In the Pipes

Amazing how it grows

One whirlwind trip to Las Vegas and I'm back already.  I didn't even have time to gamble, not even with the $50 slot credit that came with the hotel room.  Although I did manage to enjoy some fine sushi, some good rum & tonics, to lock myself out of my hotel room at 2:30 AM, and to almost miss my flight home. 

I did not attend the first OTC after we released AutoCAD P&ID.  But last year I did attend OTC and our Autodesk Plant reseller day.  Then, Stephanie and I gave an overview of AutoCAD P&ID 2009 to the resellers.  I want to say there were about a dozen of us in the room.

Today we had another plant reseller day, and I am amazed at the turnout.  We had people from Mexico, Japan, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, England -- and of course for over a half dozen U.S. states.  It is very encouraging to see that Plant is catching on in the reseller network.  I rallied everyone into a photo before the Plant 3D Beta demo - too many to fit clearly into one photo! 

By the way, the new Plant 3D Beta 2 will post on Monday March 16th - this one has metric along with imperial units.  Please check out Stella on the MyFeedback site if you are interested in taking a look.

One night in Vegas

I'm off to Las Vegas again for our annual sales conference OTC. That stands for One Team Conference, where our business development, sales and reseller community gets together to see the new products and plan for the upcoming year.  I'm going just for one day to present what is new with AutoCAD P&ID 2010 and to give a Plant 3D preview.

Just briefly, the new items in AutoCAD P&ID 2010 are :

• User Interface Enhancements - particularly the Ribbon
• Restricted access to Project setup - only the people with write access can get into setup
• Project specific tool palettes setup - making the tool palette changes when the project changes 
• Curved Schematic Lines  - for those rare times you need to draw curved pipelines
• Inline Equipment Improvements  - improving behavior when equipment is placed in the middle of existing lines
• End Connections for Inline Instruments - for example, being about to show control valves as flanged
• Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS) Instrumentation Symbols - we're selling in Japan!
• Integrated P&ID and Plant 3D environment

This last one will make more sense when we actually release a Plant 3D . . .stay tuned . . .

Imagining Data

I'm grabbing lunch (well, at this point, finishing lunch) at my desk and mulling over the topic of data visualization.  Recently I mentioned to a friend that I liked maps, and he sent me to this link to a map by Charles Joseph Minard.  This shows the size and location of Napoleon's army and the low temperatures during the disastrous Russian campaign of 1812.

It's more of a graph than a map and amazingly innovative, especially considering it was first published in 1869. 

Then today I came across this interesting data visualization blog.  It shows how artist/educator, Jer Thorp used the open source "processing" engine to visualize New York Times data.  (New York Times has open APIs, who knew?)  Looking at the cool graphs, it is enough to get me back into coding for a spell.  I'm pondering what I want to use as my source data, what story I want to tell, and how much of my weekend I will dedicate to it.  Yes, I know, I'm living the dream.

These data visualization links got me thinking about Worlde, which produces tag clouds that visualize the frequency of word usage.  I loaded in the data that we collected during our recent interviews in Houston and Calgary to see what the tag cloud would look like.  After minimal massaging, the tag cloud came out like this: 

Not surprisingly, Model, File, Project, Drawing and Specs took top billing as data "words".  Surprisingly, Newfoundland got more of a front & center placement than expected.  This clearly needs more research.  Neat, no?