WorldCAD Access

How Editors Record Press Events

There were eight editors at the Oce press event, and this is the hardware they used for taking notes:

• 5 - notepads (you know, pen and paper).
• 1 - Macintosh notebook computer.
• 2 - Asus Eee mini-notebook computers (Linux).

Out of date? Sign of the times? Rage against the Microsoft monopoly? Personal preference based on experience?

This was the first trip on which I relied on the popular Linux-based mini-notebook. It worked well, connecting to the hotel's wired Internet and the wireless Internet available near the Oce office. Email, Web access, note taking, article writing, PDF viewing, Picassa photo processing, ebook sending, movie watching -- everything I need to do on business trips worked on the diminutive machine. Even viewing the PowerPoints provided by Oce was flawless with the OpenOffice software. My fingers quickly adjusted to the small keyboard.

(Only drawback: the spare battery I ordered from Hong Kong arrived the day after I returned from this trip to Chicago, and so I was limited to working just two hours during my four-hour flight. The lack of a CD/DVD drive posed no problem on this trip, since I had ripped movies to a 16GB USB key.)

I asked the other Asus user why he got one: the small size and weight were crucial to him. He bought the cheapest 2G model ($300 or less), because he figures these devices will just keep improving, and then he'll get a better one.

Above: Two Asus Eee mini-notebooks at one press event.

My next trip is to the SolidWorks event in Barcelona in mid-September, and there will be large contingent of editors and bloggers. I know there'll be more Mac users in attendence; it'll be interesting to see what other computers will be hauled along for the long trip. 

One other significant change over the years: PalmPilots and their Windows equivalents are no longer in use.

OCE ColorWave Media Event

OCE flew in eight editors to their North American head office in Chicago to show off their new ColorWave printer with its CrystalPoint toner-pearls. Most of the other editors are experts on the printing business, so jokes like "They still run some 650s" abound to appreciative chuckles.

Above: The OCE Corporate Solution Studio in Chicago.

OCE developed the pearls to better compete with HP, which has a tonne of patents protecting its printing business.

The pearls are blueberry-size waxy spheres that are melted at 300F then squirted at paper.

Above: The CrystalPoint toner-pearls are gravity-fed with an auger inside the cartridge.

The exciting part: anything from CAD wireframes to photographs can be printed on the same plain paper, and there is no waiting for drying.

Above: Randall Newton examines ColorWave output closely.

The ColorWave printer is $60,000 - $70,000, but can be leased for $2,249 a month. The toner cartridges are $400 each.

You can read full coverage of this event in upFront.eZine issue #569.

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[Disclosure: Oce provided airfare, ground transportation, hotel, meals, and some corporate gifts to all attendees.]

Randall Reporting: Google Basecamp

Randall Newton is live blogging his experiences attending Google's Basecamp for SketchUp users. Google artificially limited attendence to 300, so Randall's one of the lucky ones. Apparently 45,000 wanted to attend -- a problem in logistics the organizers of Autodesk U, SolidWorks W, and Bentley E would love to have.

Entries are listed here: aecnews.com/news/category/26.aspx.

15% Fewer Journalists at BE 2009?

Bentley Systems this week flew in 50-70 journalists (the estimates vary) to Baltimore for the annual BE user conference to hear CEO Greg Bentley's wish that his company reduce its so-called "carbon footprint" by 15% next year. As All Points Blog's Joe Francica reports, "starting with reducing the amount of travel his company undertakes."

CAD journalists: look at six of your compatriots. One of you will not be there next year.

In other news, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass was confirmed as a no-show by journalists in attendance. AECnews.com's Randall Newton reports that his copy of the press agenda listed "Bentley Corporate Press Conference. Presenter: Greg Bentley and possibly Carl Bass (live feed)."

It appears that the A-B collaboration agreement was not ready to be publicized, Mr Newton figures. It would follow agreements Autodesk struck last year with PTC, Siemens PLM, and other competitors.

Gnome On Mt St Helens Webcam

The Mount St Helens Webcam is sometimes host to monster-size bugs that land on its lens. Or view-destroying snow drifts.

Today, a gnome made it up to the Webcam, and posted a message. (I had to process the image a fair amount to read the message.)

("I will get the show?")

COFES 2008 - Day 3

COFES 2008 is over. I missed filing my report of the last day due to cumulative hangovers from previous nights. Then I was in Atlanta for a business meeting, and finally I found myself back in India. I am still struggling to find my coordinates in space and time.

Day 3 Keynotes

Anyway, the third day of COFES went somewhat like this. Two keynote speeches followed morning breakfast. Mills Davis is founder and managing director of Project 10x, a research and consultancy company specializing in next wave semantic technologies and solutions. He spoke about innovation and the Web. But what began as an interesting talk ended up being a mind boggling, confusing, and irritating experience for me. I am not referring to the content of his speech, but rather to the way it was presented. Take a look at these images:

His presentation ended up being a presentation on how not to make a presentation.

The text was so small and the images were so minute that Mills, on more than one occasion, found himself walking up to the big screen to get a closer look at that he was talking about.

The second keynote speech was by Terry Swack, a “serial entrepreneur”, and specializes in creating environmental startu. Clean Culture is her third. Basically, she let us know, in no uncertain terms, how we are going ahead all guns blazing and screwing our planet. Most of what she said is covered at www.storyofstuff.com, which I strongly recommend that you visit; watch the video.

Something New from Scott Harris

Thereafter, there were a series of discussions and roundtables in and about the hotel. I had a very long poolside discussion with Scott Harris, a co-founder of SolidWorks [and Cosmic Blobs]. I was surprised to learn that he regularly followed my blog at www.deelip.com. One topic led to another; after a half-hour I realized that I was having a wild and animated argument with the co-founder of SolidWorks. I stopped and said, “Scott, I can’t believe that I have said all the things I have.” And he calmly replied, “This is precisely the reason why I come to COFES. Such discussions and arguments can happen only in an environment like this. Here is where people tell me things they normally wouldn’t have.”

Truly, COFES is an informal event like no other. You can literally walk up to someone, whoever he may be, introduce yourself and start talking as though you were old pals. I did this over and over again with so many people. I am not sure whether it was my badgering, but eventually Scott went on to disclose more than he should have. He then gagged me from blogging it. But I can say one thing: Scott Harris is going to be in the news pretty soon. And for the right reasons.

Mike Riddle

I lunched with Mike Riddle, a guy who needs no introduction. So I will not give one. I asked him why he stopped blogging. Apparently a company decided to sue him over what he said on his blog and that made him stop. Fortunately, he intends to fix that and so we may be hearing from him in the future. After lunch, he showed a couple of us his "new stuff" that he was "persuaded" not to show in his presentation the earlier day. It’s unfortunate that things are a bit messy here, and mess is something I don’t enjoy analyzing.



After lunch I was busy moving my things to another hotel and could not attend the series of discussions and roundtables. I returned in time for the final reception and dinner, which ended with the CAD society awards ceremony. No prizes for locating Rachael Dalton-Taggart in the picture below.



COFES 2009 will be held April 16-19, 2009 at the Scottsdale Plaza; I hope to be there.

Joel On Boston

Boston is one of my favorite cities. Joel On Software is planning a programmer's conference for September, and describes the city:

Boston is absolutely beautiful in September. The weather is usually perfect. You can go kayaking on the Charles [River] or take the Duck Tour(*) if you're unambitious. Over 250,000 college students have just arrived, full of completely unjustifiable hope and optimism. The summer tourist crowd has mostly gone home so you can get into museums and historical sites. There are plenty of coffee shops that aren't NASDAQ-listed.

Unfortunately, last time I was in Boston, it was middle of July and weather-dreadful. With daughter in tow, we endured umbrella-less downpours resulting from a passing tropical storm. Yuck!

(*) Duck Tours uses my photo of Newbury Street on their Web site's interactive tour.

COFES 2008 - Day 2

Report by Deelip Menezes:

The second day of COFES 2008 began with the keynote speech by Karl Ulrich, a CIBC professor from Wharton. He spoke about his upcoming book, Innovation Tournaments: Creating, Selecting and Developing Exceptional Opportunities. Basically he described an approach to pick the best idea for a business venture from a list of ideas.

There were some enlightening aspects, but it seemed to me that everything else was more or less simple common sense -- with the addition of a litany of charts, graphs, diagrams, and statistical analysis jargon. I always have a problem with overdoses of charts and graphs, and so maybe that’s what turned me off.

Digital Prototyping

After the keynote, I attended the Autodesk technology suite briefing. A technology suite is basically a hotel room where a sponsor gets to present a few ideas to as many people who can fit into that room. The Autodesk suite was pretty much sold out.

Buzz Kross, vp of Autodesk’s Manufacturing Division, explained his vision for digital prototyping. I have heard about digital prototyping for a while now, and was interested in hearing it from the horse’s mouth and, if possible, question the horse as well.

Buzz mentioned a few things about Autodesk first, calling it the largest CAD company that spends $150 million annually on R&D. (I wondered, with a budget like that, how come AutoCAD 2009 isn’t very different from AutoCAD 2000. When was the last time a concept as radical as layers or blocks was added to AutoCAD? I hope they are not spending all that money to make fancy things like non-rectangular viewports and pretty interfaces.) Over the next ten years or so Autodesk will acquire companies that have technologies that will aid in giving Inventor the capabilities of digital prototyping.

So what exactly is digital prototyping? From what I understand, it's solid modeling + other features that validate, improve, test, etc. the solid model. A simple example would be a finite element analysis module what works inside of Inventor. Which begs the question, how is this different from what is being done now in other CAD systems?

When Buzz stated that digital prototyping would "completely replace" physical prototyping, I had to make my presence felt. I pointed out that a company designing a product such as a mobile phone is not going to rely on digital prototypes alone. Someone would need to actually hold a physical prototype in his hand and put it to his ear to get the"feel" of the product that they are going to spend millions on. You simply cannot "feel" a digital prototype, however intelligent and sophisticated it may be. Buzz admitted that he had no answer as to how a person would "feel" a digital prototype, but still maintained his position that physical prototyping would eventually be done away with. Well, if Buzz turns out right, it means that the rapid prototyping industry (and maybe a few others) are going to go up in smoke. Interesting.

In response to my question about varied user interfaces between their products, Buzz mentioned that Autodesk was working on something they are calling "Airmax" -- that’s AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit and Max. No, it’s not all of them wrapped into one (what an organized mess that would be!). It is something to do with giving each program a unified user interface. It looks like some of this is already in AutoCAD 2009, for I doubt they spent all that time and money on AutoCAD 2009's ribbon interface, only to drop it for something else soon. And as I type this, I wonder why Maya isn’t part of Airmax?

Maieutic Parataxis

Later in the day, there was a program called "Maieutic Parataxis." (Maieutic means the midwifery of knowledge; parataxis means the juxtaposition of ideas without connection or conjunction.) I am quite positive that the person who came up with this -- must be either Joel Orr or Brad Holtz -- must have been high on something. As it turns out, Maieutic Parataxis was several groups giving rapidfire five-minute presentations on products, services, startups, and ideas that they were working on.

One of them was Mike Riddle, and I was disappointed that he did not show his SmartNotes or Thinker products like he hoped he would in an interview with Ralph Grabowski in upFront.eZine. The "oohs" and "aahs" went to the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies and their Videotrace technology. Maieutic Parataxis indeed!

Finally, all the COFES attendees were filed into buses and taken to the Arizona desert for Evening under the Stars, a western cookout among the cacti and large telescopes to gaze at the stars.


Tomorrow is the last day. I do not see another Maieutic Parataxis in the schedule for tomorrow. And I am not sure whether that is a good or a bad thing!

[Disclosure: COFES provided complimentary registration and a USB drive.]

COFES 2008 - Day 1

Deelip Menezes reports for WorldCAD Access from COFES 2008:

COFES 2008 started Thursday afternoon with presentations on varied topics, the first by Kathleen Maher from Jon Peddie Research. She spoke on "The Practicality Gap" -- the causes for good products failing.

Second was Ken Hall from Gensler, who spoke on "The Sustainability Paradox". He painted a sad picture of how we are using our resources as a civilization, and what we need to do to prevent doomsday. From what I gathered, neither our governments nor we citizens appear to be in the mood for implementing his recommendations.

CAD At the Nano Level

The third presentation interested me a lot. Mark Sims is with Nanorex, a company that has developed the first CAD system for nanotechnology. The CAD system is called NanoEngineer 1 and looks a lot like any parametric solid modeler, except that it uses atoms and molecules for building blocks. (It even has a model view and a feature tree, except that it is called a "model tree" here.) In short, nanotechnology involves creation of custom molecules and fiddling around with them in order to create things that I haven’t quite understood yet.



NanoEngineer 1 lets users create 3D virtual molecules and string them together to form complex compounds. The output of the modeling process is a plain text file containing a bunch of numbers and codes which can be sent to companies that build these compounds and ship them to you by mail. Reminds me of rapid prototyping.



NanoEngineer 1 is the result of four years of development, and is due to be launched on April 24, And guess what? Nanorex is releasing this as open source! It has an API which can be used by programmers like me to make plug-ins. However, I am going to stick to developing plug-ins for normal CAD systems for now, for the very simple reason that I can understand them. I am not yet comfortable with poking around molecules.

I had heard a lot about nanotechnology, but never got to understanding it. Mark Sims' presentation explained a lot of what's going on in the field of nanotechnology research and implementation. I must admit that most of the core fundamental stuff went over my head, but at the same time, seemed to be quite interesting. Maybe I will read up on nanotechnology soon.

The Future of Engineering

The fourth presentation regarding “The Future of Engineering” was given by Peter Marks of Design Insight. He described how and why the USA had a period of excellence in the 1900s. Their innovation and engineering supremacy over the rest of the world made it a superpower and led to a strong economy. Then he shredded each and every factor that worked for the US in the 1900s, and showed how these factors are now obsolete or no longer work for the USA anymore. Basically he set the stage for the US to be royally screwed in the 2000s. Although his views were quite pessimistic, I must admit that they closely resembled the reality that we see today.

He touched on many factors, one of which was outsourcing. In my opinion, outsourcing is not a solution for the USA, but rather a problem. The USA is no longer outsourcing only manufacturing and services; it is also outsourcing knowledge activities, like research and development -- things that are going to come back to haunt them in the future. When you end up making other people smarter than yourself, you are going to end up finding yourself in a compromising position.

After the presentations, there was an informal poolside gathering, and later spouses were called to join with the eating and drinking. In my case, my spouse is sitting pretty on the other side of the planet.

Friday is when the real action starts.

(Deelip Menezes is the owner of SYCODE, a programming firm specializing in CAD translators, located in Panaji, Goa, India. His Weblog at http://www.deelip.com carries additional reporting on COFES.)

Proof...

Proof that I was in San Francisco, as recorded by Shaan Hurley: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2410/2265887156_dee40ced5f.jpg?v=0