In the Pipes

The Big H

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! 

Girl in Oz, again

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 Johan 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.

Introducing P&ID Property Acquisition

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:

• Line and inline asset
• Line and start asset
• Line and end asset
• Annotated and annotation
• Line and break
• Line and off  page connector
• Line and nozzle
• Pipe line group and pipe line
• Connected off page connectors
• Between a control valve and its actuator

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!

Las Vegas Blues

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.

Out and about

Yep, I know it has been couple weeks since I last posted.  I went all the way to Singapore and back - and a trip like that really eats into my energy.  You might think - as my boss does - that 20 hours on a plane (each way) and I would get a lot of work done, but for some reason that is never the case.  I did read all 731 pages of Dan Simmons' Ilium, which was rather good but would have been better if I had actually read Homer's Illiad. (His Hyperion was better IMHO.)  But I did not get a chance to blog.  I couldn't think of anything to say that didn't involve whining about how long the flight was or marveling at the quality of service offered by Singapore Airlines, even in coach.  I was in Singapore for just a short four day trip.  I did some P&ID training for a customer and also trained some folks from a reseller we have there.

I'm back now, and recovered.  Things are moving quickly on the Plant Team.  We released AutoCAD P&ID 2009 Beta 2 back around February 10th, but we aren't stopping for a breather.   We are, as always, moving ahead with new designs on all product lines.  Building software here goes through several phases:  a research phase when customer and business requirements are defined and understood, a design phase when software specifications are created, and a development phase when the software is coded to the specifications.   My features are all in the development phase right now - it's nice to watch a plan come together! 

I expect to be showing some early betas to "the real world" in the upcoming months.  If you are interested in becoming part of usability studies, definitely let us know!  (I'd be especially interested if you are an Isogen user.)  Usability studies involve meeting with us (either live or virtually) and working though a loose script with beta software.  We observe your efforts and listen to your feedback - this gives us a good idea of what works and what doesn't.  As a designer, I find it unbelievably frustrating to watch these sort of studies, but they certainly do point out the strengths and weaknesses in any design.  Anyway, if you are interested, please let us know by signing up at the Autodesk Usability site.  You can indicate interest in testing any Autodesk product, but for Plant purposes, please pick AutoCAD P&ID or AutoCAD Plant 3D.  Or, if you prefer, you can just email me (ursula.sadiq@autodesk.com)

Next week, I'm off to Las Vegas for One Team Conference (OTC), Autodesk's annual event that brings together thousands of sales employees and channel partners for several days of intensive business planning, networking and skill building.  No, I'm not joining sales - I'm quite happy in design thank you.  I am participating at OTC by providing training on new AutoCAD P&ID features.  That reminds me. . . I need to go install the latest P&ID build.

Free at last

So it's that time of the year when finally we are free to talk about upcoming product features.   We had to wait until after the start of our World Press Day.  Autodesk hosts a press event every year this time to brief the press on the upcoming software releases.  This event always happens right around Valentines Day - guess we are trying to drum up some love?  (Although Valentines Days San Francisco-style involves things like flash mobs having pillow fights, probably not the style of attention that our marketing folks are going for.)   But as soon as the press has been briefed, then we are free to blog about all the cool features.  Nice!

I have to admit that the press is more interested in things like test driving Harmonix Music System's Rock Band (made with Autodesk software!) on the PlayStation3 here than my AutoCAD P&ID demos.  No accounting for taste I guess.  So I'm taking advantage of the lull as a chance to blog.  AutoCAD P&ID 2009 includes some enhancements that I want to highlight in the next few blogs, starting with the data side of things and Export enhancements.

Existing in AutoCAD P&ID 2008, you can look at your component data in Data Manager, and if you want you can export your data to Microsoft Excel.  Whatever data node you are currently viewing in the Data Manager is exported as a sheet in an Excel file.

In AutoCAD P&ID 2009, we've expanded this feature so that you can now export "Active node and all child nodes".  What does this mean?  Well, you can now invoke Export at the Equipment node, for example, and generate an Excel file with a worksheet showing the Equipment node data, but also worksheets showing Pumps, Tanks, Exchangers -- all the child nodes.  In AutoCAD P&ID 2008 you had to export data one node at a time and manually combine them into one Excel file.  Now AutoCAD P&ID 2009, you can do this in one step:

But wait. . .there's more! You can now specify different file formats when you enter the export file name and location.  AutoCAD P&OD 2009 supports export to XLS (the excel 97-2003 format), XLSX (the new Excel 2007 format) or a comma delimited (CSV) format.

Simple productivity enhancements, but they go a long way to make life easier.  In upcoming entries I'll talk more about importing and exporting data with AutoCAD P&ID 2009.  Right now I have to go get some afternoon chocolate before the press eats it all up.

Pipe Specs, Shaan's way

Hey, look at this - Plant is getting popular.  We even have Shaan Hurley thinking Piping Specs these days in his Between the Lines blog.  In case you don't know Shaan, he's the Technical Marketing Manager for Autodesk's Platform Technologies Division which includes AutoCAD.  He has a great blog covering AutoCAD and a whole lot more.

After reading his post, I think we should put him in charge of creating all our sample piping specs.  He does seem to have a thorough understanding of the requierments ;-)

Plant Solutions at Daratech

One of the great parts of my position at Autodesk these days is that I get to attend conferences and interface directly with our client base.  This enables me, among other things, to continue to learn about client issues.  Bringing this information back to the office helps us design better solutions into the software.

I was just in Houston at the Daratech conference last week.   Along with the P&ID team, we had with us Total CAD Systems, the local value added reseller, who are getting into the thick of selling and supporting Plant Software.  We were also showing NavisWorks (now a Autodesk product) as well as integration of P&ID with Vault & Buzzsaw.  Additionally we had our 3D product manager on hand discussing upcoming technology.  I hope to be back to Houston in May for the massive Offshore Technology Conference trade show.  It's another great opportunity to continue discussing Plant software needs with clients.  Plus I've even learned to enjoy Houston across the years - contrary to popular opinion, it is possible to have a good time in Houston!

I'm a bit late in posting this entry because I've been off for the last few days.  I took advantage of Houston's proximity to my former home New Orleans to visit just in time for the Mardi Gras festivities.  If you have never been, I strongly encourage you to make it out some year.  It is an event that has to be experienced to be believed.  I'm now back in the office recovering from the parades, parties, great music, amazing food, and getting my fair share of beads.  Yes, we even fried a turkey - a 14 pound bird @ 3 minutes a pound.  Delicious!

Oh - and Happy Mardi Gras!

P&ID Substitution Grips

I was talking to a client recently who pointed out that some things in P&ID that I find commonplace are new to others.  After all, I've been involved with this software for a few releases, but others may be seeing it for the first time.  So I figured I'd write some entries on some of my favorite bits of functionality.  Today's topic is Substitution Grips.

After you place a component in P&ID (like a valve) and then select it, a special grip that  looks like a downward pointing triangle might appear.  If you hover over this grip, a tool tip displays saying "Substitute with another Component"

  

Next, click on this grip to display a palette of other similar components that you can substitute for the current one.  As you hover over a symbol in the palette, tool tips help you find the one you are looking for.  Simply select any symbol from this contextual palette to substitute it into the drawing.  Shown here, I am substituting a Ball Valve (on the palette) for a Globe Valve (currently in the drawing):

After substituting the globe valve with a ball valve, the drawing would look like this.

 

It's that simple, really.  Instead to erasing one symbol, finding the correct one on the tool palette or menu, and inserting it, you can just click on the Substitution Grip and pick the desired symbol. The system does the rest.          

Mulling new designs

I've been wanting to write about design issues again.   This time not so much on software design, but more on everyday life design.  In particular, rethinking the traditional way we do things.  I've been wanted to post this for a while, but I had some technology issues (read that as - I couldn't find my camera cable).

A ex-coworker of mine (hi Tim!) used to tell this story:

For years, whenever she cooked fish, she would cut it into thirds and then fry it up in the pan. 

After many years, her guy finally asked, "Why do you always cut the fish in thirds before you cook it?" 

"That's how my mother always did it," she replied.

"Well, why did your mother cut it into thirds?  Wouldn't it be better to cook it whole?" 

"You know, I never thought about it.  I'll call Mom and ask."

So she got her mother on the phone, and she brought the question up.  "So Mom, when you cook fish, you always cut it into thirds.  We were wondering why."

"Well, sweetie, my fish pan is kinda small.  I cut the fish into thirds so it would fit."

So Tim would tell the story to illustrate that just because we traditionally do things one way, maybe we should take a step back sometimes and rethink why.  Like do we really need to put the valve takeoff list as a table on the P&ID?  Or do we really need to have that detail on the isometric?  Or whatever.  Perhaps this isn't really a requirement, it's just tradition -- perhaps a tradition based on previous technological limitations that we no longer are constrained by.  And the fish would taste better if you didn't chop it up first.

For Christmas, I bought myself a new watch and a new pair of shoes (among other things).  Both have some interesting non-standard design elements.  First, the shoes.  I really like the look of these shoes.  But wearing them the first time I notice that every hour or so they come untied.  Turns out they have ROUND laces.  Who's bad idea was that?  I'm not the only one who thinks round laces are ridiculous - even back in 1998 writers were lamenting the idea.  You'd figure the shoe manufacturers would have addressed the issue by now, but apparently not.  If you are going to change a traditional design, it need to function AT LEAST as well as the original!

The watch has non-traditional way of displaying the time.  That's 12:56 in the photo.  It isn't particularly BETTER than a standard watch dial, but does have a coolness factor.  And yes it tells time perfectly, as soon as you train yourself on how to read the dial.  I bought it from TOKYOFLASH, which has lots of these cool non-standard-dial watches.  (I think I may have to start a collection.)  This change from the traditional works - it is functional and has a added something that makes it appealing.

Just something to think about.  I try to keep this in mind as I review requirements and create designs.

So it is 2008.  Keeping with tradition, I have resolved to eat better, workout more, enjoy my life more . . . here, this video is pretty much what I have in mind for next year.  (yeah, yeah, I spend way too much time online.)