In the Pipes

AutoCAD P&ID 2009 is here !

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

• P&ID Property Acquisition, and
• Export to Excel Enhancements. 

There are also a number of other key enhanced features:

• Validation:  This is the ability to check the project drawings for common errors like pipelines that end in space or pieces of equipment that aren't piped up.
• Data import from Excel enhancements:  This is minor but cool. During the import process, AutoCAD P&ID displays revision clouds on the graphics of the components with pending updates.
• Save as AutoCAD feature:  You can create a "dumb" pure AutoCAD version of any P&ID.  Visually it will be identical, but all the graphics will be pure AutoCAD blocks and linework. 
• Custom Data Manager Views:  You can redefine the navigation tree in Data Manager to show data grouped by any property.  If this last sentence doesn't make sense, stay tuned.  It'll be the focus of my next blog entry.
• DIN content and Metric PIP content:  Added to the PIP Imperial, ISA and ISO content, we now also ship DIN and PIP Metric standard template projects.
• A host of miscellaneous minor fixes that we call "fit and finish".  These go into improving every release.

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!)

Me blog pretty some day

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. 

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!