WorldCAD Access

The Tired Tourist (Day Tripping in Oberhausen)

My host, Dietmar Rudolph, noted it the irony of me staying three nights in his home town of Essen, yet I am seeing none of it, 'cepting his quiet street. 

Our second day we headed to Oberhausen, once the center of Germany's massive steel industry, especially the name Krupp. Steel was located here in in the Ruhr Valley for the large underground deposits of coal (energy) and the Ruhr and Rhine rivers (transportation). The hills ("mountains," in local parlance) that dot the region are artificial: they are the now-green dumping grounds of rock separated from the mined coal.

The site of one former steel mill has been turned into a mini-Disneyland-like experience. The land now hosts Europe's largest shopping mall, a Six Flags-like amusement park, outdoor adventure park, Germany's largest aquarium, a canal lined with restaurants, and most unusually, a converted natural gas storage tank.

Based on my in-situ observations of the densely crowded shopping mall, I can confidently report that there is no recession.

The massive food court of the Centro shopping mall, named Coca Cola Oasis.

The storage tank is now an exhibition hall and viewpoint. Taking the elevator to its roof affords a wonderful view of the Ruhr Valley.

View of the green Ruhr Valley.

Inside the storage tank, an exhibit of the solar system was current. It featured the largest scale model of the moon ever created, some 25m [80 ft] in diameter, and a bright glowing sun in the center.

The sun shines inside the former natural gas storage tank.

While my daughter haunted the shopping mall, the other three of us took in a mammoth model railway layout. It reproduces the Oberheim area as it was in the 1960s. Employees were determined to carry on, despite the impending bankruptcy; they wore T-shirts that sported the defiant slogan, "Wir machen weiter; jetz erst recht!" (We carry on).

Detail view of the model railway layout during an evening phase.

Germans love their ice cream ("Eis"), and we ended our Centro day with a stop at an Eis specialty shop. Each concoction is roughly e5 ($7). 

Elaborate ice cream is served in glass cups over a foot tall.

On the way back to Essen, we stopped at the planned community of Margarethenhoehe, created by Krupp for his employees and named after his wife ("Margarethen heights"). He provided employees with nice homes, garden areas (unusual for the workers at the time), hospital, education, and subsidized grocery stores. And they rewarded him with loyalty.

Town houses in the idyllic community of Margarethenhoehe.

After seven days of hardcore touristing and conference attending, my daughter and I were glad to have a more leisurely day.

Resting in Dietmar's quiet backyard.

Worn out, yet thrilled with all we accomplished, we returned home to Canada the following day.

The Artsy Tourist (Day Tripping in Koln)

OK, so now we're in Germany, at the home of Dietmar Rudolph, who runs CR/LF Consulting. He is best known in the CAD world for his definitive book on mastering AutoCAD's object format. These days he fine-tunes 30MB of LISP code that automatically designs all aspects of elevators -- including unfolded sheetmetal plans. 

He and his wife Susanne drove us to Koln ("Cologne" for those who can't pronounce the umlaut) and home of the world's first cologne, No. 4711. The perfume is named after the house number in which it was first made.

The ad for "No. 4711 Genuine Cologne Water" dominates the inside of Koln Hbf (main railroad station).

We parked on the Messe (convention center) side of the Rhine River, and then walked across the railway bridge -- perhaps one of the busiest in the world. There seemed to be a train crossing (or waiting to cross) every 30-60 seconds. Dietmar told me that when the super high speed rail line was built from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, German Railways (Die Bahn) skipped the Koln station because they feared the bridge's bottleneck would slow operations. So high-speed Koln-bound passengers get off across the river, and then take a feeder train into town.

Twin spires of the Koln cathedral and the busy railway bridge across the Rhine River.

Walking along the bridge, we came across a padlock attached to the wiremesh fencing. And then a thousand more. Lovers engrave their names on them, and then attach them to the fence. Some use feltpens, perhaps wisely.

A positive symbol in today's divorce-oriented world.

Koln is like Washington DC in that the museums and other interesting sites are all packed into a small, walkable area. There is the famous twin-spire cathedral, next to classic railway station, next to the tent for the Spamalot musical. 

People socializing on the steps between the cathedral and the railroad station.

We first hit up the museum of modern art, of which about half was interesting. My daughter ws delighted that it housed some of Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon-style art, her favorite. There was also lots of Picasos, one by Dali, and other well known modernists.

It's in an art museum, so it must be art.

After lunch on the plaza, we headed inside the cathedral and down into the catacombs. The other three climbed the 509 steps to the top of the spire; I stayed below fearing for my knees. 

Lit candles in the 850-year-old cathedral (work began in the mid-1100s).

After wandering along the Rhine, we took in the Chocolate Museum, sponsored by Lindt. Part of it is a chocolate factory. We learned that hollow chocolate is made by partially filling clear plastic molds, and then attaching them to machines that rotate the mold. As the chocolate dries, the centrifugal force evenly distributes the chocolate. If
a second color is needed, white chocolate is first handpainted into the mold.

Every museum needs a Museum Store; this one sells only chocolate.

Oh, and those Lindt ball chocolates get their distinctive rough texture by passing under a moving wire meshes that roughen the still-soft chocolate exterior. 

On our way back to the parked car, we watched urban rock climbers.

She made it to the top.

The Mad Tourist (Day Tripping in Amsterdam)

On our last day in Holland, we needed to do one more thing: visit the Rijksmuseum where the Rembrant paintings hang, such as the famous Night Watch. We checked out of the hotel, left the bags in the hotel storage, and then listened to the desk clerk's horrified reaction to our plan.

"No! You should not go. It is the Queen's birthday, it will be so crowded that you will not be able to do anything!" Despite her misgivings, we figured we'd find out for ourselves. 

At the Leiden train station, we got two round trip tickets, and were pleased that they included free rides on the Amsterdam bus and tram systems. Getting on the train, it was just 1/3 full -- odd, I thought, since there were supposed to be lots of people going to Amsterdam.

Stepping out of the station, we saw the crowds. And no tram or bus system. Amsterdam shuts down major roads, turns them into pedestrian malls, and color codes them. So, no free tram rides for us; but the Blue pedestrian route went to the Rijksmuseum. (And we got there in just 25 minutes of walking.) We felt sorry for the tourists who unwittingly schedule to leave or arrive that day -- lugging their suitcases for blocks on end through the crowds. Even stewardesses were affected.

With so many shops closed, I was worried the Rijksmuseum might be closed as well, but it was not. In fact, there was no line-up to get in. We went through the metal detector and got the tix. I was last here 3.5 years ago, and was pleased that reconstruction of the museum was still uncompleted: this meant that all the important works were condensed into a small 2-storey section that we could get through in 1 hour. An unfortunate change was that I could no longer take pictures.

Upon leaving the museum, we were astounded by the crowds. The Netherland Railways was discharging vast hoards of revelers, one overcrowded train every 2-4 minutes. All wearing something orange or queeny; mostly teens and 20-year-olds; even the railway schedules were printed on orange paper for the day.

We wandered over to the nearby park to take in the free concert by Dutch pop musicians we had never heard of. 

On our way back to the railway station, it was a real effort to walk against the tide. 

At one canal, we watched the parade of boats.

Some even had djs on board, running their sound equipment from portable gas generators. Some boats were overcrowded and low in the water.

And this boat annoyingly enough lit up orange smoke just as it came to the bridge from which we were watching.

Back in Leiden, we headed downtown, and it too was crowded. As we took the hotel shuttle bus back to the hotel, the driver told us of the attempted assassination attempt on the queen.

Well, this day is no longer about the queen, anyhow. It's about wearing orange and drinking beer. Perhaps it should be renamed Festival Heineken.

The 20-Minute Tourist (Day Tripping in Belgium)

Following the ODA conference, we had a spare day, so we decided to make a day trip into Belgium. In Europe you can do that sort of thing. My daughter was thrilled, reminding me how cool it was when we made that left turn on Hwy 16 and visited Alaska for an hour or two (Steward-Hyder) a few years ago.

We planned to go to Brouge (since I'd already been to Gent) but inexplicably the ticket agent made out our ticket for Gent -- perhaps that was better, since we didn't need to spend time figuring out where the tourist sites are.

First stop in Belgium: Antwerp, the diamond capital of Europe. We had 25 minutes between trains, so we spent 20 minutes speed walking around the streets near the train station. 

The Antwerp train station is remarkable: four levels, three of which carry trains. The photo above is the lowest level, with its spooky blue lighting.

Stepping outside the station, you are faced will wall-to-wall diamond stores. 

Gent also has canals, like Holland. 

View of the city of Gent (Ghent) from the top of the castle.

My daughter in the castle's horse stable.

A store along the river in Gent.

A youngster tentatively tries the art of spray painting in Gent's graffiti alley.

One of the modern buildings in Brussels.

On the way back to Holland, we went via Brussels, and again did the 20-minute power walk around the city blocks nearest to the train station.

Time-wise, this trip was ineffective: 10 hours traveling by train to spend 4 hours in Gent. But it was worth it.

Photos from The Netherlands - 2

Arnold van der Wiede's wife organized two days of tours for "the wives" of attendees. My daughter went along, and here are some of her 187 photos of the Keukenhof gardens near Leiden, where our conference is taking place. The 80 acres of flowers are pretty overwhelming, she reports.

My daughter during a moment when it wasn't raining. As Randal Newton tweeted, "In Amsterdam the rain falls mainly on the tourists."

Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 2.5

During the break, CADMagazine editor Rob Sman and I were commenting on the lack of MCAD apps in the IntelliCAD-ODA orb. After the break, we were corrected by the next presentations.

Mr Sman told me that his magazine is able to survive in print form, because his advertisers prefer the longivity of ads in print publications -- unlike Web banners that appear and disappear. The magazine is distributed in Holland only.

Ledas

Wow! I just loved the presentation by Dmitry Ushakov of Ledas describing his company's variational direct modeler. You can read more about it from www.Ledas.com/group/white_papers

IMSI/design

We tend to think of IMSI selling TurboCAD for cheap, but they have being doing a lot of work behind the scenes to support many file formats and workflows. Maurtiz Botha showed us his company's constraint technology. For example, TurboCAD has an auto-constrain mode that works like this: you draw a rectangle; TurboCAD explodes it, and then adds constraints logically that keep it as a rectangle. (Keep snap off when drawing with constraints, he recommenced.) 

"This is the way AutoCAD will develop in the next several years," he predicted, as he showed how TurboCAD uses 2D parametrics to drive 3D models, and then generate sections for use as detail drawings. (AutoCAD has had some of this, but does it through the command-line -- much more painful than TurboCAD's drag'n drop of sectioned 2D views that are automatically scaled, complete with fragmented, differently-scaled, fully-associative details.)

The key for non-CAD users, he said, is to export TurboCAD drawings in SVG [scaleabgle vector graphics] format in Adobe Illustrator (on the Mac). Then the non-CAD user can pretty-up the drawing. Thus, he showed the workflow from rough sketch, parameterized made into 3D in TurboCAD, extracted as 2D views, and then exported to an Adobe product.

He showed another workflow of starting in SketchUp, imported into TurboCAD -- including layers, textures, SketchUp-generated views (imported as paper space), and SketchUp components (converted to blocks). He generated 2D and 3D sections of the imported model, and then exported as SVG.

Of interest: TurboCAD's ability to selectively expose parameters of blocks (symbols). For instance, you can toggle the bend feature of a sheet metal part. Or toggle exploded view of an office desk.

Additional Coverage

For more on the ODA conference, check out Deelip Menezes' blog at ODA World Conference - Day 1 - Development Status.

Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 2

Techsoft 3D, the HOOPS people, are showing us the kinds of advanced visualizations that they make possible. Right now they are demo'ing a 3D section plane -- think of the three-sided corner of the room kind of shape, but transparent -- cutting through a 3D model. You see a rectangular cutout.

Randall Newton is asking why they created the 3D Adobe integration -- was it market-driven? They think 3D PDF will become more important in the years to time, and so they are anticipating demand in the future. I thought I got a hint that this may be driven by Adobe.

Well, something that's got to be fixed the 3D PDF display speed. The demo jock apologized, "It's Acrobat, not ours"  as the 3D model failed to rotate inside Acrobat Pro. It's that sluggishness that has caused me to ignore 3D PDF.

ADTdirect

Vadim Kosarev of the ODA is demoing the architectural extension to the the ODA's DWG "platform", called ADTdirect. This lets you write custom architectural applications -- not new, something that's been around for quite a few years, but relatively unknown. The ODA wants to change that lack of awareness.

The demo architectural app shows the capabilities of ADTdirect. Some of the features we are seeing include:

• 3D grips (eg, make walls longer, wider, and taller)
• self-cleaning walls; slabs (floors); single- and double-angle roofs; doors and windows that snap intelligently into walls
• interactive 3D rotation
• window styles change all windows instantly
• all types of stairs, with grip editing. If railing entities are attached to stairs, they react as stair parameters are changed.

Facet Modeler

The ODA's facet modeller uses b-rep [boundary representation] technology (AECGe class name). It is currently used by the ODA's architectural and civil engineering apps, but could be used elsewhere. It supports primitives, Booleans, revolution, section, cut with extrusion, and so on.

- - -

(I just noticed that the government of Portugal is running tourism ads on this Weblog. I am guessing that Google AdSense is reacting to my references to Holland.)

Photos from The Netherlands

The ODA conference has 95 member attendees with 4 media and 25 employees of the ODA. There's representatives here from Oracle, Intergraph, AVEVA, Nemetschek, Spatial, and TechSOFT 3D.

Neil Paterson addresses the 125 attendees.

The lovely seaside town of Hoorn, north of Amsterdam. When leaving the train station, turn right (going past the bus stop), and then head a few blocks to the seaside -- there are no signs. On our return from Hoorn, the Netherlands Railway system backed up due to a suicide on the tracks. 

The waterfront at Hoorn, The Netherlands.

On Sundays, the Dutch rail system offers a country-wide first-class travel pass for a mere e20 (about $26). First-class sections, however, barely differ in quality from second-class -- except for being uncrowded.

Double-decker trains run every 5-20 minutes between stations.

The tulips are currently and bloom, and here are some of the fields seen from our train.

 Tulips were developed in Turkey.

Your editor enjoys "first class" travel on Netherland Railways.

Open Design Alliance Conference - Day 1

Okay, so here we are in Leiden, The Netherlands for the ODA's first annual conference. I've got Randall Newton typing at high speed on his Mac to the left of me, and Deelip Menezes across the aisle in the hotel conference room.

We're listening to ODA CTO Niel Peterson outlinning all of the software the ODA produces, along with their capabilities. This is no longer *just* the DWGdirect people. For instance, allit takes to add ACIS to your CAD software is to get a license from Spatial; the ODA has done all the work getting its libraries working with ACIS solids modeling -- including creation, rendering, and editing 3D solid models.

But not just ACIS. They also handle rendering of Parasolid data in DGN files and have a lightweight 3D facet modeler.

Mr Peterson's history is pretty interesting, as he is candid on the ODA's triumph's and disappointments -- like the member who last week finally updated from 6-year-old DWG code to the latest code

The Platform

To begin the first day of this 3-day conference, ODA president Arnold van der Weide announced that the Open Design Alliance will no longer talk about "libraries." From now on, the term is "the platform."

Too grandious? Not when you sit through Mr Peterson's presentation and all the software available from the ODA. Next format to be supported: PDF.

The organization has 2,000 members, and this quarter grew 10% over a year ago.

(I'll have more in next week's upFront.eZine.)

Q&A

Mr Menezes asked where the ODA sees itself in 5 years time. 

Answer: The ODA hopes for 10% annual growth. It also hopes that Autodesk stops seeing ODA as a threat, but instead as a partner -- especially since the ODA has its DWG platform working in the Mac.

I asked what was meant by the ODA's aim: "To develop a platform for technical graphic applications," because "technical software is pretty broad, and could include diagramming software like Visio-- "and PhotoShop," added Mr Newton.

Answer: "Yes." The ODA feels it can do much more than just CAD software, and that a Visio-like program is possible.

Commentary

We'll see. I recall when Visio decided they were going to be dominant in technical graphics, and then crashed'n burned in its first attempt to go beyond diagramming -- recall IntelliCAD? Even Autodesk had a similar plan in the mid-1990s, branching out to PowerPoint-like software, Chaos software, clip art, etc, all handled by the now-defunct Autodesk Retail Products division in Bothell Washington.

OTOH, those missteps resulted in significant impacts on the CAD industry. Out of Visio's "mistake" in buying IntelliCAD came the ODA and ITC (IntelliCAD Techncial Consortium).

Time for lunch; talk to you later.

PS: Next year's conference will be in Florida.

(Disclosure: The ODA provided me with transportation, accomodation, some meals, and a plaque in recognition of upFront.eZine's 600th issue.)

Countdown to Leiden - T Minus 0 Days

I fly so much that I find a phobia spreading over me in the days leading up to departure. The phobia is a feel of dread, because I've experienced so many screwups over the years. It's that racing through airport hallways -- or worse, stuck in an excruciatingly slow security lineup -- as I undertake another desperate and ultimately failed attempt to catch a connection: that wears me down the most.

I love traveling, especially overseas; once I am sitting in the airport departure lounge, the phobia leaves me.

Last night, 24 hours before departure, I began struggling with Air Canada's online check-in system. I was reminded of the words of Paul who warned against making definite plans for the future, such as, "We will go to such and such a city next week." In his case, he figured that God might have other plans before then; in my case, it was Air Canada's computer system.

Promptly at 5:20pm, I attempted to check-in through aircanada.com. It didn't work. Over the next 14 hours, I tried every so often. The part that puzzled me was that I could get part way through the check-in process before being kicked off with the uninformative "We are sorry..." message. Each time, it occurred at a different stage.

Since the process broke down at random places, I began to wonder if the problem was with Air Canada's computer, rather than something going wrong at my end.

This morning I finally got through all the way. The flight to London looks absolute jammed full -- ugh. London to Fankfurt looks quite empty -- no wonder BMI canceled its flight on us, forcing us to route through Frankfurt to get to Amsterdam.

I changed a set of seats so that my daughter and I sit nearer each other. (Our reservations are not linked, because she is flying on my United points). I printed off my boarding passes. I printed off hers.

Wait a minute! For the 3-legged trip, I only have two passes, while she has all three. I recheck my reservation online, and Air Canada has me down for only two legs. Gulp.

I called Air Canada's reservation line. The agent noted that other customers had also been calling to complain of the online check-in being flaky. He told me that their computer system has a limited number of requests it can handle, and so might be overloaded. Welcome to 2009.

He confirmed that I was in the system for all three legs, but that I'd have to get the third boarding pass at the airport. I asked if he could assign seating for the third leg, but he could not see our trip's two Lufthansa legs on his system -- odd, since I was able to see them through their Web site.

Eight hours to go before the phobia leaves me.