Yearly Archives: 2012

Software as a service is great…

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…for some things. The other day, I amused myself by creating a video using a site called Xtranormal. You’ve probably seen 3D cartoon-like videos of people with stilted voices. It’s done by signing up for a free account, choosing a background and some characters, then typing in your script. This is converted, generally fairly successfully, to spoken words. The characters lip-sync to your script, you publish the video and you’re done. If you have a YouTube account, the site will upload the video for you. Video creation service provided on line, video hosting and viewing service provided on line. No problem.

Here it is; this blog’s readership is not the intended audience, so you probably won’t find it particularly amusing.

Could the video creation have been done using a standalone application rather than doing it on line? Absolutely. It may well have been quicker on my PC, but using this SaaS was fine. It performed well enough to be usable. Somebody taking my work isn’t an issue, as I always intended to show it publicly anyway. The worst that can happen is that my email address is abused, but it’s easy to make a throwaway email address.

I think that for this trivial recreational task, SaaS technology was absolutely appropriate. If the site had been unavailable or my Internet connection had been down, it wouldn’t have really mattered. If YouTube goes down for an hour and people can’t view my video, so what? If YouTube closes my account and makes all my videos unavailable, that would be more annoying but still not fatal.

So, full steam ahead for CAD on the Cloud, then? Er, no. It has yet to be shown that the Cloud is the appropriate technology for that particular use. I’m sure it will be, for some specialist niche requirements. But all of it? A complete fully-functional CAD application provided on a SaaS basis as an appropriate use of technology? Not any time soon. Maybe one day, but then again, maybe not. There will have to be real, demonstrated benefits that outweigh the concerns. The CAD Cloud vendors are going to have to go well beyond the “Wow! This is cool!” phase first, and start engaging the CAD community in serious discussion about the genuine concerns that customers have about the technology. Ignoring those concerns won’t make them go away.

Repost – how to get your picture next to your comment

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This is a revisit of a post I made about three years ago, and repeated a year later. This has become more relevant recently because I changed the default avatars displayed next to comments to use random faces rather than random patterns. If you object to being portrayed as a grinning loon, read on.

You may have noticed that some people’s comments have an avatar picture next to them (no, not the film with the Roger Dean visuals), while others have a randomly assigned pattern. On this blog, the avatar picture is a gravatar (globally recognised avatar), and you can have one too. Once you set it up, you will find that it works in all sorts of places, not just this blog. Some other blogs may use other avatar standards, though.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Visit gravatar.com and pick a sign up link.
  2. Provide a valid email address; the same one you provide when adding comments to blogs. I have not received any spam as a result of doing this, which is no surprise because Gravatar is owned by Automattic, Inc., the highly reputable WordPress people.
  3. You’ll be sent a confirmation email; click on the link in that and follow the prompts to set your password and so on.
  4. Choose your gravatar image from your hard drive, the internet, a webcam or a previously uploaded image. You can point to any size photo and will be prompted to select a cropped square area to display.

That’s it, although you can manage your account to provide multiple email addresses and images if you wish. Wait 5 or 10 minutes, then check out this or other blogs and web locations where you have made comments in the past. Those blogs with layouts that support gravatars should now display the picture that you associated with the email address you supplied when you made your comment. If the image doesn’t show up, do a reload/refresh and/or clear your browser’s cache and try again.

Why don’t you trust Autodesk?

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As I mentioned earlier, any company that wants to move its customers to the Cloud is going to need the trust of those customers. Three months ago, I started a poll to try to get some measure of how trustworthy you consider Autodesk to be, in terms of doing the right thing by its customers. The results of that poll look pretty awful for Autodesk. Right from the start, the distrusters have outnumbered the trusters by three to one, with the current results showing an overwhelming majority of respondents (77%) not trusting Autodesk.

Why? What has Autodesk done in the past, or is doing now, that leads people to this level of distrust? If you have voted in this poll, I’d like to know your reasons, so please add your comments whichever way you voted. If you think there’s an issue with the question wording and/or its simple Yes/No choice, feel free to say so.

There will be a number of people who have an inherent distrust of corporations, so as a control I’ve added a number of polls to try to see how much that influences the results. There are near-identical polls for a wide range of different corporations. There’s a poll for an on-line retailer and Cloud service provider (Amazon), one for a computer and gadget maker (Apple), one for another CAD company (Bricsys, makers of Bricscad), one for a maker of cars, motorbikes etc. (Honda), and one for a traditional retailer (Target). I’ll be interested to see how trustworthy you consider those corporations to be, and how they compare to Autodesk.

Dark times, dark sites

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This site has gone dark for a day to support the movement against the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills. Rather than black out the whole site for a day like Wikipedia and thousands of other sites, I have decided to keep the blog somewhat usable.

SOPA is really, really scary stuff. If you’re an American citizen, I encourage you to visit the American Censorship site and do what you can to protect the Internet from the evils of Big Content.