Archive for May 25th, 2006

Update: The full text of Eric’s article (btw, he’s talking about Vault in case you’re looking for relevance. Not neccesarily the verison of Vault we’re looking at, but its parent I believe.)

An interesting article in the Guardian today, via slashdot. If you’re not reading slashdot, you should be just to keep up with what else is happening in the world. /. isn’t perfect, but it’s a decent barometer of good stuff from all corners of the tech game.

So, Eric Sink writes in his article that bugs are just part of the game, and that each bug goes through a review matrix, informally or more formally.

1) How bad is its impact? (Severity)

2) How often does it happen? (Frequency)

3) How much effort is required to fix it? (Cost)

4) What is the risk of fixing it? (Risk)

For all of the posters in the Adesk newsgroups that think software should ship without bugs, take a few minutes and read the article. Learn a little bit more abuot the process, and you might appreciate what Dan et al go through during the process. Or maybe you won’t, and just don’t care. Either way, it’s a good read.

Now, with all that said, I sure wish the damned pan-unselect issue would be fixed.

No, I don’t have dementia quite yet - I’m not re-writing articles here on the website.

In tomorrow’s Civil 3D webcast, the team will announce the availability of the new Civil 3D 2007 Extension for Google Earth. Tomorrow will also be a preview of that functionality.

I haven’t had time to test it yet, but here are some of the reported key features:

- Take complete control over the data you want to publish and how you want it to display including symbology and elevation

- Add layers of available Google Earth data including buildings, transportation systems, roads, etc to view your project within the context of the surrounding area

- Publish Civil 3D objects as Google Earth placemarks allowing you to quickly locate and navigate to a specific place on your project site

-Create drive-throughs along road centerlines and save snapshot views of your project site from different vantage points

- Associate points in your Civil 3D model with realistic 3D content (in KML format) such as light poles along a street, houses, or cars

- Publish your data using the coordinate system already specified in your drawing, pick from over 100 coordinate systems at publishing time, or apply a user-defined coordinate system.

For clarification, this is different from the EXPORTTOGOOGLEEARTH command that I wrote about previously. This is a new wizard-driven application that lets users publish Civil 3D objects and metadata including points, parcels, alignments, corridor models, surfaces, and hydraulic networks directly to Google Earth. It’s much more powerful and flexible than the command within Civil 3D.

To install the Autodesk Civil 3D 2007 Extension for Google Earth, you must have Autodesk Civil 3D 2007 already installed. You also need to have Google Earth installed. You can download Google Earth here. The Extension for Google Earth works with the free version of Google Earth as well as with Google Earth Plus and Google Earth Pro.

You can view the Readme File here.

You can download the extension here.

As always, Have Fun!