Monthly Archives: July 2010

Magic vanishing images

In a thread in the Feedback & Questions about the Discussion Groups section of the Autodesk discussion groups, somebody called ACADuser contributed what I thought was a highly amusing bar graph as a test image. Inspired by this, I contributed a couple of test images of my own.

A few hours later, the whole thread magically disappeared! It seems a shame that I went to the effort of making those images, and all for nothing. The handful of people who would have seen them on the discussion groups have now missed out on the experience. So I’ve decided to make up for that by posting them here, where thousands of people can look at them instead.

Here’s the first one (not that amusing):

Discussion group upgrade poll results

Here’s the second one. Given the circumstances, it seems somewhat prescient:

Clue train pie graph

If ACADuser wants to get in touch, I’ll be quite happy to post his image too.

Autodesk’s Callan Carpenter responds to Subscription follow-up

5 Replies

You may remember a month ago I raised the question What proportion of Autodesk customers really are on Subscription? Shortly after that, I sent Autodesk Subscription VP Callan Carpenter these questions following up on the interview:

I have a request for follow-up information arising from this interview. I hope you can find the time to provide some answers.

Preamble: Several people have called into doubt your assertion that the simplified upgrade policy affects only a tiny minority of your customers (you seemed to imply a figure of around 3% non-Subscription customers, with 1.5% who upgrade within a year or two). My own calculations based on Autodesk’s latest published financial results indicate that of upgrades represent 21% of the combined income from Subscription and upgrades, which is 7 times greater than the impression you gave in your answer. Please see this post for more discussion.

Questions:

Please clarify in as much detail as possible exactly how you arrive at your figures.

A percentage is derived by dividing one number by another; what exactly are you dividing by what to come up with 1.5%?

Please explain why your statements appear to contradict Autodesk’s own published figures.

How large is Autodesk’s total installed base?

Other points of dispute have been raised by various commenters, which I have paraphrased here. I invite your response.

Because Autodesk made Subscription cheaper than upgrading, it is no surprise that upgrading became less popular. This doesn’t indicate that customers prefer doing business in that way, merely that Autodesk made it the cheapest alternative.

If the idea of Subscription is such an attractive proposition, why do you need to sweeten the deal with tools that you don’t allow upgraders to have?

Your assertion that the 12-month cycle is driven by the product teams is incorrect. It was chosen for business reasons and the product cycle was forced to fit the Subscription model.

After a few follow-ups, I received a response yesterday. I reproduce that response here verbatim and without comment:

My sincere apologies for the delay. I have been travelling quite extensively, and this response has been sitting in my drafts email folder, and I just kept getting sidetracked with customer matters.

Nonetheless, I appreciate the opportunity to respond to some of the feedback you received after our discussion last month. During that first interview we discussed, among other things, the rationale behind the Simplified Upgrade Pricing program. I argued that SUP impacts only a small subset of our customers, and quoted figures to support the case. It appears those figures have been challenged by a few of your readers who feel their experience is different. Is it possible that both points of view are right? I believe it is.

By my prior statements I do not mean to suggest that the vast majority of all customers are on Subscription. Autodesk has a very large base of customers that has grown over the past 28 years. The subscription program as it exists today is only about 8 years old, so we had 20 years to develop a large base of customers, many of whom are not on Subscription. (Yes, there were forerunner programs like VIP, but they were structured quite differently and never generated an appreciable amount of business.) This is important because the SUP program only really impacts those customers upgrading from one and two versions back, which is a very small percentage of the already small upgrade revenue. Subscribers and customers upgrading from four or more versions back see no change to their pricing, and customers upgrading from 3 versions back see either no change or a very nominal one (up or down) depending on their specific product or country.

Most of the non-subscribing customer base does not purchase upgrades one or two versions back. In other words, most of these customers either haven’t bought anything from us in a long time, or when they do, they fall into the 98.5% of the revenue that includes upgrades from three or more versions back.

History is one thing, but the current trend line is another. For 8 years the Subscription program has coexisted with the Upgrade program. During that time our customers have been free to chose either strategy for keeping their technology current. Based on the results, their choice was clear: the majority of customers buying over the past few years have opted to leverage the Subscription program to stay on the latest technology in the most cost effective way possible. Only a few have elected to stay current through one and two version upgrades. The rest upgraded from older versions – three or more back. Of course Autodesk still offers all those choices going forward, albeit with a slimmed down price sheet.

There is one last point that I would like to make: While we believe Subscription is the most cost effective way to stay on the latest design technology, there is much more to the program than cost savings. Direct access to Autodesk product support specialists, Advantage Pack© bonus features, and free software for home use are just some of the value-added aspects of the program. In short, we are committed to an ongoing, continuous reevaluation of both the cost and benefit components of the Subscription value equation in order to make it an attractive option for as many customers as possible.

Thanks, again Steve for allowing me the time to speak with your readers.

This spam amuses me

2 Replies

Any Internet resource that allows public comment has to deal with spam. Fortunately, Akismet takes care of the vast majority of the spam on this blog so I don’t have to worry about it. Most spam is just moronic and I’m saddened that there are still some people around who are clueless enough to fall for it, making it worthwhile for the spammers to continue their evil ways.

Today, Akismet caught the first spam I’ve seen for a long time that actually made me LOL. Here it is:

HELP! I’m currently being held prisoner by the Russian mafia xyzrxyz pxxxx enlargement xyzrxyz and being forced to post spam comments on blogs and forum! If you don’t approve this they will kill me. xyzrxyz pxxxx enlargement xyzrxyz They’re coming back now. xyzrxyz vxxxx xyzrxyz Please send help! nitip vxxxx

I removed the bits that would make this useful to the spammer, so I guess I’m now responsible for some poor schmuck suffering a hideous fate at the hands of the Russian Mafia. Oh dear, what a shame, never mind.

Missing language pack fixes compared

2 Replies

Having tried out the cleanup fixes from both Autodesk and Owen Wengerd, they both appear to work fine. Here are some points of comparison:

Owen’s utility will work with any AutoCAD variant from 2007 on; Autodesk’s fix is currently restricted to Civil 3D 2009, 2010 and 2011. As this problem is definitely not confined to Civil 3D, and may need to be dealt with by non-Civil 3D users, that could be the dealbreaker right there.
Owen’s can be installed by anyone by simply copying a file and loading it when needed or in the Startup Suite; Autodesk’s requires admin rights to either run an installer program or manual replacement of a program component, depending on the release.
Owen’s loads and runs as the user requires; Autodesk’s runs automatically when opening and saving a drawing.
Owen’s provides some information about what is getting cleaned up; Autodesk’s operates in total silence.
Owen’s utility can take a while to scan through everything in a complex drawing; Autodesk’s appears to take no longer to open the drawing than normal. To give you some idea of the times involved, in one test in Civil 3D 2011, opening a blank ( but 2.2 MB!) drawing based on the Civil 3D template took 3.6 s with or without the fix; Owen’s cleanup took 0.7 s. In another test on an oldish PC with AutoCAD 2010, cleaning up a drawing with 2.8 MB of real content took Owen’s utility about 15 seconds.

For my purposes, Owen’s utility is what I need, because the users who need to clean up these drawings use AutoCAD, not Civil 3D. I’ve set up a batch process for these users, which opens each selected drawing, runs Owen’s utility and saves the drawing. However, I suggest Civil 3D users install the relevant updates and patches anyway, as they fix more than just this problem. In addition, in Civil 3D 2011 without the Autodesk fix, one of the problems fixed by Owen’s cleanup (a AeccDbNetworkCatalogDef one) is then immediately recreated by Civil 3D.

The upshot is that Civil 3D users should at least apply Autodesk’s fixes; everybody else should use Owen’s.

Using Owen’s fix, it is interesting to see what it reports as being the problem in particular drawings. Here’s what one of my non-Civil 3D problem drawings shows up:

Command: cleanlanguage Scanning drawing for corrupt objects... Corrupt object AecDbScheduleDataFormat<2F84> CLEANED Found 1 corrupt object

Here’s what the Civil 3D 2011 ANZ template shows up when cleaned:

Command: cleanlanguage Scanning drawing for corrupt objects... Corrupt object AeccDbNetworkCatalogDef<8B7> ERASED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<1619> CLEANED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161B> CLEANED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161A> CLEANED Corrupt object AeccDbLegendScheduleTableStyle<161F> CLEANED Found 5 corrupt objects

It looks like every Civil 3D 2011 drawing based on these templates has been going out corrupt in 5 different places. Hopefully, Autodesk will quickly get on to fixing up the Civil 3D template situation, and will incorporate the automated open/save cleanup in future updates to AutoCAD itself and all the other AutoCAD-based verticals.

Another language pack cleanup solution

Partial fix for language pack problem

1 Reply

The Civil 3D group within Autodesk has moved impressively quickly in providing a partial solution to the language pack problem I described earlier. What has been provided so far is a set of patches for Civil 3D 2009, 2010 and 2011 that allow Civil 3D users to remove the spurious language pack flag by opening and re-saving the affected drawings. I have not yet tested this, but I am informed that it works.

What’s left to do? Obviously, not all recipients of these drawings are going to have Civil 3D. In fact, prior to isolating Civil 3D as one definite source of the problem, I had spent a lot of time helping out AutoCAD users clean up language-pack-infected drawings, using awkward and dangerous copy-and-paste methods. So Autodesk has AutoCAD and all its vertical variants to work through yet as far as a cleanup mechanism goes. Also, the problem needs resolving at the source end. All “infected” templates (in Civil 3D and any other verticals that may have the problem) need fixing and distributing to users as quickly and effectively as possible, in order to reduce the number of drawings being created with the problem. I know individual users can do this for themselves, but large numbers of users won’t do so if left to their own devices, causing problems for everyone else. As the originator of the problem, Autodesk has a duty to do its very best to resolve it.

Thanks, Autodesk, for quickly getting started on fixing the problem and providing a partial solution in a timely manner. I hope you can provide the rest of the solution equally efficiently.

Civil 3D 2011 ANZ comes complete with “virus”

6 Replies

If you install Civil 3D 2011 using the ANZ (Australia/New Zealand) profile, when you start it up for the first time, you will see a large warning indicating that the drawing requires an Asian language pack to be installed. It also warns that this is a symptom of the acad.vlx virus:

Language Pack warning

Now I know that in this case it’s not an actual virus causing the problem, but rather the ANZ template drawing being “infected” with this Language Pack requirement. I have had to deal with quite a few incoming drawings in this state, and that’s painful enough without Autodesk also infecting every Australasian Civil 3D drawing with the problem. Other profiles may be similarly infected, but at the moment I don’t know. Edit: Matt Anderson reports that the problem occurs on US systems too.

Autodesk, I suggest that as a matter of great urgency you create a clean ANZ template file, post it as a hotfix and warn all your Civil 3D customers of the SNAFU. Neither “install the language pack” nor “turn off the warning” are adequate workarounds. Your customers do not want to send out or receive any drawings in this state.

Beyond the immediate issue of Autodesk shipping software that on first use warns the user that they may have a virus (and encourages the creation of drawings that spread that warning far and wide), I would appreciate some assistance in dealing with “infected” drawings, whether in Civil 3D or plain AutoCAD.

First, I need to be able to detect such drawings using LISP so I ensure they are rejected rather than allowed into our drawing management system, and this detection will need to work in releases at least as far back as AutoCAD 2004.

Second, I need a mechanism of cleaning up such drawings. The only thing I have discovered that works so far is the manual, time-consuming and dangerous process of recreating the drawings by starting from scratch and Copy/Paste in each layout. With big jobs using nested xrefs, this is fraught. I need to be able to provide a LISP-based cleanup mechanism that I can set up to work in batch mode on a set of drawings.

I would be grateful for any clues anyone might have about the above detect & cleanup needs.

Edit: see the comments for further important information.

Any Bricscad users out there?

32 Replies

I would be very interested to hear from any of you who have adopted Bricscad (either partially or fully replacing AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT in your organisation), or at least seriously investigated using the product. This post is aimed at users and CAD managers rather than third party developers, who I expect to cover in future posts.

Why did you investigate changing over? How far have you gone? What are your experiences? What are the pros and cons? How is performance? Reliability? Bugs? Ease of use? Familiarity? Support and other aspects of customer service? Total cost of ownership? Are you experiencing interoperability problems when exchanging drawings with Autodesk software users? How did you go with incorporating in-house customisation and third party tools?

Please add a comment, or if you prefer, email me using my contact form.

Dear Paul

1 Reply

tl;dr

Edwin’s 100 tips, plus my own

3 Replies

Over at Edwin Prakaso’s CAD Notes site, he has collected 100 AutoCAD tips and published them in a highly useful post. Very nice job, Edo.

While you blog readers are collecting tips, you might as well have a look at mine, too:

http://www.blog.cadnauseam.com/tag/tip/ (and page 2)

I was surprised how many tips I have posted over the couple of years this blog has been running, although not all of them are for AutoCAD. Anyway, I hope you find some of them useful. If you don’t want to wade through all that lot, maybe you can get started on this five and five more tips from the early days of this blog.

cad nauseam

Mostly AutoCAD, BricsCAD and related subjects