for Autodesk to fix it. Never mind, I’ve done a lot of waiting for Autodesk over the past few months, so I’m kind of used to it.

Other than that, the discussion group system looks like the same old pile of garbage that it has been for weeks. For example, Search is still broken. Paste is still arcane. Using the indent or bullet items in Rich Text results in text above the selection being indented too. The question evaluation system (of dubious value in any case) causes threads to start with such nonsense as “This question is not answered. Helpful answers available: 2. Correct answers available: 1.” Er, OK then…

Even the Help page hasn’t been updated to reflect any alleged new fixes or to correct any of the errors I pointed out weeks ago.

All in all, I’d say it’s not exactly a major triumph as a maintenance effort.

Autodesk, please give up trying to maintain this steaming pile of pus. It’s not going to work. If the people at Jive Software can’t help you get their forum software working (and there has been plenty of time in which that could have happened), then bite the bullet and throw it away. Really.

Autodesk discussion group maintenance this weekend

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According to a notice on the Autodesk discussion groups, they will be down for maintenance for a while this wekend. The scheduled downtime period (in terms of GMT/UTC) is 7 AM Saturday, 15 November 2008 to 5 AM Sunday, 16 November 2008. Fingers crossed for some big improvements, they are desperately overdue!

Autodesk discussion groups – signs of life?

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After an extraordinarily long period of total silence about the dreadful state of the appallingly-updated Autodesk discussion groups, it seems that the sleeping monster has raised an eyelid. Although it unfortunately indicates that Autodesk intends to try to patch up the new system rather than throwing it away, there is now a “sticky” post at the top of each forum containing the following text:

Your continued patience is appreciated as we work to resolve the discussion group issues you have been reporting. We understand the impact these issues have on your productivity, and want to assure you we are continuing to troubleshoot and resolve. We’ve posted an update under “Help” to provide awareness and status of the issues we are working on. We’ll regularly update this as improvements are made.

Never mind the glacial nature of the response, it’s good to see that an acknowledgment has finally been made of the problems. However, picking on the Help link reveals that there’s a long way to go yet before all the problems are even fully understood by the team responsible, let alone fixed. Only three “Known Issues” are listed, and four issues are allegedly resolved. At least one of those, shown as resolved on 7 October, is still very much broken right now. At least one of the FAQ items, “Why can’t I stay signed in?”, gives false information.

Discussion group team, you will find a lot more than seven issues listed on this blog alone. To see them, just click on the Newsgroups link in the Tags section on the right. Alternatively, you could use the Search box at the top and enter something like “discussion groups”. A search that actually finds everything? There’s a novel idea.