It's my birthday and we took time out from today's strategy session to have cake. Actually, 2 cakes. And Mark our VP even splurged and bought the group an Atari Flashback 2 with 40 Games Preloaded (which we all can pretend was in my honor). Woo hoo! I love birthdays!
I don't feel like writing about software today. I want to write about cars.
It's the middle of summer here in the San Francisco Bay area, and when it gets hot and windless we often get Spare the Air days. On a Spare the Air day like today, officials encourage everyone to drive less by using public transit (or by just staying home). Sometimes they even make all the transit free, but not this time. I opted to go to the San Francisco office - whichI can get to by tram - instead of my usual drive to a different office 40 minutes away. I'm patting myself on my back for being a good citizen and saving air.
This brings me to the next green topic we've been chatting about lately at the office. In the Autodesk parking lot, the Prius Hybrid is very well represented. It gets more and more popular as gas prices continue to rise here. Yeah yeah, I know we Americans are generally spoiled regarding how cheap our gasoline is. Still, we're not used to paying $4.50 per gallon, and it is changing habits. My favorite thing about the Prius is the video screen that can report your car's current energy consumption in real time. Of course a Prius is no Atom. (But then again, what is?)
Yesterday, I was riding to lunch in a coworker's new Prius, and we started chatting about cars. I learned that apparently a modestly priced compressed air powered car is being developed. For about $3 of electricity you can fill it up (with air) and go 125 miles at speeds of 70 miles per hour. It seems too fanciful to be believed, despite the videos and websites hyping it. I have to admit I was skeptic that it would make it to market.
But hey, it turns out that one of our software engineers actually already has one booked in India (although he won't clearly tell me exactly how he managed that). It's a Tata Nano. At $2500 it's the "worlds cheapest car" - that's even cheaper than a Vespa! Clearly, they've moved from concept cars to production vehicles. He does indicate that it isn't the most substantial car, but still. Too cool.
Now I'm using my skepticism to disbelieve the new reports of a water powered car. Seriously, water powered? "Any kind of water will do . . .even tea works." This is going to take some serious convincing before I believe in it.
Hey, I must be becoming a Californian. Buying organic produce, craving green cars, next thing you know I will be trying to detox with a cleansing fast. Go go green !
I'm just back from solstice camping in the central Sierra Nevada mountains, where I survived an encounter with a rattlesnake and 20+ hours of techno music. Two days later I'm pretty much recovered from the weekend, so I figured I'd write a geeky post (unlike all those previous posts). So, lets discuss Custom Data Manager Views.
Out of the box, Data Manager shows a tree view on the left that displays an inventory of everything drawn in that Drawing. The right panel shows details for items in the selected node in the tree.
Alternatively, you can view everything drawn in that Project if you pick the project view from Data Manager's dropdown list
Right, so that plus some reports is what is available "out of the box". But more than a few of you have asked for a different way of organizing the tree view. We've had requests to group the tree view by Area, or by Supplier, or by some other field. So for the 2009 release of AutoCAD P&ID, we added a Custom Data Manager Views feature.
Let's say you wanted to see the tree view by Supplier. First, you need to set up the view. This is done in Project Setup, which you get to by selecting Properties... from the Project node right-click context menu in Project Manager. (Don't ask me why it says Properties when it launches a dialog called Project Setup. Although I think that is partially my fault from the hectic first release days of 2 years ago. Maybe we'll get around to changing that next release.)
In Project Setup, you need to:
The New Level... button brings up a Select Class Property dialog box. Next, you pick the property that defines the top level of your tree. I'm selecting the Supplier property, then pressing OK to close this dialog.
I'm going to put a second level into my tree of ClassName by selecting the New Level... button again, and picking Class Name from the property list. Now my Project Setup looks like this:
It's that easy! Press OK to close Project Setup. Now, in Data Manager, you will see your new view called Supplier List. Selecting this view, entering values for Supplier into grid in the right side of Data Manager, and selecting the Refresh icon will now show your project inventory tree grouped by the Supplier and sub grouped by Class.
Recap: you can use the Data Manager tree to group by any property. Coupled with the ability to add properties to any class, you can get the AutoCAD P&ID 2009 Data Manager to display all sorts of custom data views. And yes, you can export and import these custom views to/from Microsoft Excel just like the out-of-box views.
This is kind of fun . . . I'm "staffing the Plant Solutions booth" at the Autodesk Experience Tour "Virtual Event". You may know that in North America Autodesk puts on an event we call the Autodesk Experience Tour. We visit cities all over North America. At each stop, we host a day with information sessions and booths. This free tour allow attendees to learn more about Autodesk and our software offerings. We realize that there are many people who are not in any of these target cities -- so we decided that we'd try a virtual event.
It's pretty cool. As a visitor you log into a website and see something like this:
I'm not really sure why there is a zeppelin floating by, but still, it looks cool. Once on the site, you can enter the conference hall to hear talks, or the Exhibition Hall to find booths, or the Networking Lounge to chat with or leave messages for whoever else happens to be there. I'm "staffing" the Plant Solutions booth in the Exhibition Hall - that's the red one in the middle top, right next to the black Autodesk University one. I'm here to answer questions and to guide users on how to get more information on Plant Software.
I have to say I was initially skeptical about the turnout. But right this moment as I type there are 1238 people on the site! We've had over 300 at the Plant Solutions booth this morning. I'm thinking (hoping!) we may make this a regular event seeing that it is being well received. By the way, you had to pre-register for this event and get a login, and the event ends today (June 3) at 6PM EST, so it's likely too late to enjoy the virtual experience it firsthand. But keep your eyes open for next time!
Got to go, booth is busy -- I have people to greet and questions to answer!
Ok, so actually AutoCAD P&ID 2009 has been available for a few weeks. I just forgot to announce it on the blog. Hey, a girl can get busy recovering from OTC and catching up on Bay Area Life.
The 2009 release of AutoCAD P&ID first customer ship date was a few weeks back on May 8, 2008. As this release was based on the latest version of AutoCAD, it contains all the new features of AutoCAD 2009. Plus, of course, you get the new P&ID features. I've blogged about a few of these already, including
There are also a number of other key enhanced features:
As always, if you want to learn more by test driving the new version yourself, you can download a trial from the website. Actually, we also updated the screencast, which is a great, interactive way to learn about AutoCAD P&ID 2009. Listening to the screencast also gives you the experience of listening to me babble. Bonus! (And yes, my name is misspelled 22 seconds in. Be happy you aren't in the office here to hear me grousing about that!)
I've been getting comments for a few months that the RSS feed for this blog wasn't working. I finally got around to getting that fixed. At least I think it is fixed. (if you have no idea what RSS is, consider yourself lucky and ignore this post.) Anyway, if you use an RSS reader, you should be able to use the feed of :
http://in-the-pipes.typepad.com/in_the_pipes/index.rdf
or
http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/mYGm
Or, you should be able to click the "Subscribe to this blog's feed" on this page's lower left to guide you through linking. Honestly, I couldn't get the first index.rdf link to work for me, but others have told me it is enabled. I use igoogle as my reader, and it accepted http://in-the-pipes.typepad.com -- maybe igoogle is smart enough to find the rdf part.
And by the way, in case you were wondering, the title of this blog entry is an allusion to what is purportedly a very good book by David Sedaris.
This week - Houston!
I'm in Houston for Offshore Technology Conference; more than 60,000 people are in attendance. That's not a typo - really, 60,000+ people attend this conference. Hotel room are sold out for miles.
Autodesk has a booth here where we are showing software solutions relevant to the offshore community - AutoCAD P&ID, NavisWorks, Inventor, Buzzsaw, and Constructware. One of our partners, CF Design, is also here showing computational fluid dynamics & thermal simulation. I feel my rusty mechanical engineering memory come back to life just watching the CF demos. I used to know about calculating laminar/turbulent flows and convective/conductive/radiative heat transfer. But I'm no longer that cool. I like wandering the floor, checking out the giant equipment and learning new words. That's a photo of me an a large (DN400) ball valve.
Contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to have a good time in Houston. Ok, so it took me a decade to figure out how, but it is possible. After a long day at a trade show, one can take in a baseball game, hit a favorite blues club, get a good meal (crawfish! shrimp! Texas BBQ!), or go to a nightclub to see the Spazmatics. As I under stand it, the Spazmatics always play to a PACKED house. Maybe I can get in some shopping while I'm here.
So really, I'm here to work. I give a few P&ID talks in the booth theater every day. I also work the Plant Solutions pod, demonstrating AutoCAD P&ID 2009 and being evasive about future Plant applications. In case you haven't heard, AutoCAD P&ID 2009 is now out, so I get to demo the latest and greatest.
That's my life - non-stop fun!
So I'm back in Australia again. This makes it my third trip to Australia in 18 months. It's no Amsterdam, but I am finding that I am starting to appreciate this place. I'm learning new words: Stubby. Punter. Wild rocket. I verified that water from the bath drains counter-clockwise. I feel I should apologize to previous bosses about my years of refusing to travel down under. So if anyone sees Rich, tell him I'm sorry!
My hotel room is right on the beach - beautiful to look out at the Pacific when I get down time in the room. It's odd to be looking east over the Pacific and not west like we do from California. This morning there were surfers and dolphins visible from my window, as well a ships in the distance queuing to load up on coal. Although after a while of watching the waves crash I remember that I'm irrationally afraid of whales (too many Jonah stories in my childhood or something), and close the curtains. It is a fun phobia to have, particularly that year or two I worked offshore oil rigs.
Anyway, this time I'm here to teach a seminar to first year engineering students at University of Newcastle. I am amazed at how fast these students pick up software. Rarely have a had a class that everyone kept up as I introduced entirely new software concepts - but this group of 40 stay right with me, and sometimes get rather a bit ahead. They remind me of some annoying Whitney Houston song or something. It certainly is a different experience for me to talk to university students - they are so quick with the technology, but clearly have no idea what I mean when I start using industry terms like loop or spec or pig. (I did spend some time defining the pig for the class.)
It's a 12 hour course on P&ID, and I took the liberty of expanding the scope to cover the broader topic of Plant design - discussing the FEED stage, PDFs, P&IDs, 3D detailed design, Orthos & Isos, procurement, fabrication and construction. When I studied engineering we never had much of the "real world" sort of overview. I'm hoping at least some of it sinks in. This is is the first University where we present Autodesk Plant software, although we do have intentions to get it into other institutions. If you happen to know of others that may be interesting in such a session, please let me know.
It's Friday in April at Autodesk, and we just had one of our division parties - Champagne (well actually Cava) and chocolate covered berries. I love my job! Lynn Allen was here, but I didn't get a chance to talk with her. I was busy talking to designers about design stuff, and deciding if I could/should have another glass of Champagne before blogging. . .
Anyhooo - I'm been wanting to introduce another one of the new features in AutoCAD P&ID 2009 for some time now. I've been bogged down in a frantic work stretch, Easter and other distractions, but things are quiet this afternoon (if one can ignore the Xbox 360 gaming going on down the hall). A perfect time to write!
In P&ID 2009 we introduce a feature we call Property Acquisition. In previous versions of P&ID, when you insert a valve in a pipe line, the valve inherited that line's size and spec. Or if you attached a pipe line to a nozzle, the nozzle will acquire that line's size. If you wanted to, you could override the acquired size, but normally you wanted the size/specs to say in sync. This inheritance behavior was hard coded - and while it made sense, it wasn't clearly indicated in the dialogs. You had no visual clue telling you what was being acquired and what wasn't.
Additionally, we received a few customer queries on if other properties could also get this inheritance behavior. Thus, in AutoCAD P&ID 2009, the "Property Acquisition" feature was developed.
Now in P&ID 2009, you can see immediately what data properties are acquired. For example, if you look at the Properties palette for an inline valve, you will see a new lightning bolt icon on the size and spec properties. (I used to call this the SHAZAM marker, but people told me I was dating myself.) And you find that this property is read only. If you click on the property in order to change the value, you get a tooltip that informs you that this property is in acquire mode. At this point you get the chance to change from acquire mode to override mode. If you change to override mode, you can key in a new value. In override mode, the icon changes to from the lightning bolt to a user icon. (Similar iconic indications are displayed in data manager.)
For new properties, you can use project setup to set acquisition behavior. You can set up property acquisition rules when the following component relationships exist:
The P&ID 2008 help topic "Set Up Property Acquisition" has a good explanation on how to setup property propagation for your own project properties. Basically you set the property as type to Acquisition, then select the source value.
Pretty neat. Wish I could take credit for this design, but I can't, as it came out of our team in Singapore. You go guys!
So I just got back from a brief three days in Las Vegas. I'm finally figuring out how to enjoy that town - for the first time I was considering rescheduling my flight to stay longer. Usually at the end of a Vegas conference I'm worn out and more than ready to leave. Not so this time. This time I'm a bit sad that it is all over. I was staying at THEhotel, which had a cafe called THEcafe and a lounge called THElounge. And stickers on the toilet paper rolls in the room that said THE TP. THEVegas is an odd town.
The OTC conference was great - people were there from all over - I'm a bit of an outsider for this event as it is geared to the business development and sales side of Autodesk's business. (I was there to give some technical training.) Sales is just a different world than what I see most days working inside the Autodesk tower walls. I know I'm repeating myself from previous posts, but I find it very interesting to get the perspective from the field.
The conference started with an opening session where Carl Bass talked about Autodesk as a company. (Actually it started with a mini-performance from the Blue Man Group. Once the crowd was hyped up, then Carl took the stage.) Carl discussed world trends such as globalization, worldwide development of new infrastructure, increasing sensitivity to environmental impact, and the increasing ubiquity of digital data. These trends impact what & how our customers design, sparking more and more interest in digital prototyping tools. (Yes I took notes.) Obviously the increasing demands for infrastructure leads to significant opportunity in for those of us in Plant. Carl also pointed out some cool work being done by Autodesk clients - work like as creating iconic Olympic structures in Beijing or supporting the Easter island mapping project.
Our Plant industry sessions included interesting things such as integrating external databases with P&ID, preview of our 3D Piping application, and using Navisworks to walk through a Plant model. Navisworks - what a cool acquisition; I look forward to taking advantage of it in the future. And then the training session was lively and well received.
That's it for now. Oh, and happy Pi day 2008.
