Category Archives: Bug

Addendum – Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings

This post is an addendum to a post from June, Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 1, fixing drawings. This post provides new information about useful functionality added in V19 of BricsCAD that is useful for any CAD Manager or power user who ever has problem DWG files to deal with. Yes, even if your site is still purely AutoCAD-based.

In this post I’ll describe the (inspector) LISP function. This was added in the V18 cycle but was significantly enhanced in V19. It’s probably the most useful LISP function you’ve never heard of.

Although it’s LISP, that doesn’t mean you have to be a programmer to benefit from it. If you’re a non-programming CAD Manager or power user, you can use it to work out what’s going on within any DWG you’re having problems with. You can use it to discover information about objects in the drawing; not just conventional entities, but also blocks, tables, dictionaries and so on. It even works with custom data.

I gave a brief demonstration of (inspector) in the last BricsCAD Unplugged episode about BLADE. However, you don’t need to use BLADE; just enter (inspector) at the command prompt, select an object and you’ll be presented with a dialog like this:

These dialogs are modeless, and you can have as many displayed as you like; you’re not limited to one. This dialog displays the same data in three different ways. At the top, it’s shown in traditional LISP assoc form, and by playing with the Expand controls you can vary the way in which this is pretty-printed. The bottom left pane shows the data in DXF form, which is probably easiest to read if you’re a non-programmer. If you’re more of an ActiveX person or you prefer to see the properties described with words rather than numbers, you’ll prefer the display on the bottom right, which shows the COM properties for the object.

If you want to select another object to inspect without calling (inspector) again, just use the [ > > ] button.

The grayed-out lines indicate data that is considered read-only. It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean it’s impossible to change the data, merely that the ways in which that data can be changed within a program is restricted. Generally, it means you can’t change the ActiveX properties directly, but there are various other means that can be employed in many cases.

The lists are somewhat interactive; double-click on an entity name and you’ll be given another inspector window for that entity. You can burrow down through the drawing database in this way, looking for the source of your mystery DWG problem. If you’re using it while programming, you can use it to work out what set of circumstances is causing your code to trip up in certain drawings.

The (inspector) function has an optional argument, and what it will accept is very flexible. If you pass an entity name to it, you will get the data for that entity displayed. The same principle applies for various ActiveX objects: pass it a layer table object and the appropriate data will be displayed.

Direct access is provided to various useful things from within BLADE using the pull-down menu Lisp+DCL > Browse DWG Database:

If you pick Browse Text Styles, you’ll see something like this:

Double-click on one of the text style items in the left pane and you will get this:

As you can see, this is very handy for tracking down issues both while programming and when diagnosing DWG problems.

Finally, I should note that there is potential for the inspector to provide even more power in future. Bricsys LISP guru Torsten Moses is investigating the possibility of allowing the inspector to modify data, not just inspect it. There’s potential danger there, but if Torsten can make that work safely then that would be another invaluable tool for any DWG-based CAD Manager.

As I stated in my original post, it’s definitely worth a CAD Manager’s while to do the quick download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD. My experience in dealing with Bricsys is that requests for extensions for evaluation purposes are usually accepted, so you probably won’t have to give up your valuable tool as soon as your 30 days are up.

Video – Steve on BricsCAD Unplugged

Fix released for Autodesk subscription licensing error (yes, another one)

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Providing yet another entry in the it’ll never happen again file, Autodesk has issued a fix for an AutoCAD 2018 subscription licensing crash.

Thankfully, it’s not compulsory to use the execrable Autodesk desktop app or malware-like Akamai download manager to obtain this fix. There are direct links for the 32-bit and 64-bit fixes.

Lessons we learned from this:

AutoCAD doesn’t just phone home once every 30 days to maintain even a long-term a subscription license, it phones home 24 hours later too. And probably every 24 hours after that.
Desktop software that relies on the internet to continue working is a terrible idea.
Yes, it will happen again.

A & B Tip 5 – polyline areas

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In this series of posts, I’ll be providing tips that show how to do something in both AutoCAD and BricsCAD, hence A & B.

The Series

The idea behind this series is to provide useful information for several sorts of reader:

AutoCAD users.
BricsCAD users.
People in the process of transitioning from AutoCAD to BricsCAD and who need to know what to do differently (if anything).
People considering transitioning from AutoCAD to BricsCAD and who want to know about the differences and similarities.

What area is that polyline?

There are several ways of determining the area enclosed by a polyline. This post goes through the various methods. You will also notice that in each of the methods, you get the length (perimeter) as a bonus.

Spoiler alert: the most efficient methods are at the bottom. There’s a one-click method in AutoCAD (it needs a little setting up first) and a zero-click method in BricsCAD.

LIST command in AutoCAD

The oldest method is the good old LIST command. Although this has been around for ever, here’s how it works in recent AutoCAD releases. Issue the LIST command, select the polyline, press Enter to finish the selection, and above your floating command line AutoCAD will show something like this:

If this display goes away and you want to see it again, hit F2 and it will return. If you have a docked command line, AutoCAD will display the information on the text screen, which it will then display:

If you have a floating command line but want to see the text screen rather than the over-the-command-line popup, you can switch to it using Ctrl+F2.

LIST command in BricsCAD

The command works in just the same way in BricsCAD as it does in AutoCAD with the docked command line.. The main differences are that the BricsCAD default interface has a docked command line, and that the text screen (called Prompt History in BricsCAD) is displayed even when using a floating command line.

If the text screen goes away or is obscured, you can restore it using the familiar-to-AutoCAD-oldtimers keystroke of F2 (not Ctrl+F2, which toggles the ribbon in BricsCAD).

Unit precision in BricsCAD

Another difference you might notice is that the only whole units are displayed. This is because BricsCAD respects the setting of DIMZIN when displaying values in the AREA command and AutoCAD doesn’t. In this drawing, DIMZIN is set to 8, which suppresses trailing zeroes. Because the area is exactly 448.0, BricsCAD displays it as 448. If DIMZIN is not set to suppress trailing zeroes, this doesn’t happen. If DIMZIN is set to 0, BricsCAD displays the area using the setting for linear units precision, LUPREC. If this is 4, the LIST command will display the area as 448.0000, as it does in AutoCAD.

This respect for DIMZIN applies in other places in BricsCAD too. For the remainder of this post I’ll have DIMZIN set to 0.

AREA command in AutoCAD

Another good old method is the AREA command. Issue the command, use the Object option and pick your polyline. You will be shown the area in two places as shown here:

AREA command in BricsCAD

The AREA command works similarly in BricsCAD. Although the options displayed indicate that the subcommand is Entity rather than Object, you can in fact use either E or O to initiate selection of an object. Unlike AutoCAD, the area is displayed in one place only, the command prompt area:

Note that the AREA command in both applications gives you more options, including adding together several areas.

Properties palette in AutoCAD

If you have the Properties palette visible (Ctrl+1 will toggle it on), you can simply select the polyline and the area will be displayed in the palette, thus:

Note that unlike the AutoCAD AREA command, the Properties palette does respect the value of DIMZIN. To display the trailing zeroes, first set DIMZIN to 0.

Properties palette in BricsAD

Using the Properties palette in BricsCAD is identical to AutoCAD. Here’s the display:

Quick Properties in AutoCAD

Quick Properties is a cursor-based cut-down version of the Properties palette. It’s not what you get when hovering, which is this:

What you want is Quick Properties, which you only get when you select an object, for example:

Unfortunately, Area is missing. It was there once upon a time, but there were performance problems so it was removed by default. However, you can add it back in. Invoke CUI and pick Quick Properties on the left. Scroll down on the right and pick Polyline.

Turn on Area (and Length if you want). Pick OK. Now see what happens when you select a polyline:

Note: in AutoCAD 2014 (and maybe others), the Area option was missing. There’s a workaround, but it’s a complex hack and well beyond the scope of this post.

Quad cursor in BricsCAD

The easiest way to find a polyline area in BricsCAD is just to hover over it. The Quad cursor will appear, giving you the information you need:

Alternatives

If you’re doing this regularly, it makes sense to automate it as much as possible. Depending what you want, menu macros might help. There are also various free LISP routines around that do this sort of thing, for example these by Lee Mac. If you have more specific requirements (e.g. automatic area label, export to CSV), then that’s the sort of thing I do for a living so feel free to get in touch.

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

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Following the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster, where subscription users found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken by an Autodesk licensing system meltdown, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost issued an apology. He also assured customers on Twitter that it wouldn’t happen again:

While I welcomed that, I did have this to say at the time:

I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Back to the present. Does it come as a surprise to anybody to discover that less than a month later, Autodesk has again accidentally remotely killswitched people’s licenses? Again, not just the new release, but 2018 too. As reported on Twitter and www.asti.com:

After a couple of exchanges, the always-responsive people on the @AutodeskHelp Twitter feed came back with this:

So it’s fixed, but CAD Managers now have a bunch of work to do at their end to deal with a problem created at the Autodesk end. Somebody screwed up, they fixed it, another apology is issued, stuff happens, life goes on. That’s it for this month, probably. But it doesn’t address a very fundamental problem.

Let’s go back to basics.

The primary function of a licensing system is to allow use of the product by legitimate users.

Everything else is secondary. If a system relies on phoning home and getting the required response from a remote system before you’re permitted to use the software you paid for, not just after installation but on an ongoing basis, then it’s fundamentally flawed from the user’s point of view. Yet that is the system that Autodesk has chosen to base its business on.

No amount of sincere, deeply felt apologies or it’ll-never-happen-again promises will alter the fact that Autodesk has put its own convenience ahead of the ability of paying customers to use what they have paid for. Will Autodesk change that state of affairs? I very much doubt it, in which case it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen again, whatever anyone might promise.

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

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If you’re an AutoCAD user, you may have been intrigued by the news about the new way Autodesk is bundling up AutoCAD 2019 with various verticals (perpetual license owners need not apply). This is Autodesk’s latest attempt to promote its subscription model and raise prices again. 7% this time, but much more to come. But never mind that, the main point is that you’re getting a whole lot of stuff, and who could say that’s not a good thing?

So it’s most unfortunate for Autodesk that the AutoCAD 2019 rollout has been an unmitigated disaster.

My own experiences in trying to download the product were sub-optimal, but I later learned that I was one of the lucky ones. Subscription users not only had problems with AutoCAD 2019, they found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken too, victims of an Autodesk licensing system meltdown. That’s right, the AutoCAD 2019 launch acted as a remote kill-switch for people’s production software.

Perpetual license users were fine, of course. Only subscription customers suffered. There’s a lesson there that should not go unnoticed.

Back to my own experiences, to begin with I couldn’t download AutoCAD 2019 anywhere, despite it being having been announced everywhere some hours earlier. Autodesk Account wasn’t showing 2019, but it was showing this:

The usual workaround method of downloading the free trial wasn’t any better; that was still on 2018. I even tried installing the execrable Autodesk desktop app (temporarily!), but there was no sign of AutoCAD 2019 there either.

I’ve never had any success using Autodesk’s AVA bot for any real questions, but there was a time when it served as a gateway to Akamai-free downloads, so I tried that. Unfortunately, AVA has been “improved” and that once-excellent feature is gone. I did try asking AVA for the download link to AutoCAD 2019, but that didn’t go well.

First attempt:

Second attempt:

I mentioned my difficulties on Twitter and a few hours later the long-suffering but always-professional @AutodeskHelp people offered this:

Despite appearances, this actually turned out to be helpful because by then the product trial download had been fixed and was offering 2019 rather than 2018. I still didn’t see a direct link and against my better judgement tolerated a very temporary installation of Autodesk’s nasty Akamai download manager. About 5 minutes into the download it said it was going to take about 9 hours so I went away and left it. I returned within the hour to find it was finished, so I have no idea how long it actually took. After immediately uninstalling all traces of Akamai and Autodesk desktop app, I was able to start my evaluation.

So how’s the product? Pretty much the same as 2018, except with a better drawing compare tool. Oh, and the icons are better. The first command I ran in the new release reminded me that some things never change. The ancient rectangular pickbox bug popped in to see me, just like an old friend.

I’ve been warmed by the familiar, comforting experience of this and various other early 90s-era bugs and limitations, where the easiest workaround is to use a competitor’s product to do those bits. More on that in a future post.

An hour or so into using the product saw it crash and burn for the first time:

Don’t take my word for it, though; here are some comments from various users, CAD Managers and long-term Autodesk fans, most of whom had a worse time of it than I did. It’s not just AutoCAD; LT and Navisworks are definitely affected and there may be others. Comments here have been reproduced from various sources under fair use; names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I think it is safe to say that Autodesk are having a very bad day. Account and activation issues, subscription access issues, forum login issues, kudos and comments blocked to some users…

I installed the brand new @Navisworks Manage 2019 last night, and this morning I get the “Your trial has expired” !!!

I can safely say that ‘unimpressed’ is my status right now with the licencing idiocy going on. Not only can I not get the 2019 version, but my 2018 version has stopped working too.

Looks like all subscription (not maintenance or legacy) software is affected this way: logging in and out as well as workarounds posted are not working. Now this is a good reason to abandon Autodesk subscription model.

Good news: Autodesk began rollout of 2019 licenses! Bad news: It might break your 2018 licenses.

Hard to imagine this rollout going any worse.
[Autodesk]”Hold my beer….”

2.5 days without AutoCAD available. I just wish Autodesk would have told us so I could have gone on vacation. Instead, I will have to work thru the weekend to make up lost time.

I love Autodesk and their software, but they have just ditched an entire generation of Autodesk ‘rockstars’ and their subscription portal isn’t working. It really doesn’t look good, does it?

my 2018 is hosed on 3 devices

Unfortunately the situation has lasted for nearly 24 hours and no work done. Can we send the bill to Autodesk?

so I thought I’d try and activate LT
LOL

Although some parts of this are supposedly fixed, it’s not over yet. As I type this, people are still reporting problems and Autodesk is still offering apologies:

Even now, AVA is still completely in the dark about the current release of Autodesk’s traditional flagship product.

It’s great to see users helping each other, though. You may find this Autodesk Forum post by Travis Nave useful as an interim workaround. Also, in a marvellous continuation of McNeel’s free service to the AutoCAD (and BricsCAD) LISP community, DOSLib has been made available for AutoCAD 2019 even before many people were even able to get hold of the software it runs on. That’s what I call service!

All in all, this has not the best start to AutoCAD’s brave new world of oneness. How did it go for you?

CAD Nostalgia Video

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For the first video in the new cad nauseam YouTube channel, I’ve had a bit of fun. I unearthed a bunch of my old stuff to show you. Does any of this take you back? Enjoy!

Why digitally sign your LISP files?

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After I mentioned in an earlier post that I had digitally signed the sample LISP file I had provided, this generated some interest. In this post, I’ll explain why you might want to sign your LISP files. In a later post, I’ll explain how to do it.

These days it is standard practice for developers to digitally sign their code. Operating systems and applications are displaying increasingly scary warnings when coming across unsigned code. Here is an example of the sort of message you get when you load an unsigned LISP file into AutoCAD from a location that has not been explicitly configured as a trusted location:

If you’re a CAD Manager dealing with your own internal code, it’s not too onerous to configure AutoCAD in Options > Files such that a folder is trusted by AutoCAD and place your code in there. The folder should be read-only; if it isn’t, AutoCAD warns you when you try to configure it. If you do this, the scary warnings don’t appear to bother and confuse your users, even if your code is unsigned.

Another way a CAD Manager can avoid the warnings is to set the SECURELOAD system variable to 0. That’s generally not recommended because it turns off AutoCAD’s security features. While you’ll probably get away with this, there’s always a chance that a user will load some malware and then you’ll have to explain yourself to management.

If you’re not just using your code internally and it’s going to be used by other parties, then you’re not going to have that level of control over the user environment. In recent AutoCADs it’s possible to set up the installation deployment such that users can’t turn off the security settings. If the CAD Manager at the location using your code has done this, your potential users are going to be presented with unprofessional-looking scary warnings.

If you sign your code, users might still get a warning, but it’s less scary. It identifies you as the verified source of the code so they will have more confidence in picking the Always Load button. Once they’ve done this, other signed code of yours will be automatically trusted.

There’s another important reason you might want to sign your code, and that’s protection against other people’s modification of your code. If somebody edits your LSP file and then gives it to someone who tries to load it, the user is presented with an even scarier warning:

Note that this warning no longer has your name on it. This means it’s possible to protect yourself from people (internal or external) who well-meaningly hack about with your code and then try to blame you when it goes wrong. It also gives a level of protection against your code being infected by malware.

Note that all of the above only applies to AutoCAD 2016 and later. AutoCAD 2014 introduced some LISP loading security measures, but the signature stuff came a couple of releases later. Earlier AutoCAD releases, along with compatibles such as BricsCAD and ZWCAD, will just ignore the digital signature. It’s just a comment in the code as far as they’re concerned.

LISP files with the LSP, MNL, FAS, or VLX file extensions can be digitally signed. There’s a bug in the original iterations of AutoCAD 2016 and AutoCAD 2018 that prevents signed VLX files from working. This was patched later in both releases (2016 SP1 and 2018.0.2), but if you’re distributing your code externally there’s always a chance that your VLX might end up in the hands of somebody using a broken release. Also, VLX files that are digitally signed cannot be loaded into AutoCAD 2015 and earlier, broken or not. You should bear that in mind before distributing signed VLX files. I don’t do it and would advise against it. Thanks, Autodesk.

Given this information, if you decide that signing your LISP is a good idea, watch this space for information on how to do it.

When spambots get it wrong

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Here it is in all its glory:

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First 2018.1-broke-my-AutoCAD reports coming in

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Thanks to R.K. McSwain for pointing out that at least one user has reported unexpected shutdowns from AutoCAD (Architecture, probably) following installation of the 2018.1 Update. The problem went away following uninstallation of the update.

Caveat updator.

Anybody else have any issues or are you all waiting for the early adopters to find out for you?

Edit: it turns out the crash occurs when opening 2013 DXF files.

Edit 2: a hotfix has been posted here.

AutoCAD 2018.1 released, but only for some

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Autodesk has released the AutoCAD (and LT) 2018.1 Update, not to be confused with the earlier ill-fated 2018.0.1 Update. It’s only available for currently-paying subscription and maintenance customers. The “non critical” bug fixes in this Update (by Autodesk’s definition) are being withheld from Autodesk’s other customers.

Those of you who have allowed your maintenance to expire due to Autodesk’s development inaction and unjustified price increases can consider yourselves duly punished for failing to fall into line.

If you have the execrable Autodesk desktop app installed (not recommended) and it works as expected, this update will present itself to you. Otherwise, get it from your Autodesk Account page. Go to Management > AutoCAD > 2018 Downloads > Updates & Add-ons and then pick the appropriate AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download.

It has yet to be seen whether this update will break things, so if you’re feeling nervous you might want to hold off for a while and let others find out for you. (Edit: it broke one person’s AutoCAD, see comment from R.K. below).

Weighing in at well over 400 MB, the AutoCAD 2018.1 Update download is about twice the size of a complete BricsCAD download, even before expansion. So it must contain a pretty impressive amount of stuff, right? Or is it all bloat? Well, it includes 2018.0.1 and 2018.0.2 and adds this:

Xref Layers Override – Improvements to Xref Layers make it easier to identify overrides and restore them to their default values.
Views and Viewports – A new Named Views panel is added to the View tab to make it easy to create and restore named views from the ribbon, and to create scaled views and viewports for your layouts. The new layout viewports are automatically assigned a standard scale that can easily be changed from a new scale grip on the viewport. Viewport grips have been enhanced.
High Resolution Monitor Support – Supports additional dialog boxes. Palettes and icons are correctly adjusted to the Windows setting for the display scale.
3D Graphics Performance – Work on performance continues to optimize the speed of 3D display for the Wireframe, Realistic, and Shaded visual styles.

The user interface has been touched up to support the above changes. The Preview Guide has been prepared to the usual excellent standard.

That’s all useful stuff, and most welcome. Work has gone into providing some genuinely useful adjustments. But there’s not a lot of it. Autodesk is still just tinkering at the edges.

Overall, AutoCAD 2018.1 is a pretty minor mid-term update, falling a long way short of, say, Release 13c4. That update was shipped on CD to all customers. Free. No maintenance or subscription required.

Bricsys does much more significant and worthwhile mid-term updates than this, and doesn’t charge for them. Perpetual license owners, even those not on maintenance, get them for nothing. Along with the bug fixes. Which are properly documented.

Autodesk used to do all that too, but its customer service has since regressed to the point that the standards of the Release 13 days are something to yearn for. Long-term Autodesk customers will know just how damning that state of affairs is. Autodesk lags a long way behind not only the competition, but also its former self.

Autodesk CEO and all-rental architect Andrew Anagnost has asked Autodesk customers to give him a year to prove that his business model will provide them with better value. It’s not clear when that year was supposed to start, but the all-subscription start date of 1 August 2016 seems reasonable. However you reckon it, a big slab of that year is gone and there’s very little to show for it.

Time to get your finger out, Andrew.

I didn’t expect to see any comment about the policy of denying bug fixes to some customers from any Autodesk high-ups, but I was mistaken.

Here’s a quote on just this subject from Autodesk Senior Vice President¹, Buzz Kross:

It’s just bad business. Why would you not want to take care of your customers? I would never do that. Come on, we all make mistakes. All software has bugs and as a developer, I have an obligation to provide fixes to all my paying customers, whether they are on subscription or not. Customers on subscription have the advantage of getting access to new stuff. That’s fine. But denying them access to bug fixes is just not right.

Buzz Kross, Senior Vice President, Autodesk¹
9 April 2010

Photo: Autodesk

It’s not often I so completely agree with an Autodesk executive¹, but I can find no fault in his logic. Thank you, Buzz.

1. Although Buzz is still listed as a SVP in some Autodesk online materials, he’s no longer with the company.

Autodesk confirms its own unconscionable conduct

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It took several attempts over a period of months and was like pulling teeth, but Autodesk has now confirmed that it is deliberately withholding bug fixes from some of its customers.

Autodesk has taken customers’ money and in return has provided defective software (OK, that happens). It has fixed some of those defects (that happens too, sometimes). But it’s limiting distribution of those fixes to those prepared to pay Autodesk further (that has never happened before).

Just let that sink in. Autodesk broke stuff you paid for, could easily fix it, but won’t do so unless you pay more. If you thought ransomware only came from Russia, think again.

Here’s how the scam works.

Let’s say customer Fred paid thousands of dollars for his perpetual license of AutoBLOB and paid thousands more for upgrades and maintenance over several decades. Due to Autodesk no longer making significant improvements to AutoBLOB, he finally gave up hope and decided to drop off maintenance. Understandable, particularly as Autodesk has announced maintenance prices are getting jacked up.

Never mind. Thanks to his perpetual license, Fred can keep right on using AutoBLOB! Aren’t perpetual licenses just the best thing?

Let’s say Fred made the decision after discovering AutoBLOB 2017 was slower than, and really not significantly better than, AutoBLOB 2016, 2015 or even 2010. Fred’s maintenance period carried him through to beyond the release of AutoBLOB 2018, which he intended using for a few years until he transitioned to an alternative product. (Or until Autodesk Becomes Great Again, but Fred doesn’t consider that likely).

Meantime, Fred discovers that there’s a new bug in AutoBLOB 2018 that makes it useless for his needs. It’s not a crash, drawing corruption or security issue, but it is something that makes it difficult of impossible for him to produce the required output. Because he installed AutoBLOB 2018 before his maintenance expired, Autodesk won’t allow him to use 2017 or any earlier version.

Meanwhile, Autodesk has, miracles of miracles, developed a fix for that nasty bug. All Fred has to do is download and install the hotfix or Service Pack, right? Wrong. Because Autodesk has wrapped up the bug fix with AutoBLOB 2018.1, a mid-term update that includes not only bug fixes but also a few new minor feature improvements. Unlike the competition, Autodesk restricts such updates to continuously paying customers. AutoBLOB 2018.1 is therefore only available to subscription and maintenance customers. Fred’s bug has been “deemed non-critical” by Autodesk and therefore the fix won’t be distributed to him.

Fred is screwed by a combination of Autodesk’s worst aspects: chronic failure to improve the product, price-gouging business practices, incompetence in development and testing, and unreasonably restrictive licensing terms. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s then screwed again by one final, nasty, vindictive, petty piece of bastardry by a company desperate to strong-arm its reluctant customers into subscription slavery.

This is not OK.

This is no way to treat customers. It’s unethical. It’s unconscionable. It’s immoral. It’s disgusting. It’s evil.

In the EU at least, it could well be illegal. I certainly hope so; Autodesk being fined a few hundred million Euros might discourage other companies from following suit.

Although it’s tempting to think of Autodesk as a single edifice, it’s important to remember that it’s made up of many individuals. Many of them are great people who would never dream of stooping this low and who are probably quietly embarrassed to be associated with a company that does so. Those people have my sympathy and should stop reading now.

But if you’re that person at Autodesk who thought up this idea? Or one of those who thought it would be OK to do this? Or just sat silently during the meetings where this was discussed and didn’t pipe up, “This is just WRONG”? I have a message for you.

You’re an asshole.

What’s changed at blog nauseam and why

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Last week, blog nauseam died. This post explains the background to that. You’re probably not that interested, so feel free to skip to the dot points that list the changes that have resulted.

The problem was a faulty WordPress installation was using excessive resources. This caused severe performance issues and resulted in the server software stepping in to throttle the site to prevent more widespread problems. The trigger for the WordPress fault has not been determined and may never be. This is somewhat akin to an old AutoCAD drawing suddenly going bad for unknown reasons. The problem may date back years but only recently became critical.

In discussions with my completely blameless web host, Saratoga Hosting, we determined the best course of action was to create a new, clean WordPress site and transfer over as much as possible from the mortally wounded old installation. This is similar to copying and pasting or inserting valid entities from a bad drawing to a clean one, and this is what we did.

I say ‘we’ because Dave from the most excellent Saratoga did a huge amount of work for me to ensure things went as smoothly as possible and with the best result. This is not the first time I have received quite outstanding above-and-beyond customer service from Saratoga in return for the few measly bucks a month I pay for hosting. Thank you, Dave!

Doing things this way provided opportunities for several improvements to both blog nauseam and its parent site, cadnauseam.com. These include:

Improving performance. A clean install that’s not generating many errors per second will load much faster than one that isn’t, just like a small clean program like BricsCAD will perform much better than an old bloated mess like AutoCAD that’s attempting to do hundreds of things a second even when sitting there doing nothing.
Upgrading site security. In addition to various unseen improvements including upgraded protection against hackers and better backups, the site now uses https SSL security, which is the way things are going to have to be in coming years. You may have noticed that the URL now starts with https:// and displays a little closed padlock, indicating this is a secure site.
Integrating cad nauseam with blog nauseam. My old cad nauseam site was a bunch of hand-coded HTML pages that were real cool in the 90s but which have been neglected for years. It’s now part of the same WordPress installation as the blog, which avoids duplication of various things and is much easier to maintain. It also makes sense for me from a business point of view to have my business site more closely associated with a successful blog.
Modern full-screen interface. The integration of cad nauseam and blog nauseam didn’t work well with the old Tempera site template, so I took the opportunity to switch to a cleaner, more modern looking template, Fluida. In addition to being very configurable, this template does all sorts of fancy hover-over stuff that some of you will undoubtedly hate, but in my tests it performed well and didn’t get in my way. The best thing about it is that it’s now full-width: Tempera was not. Some of you won’t like that change either, but I always dislike using a web site that confines itself to a narrow stripe in the middle of a high resolution CAD screen. Now I don’t have to dislike my own site.
I’ve redesigned the favicon to reflect the dual cad nauseam / blog nauseam nature of the site.

I have now restored the polls and image galleries. The automated redirection of old URLs to the new location should now be working. The downloads page is still a work in progress and will remain hidden for a while, but that’s mostly of historical interest anyway.

Again, my apologies for the breakdown and the inconvenience of change, but I’m glad that there have been quite a few positives arising from a bad situation.

If there are things about the site you don’t like now, feel free to let me know.

Automated .NET 4.7 update kills AutoCAD pre 2017

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Thanks to Robert Green for pointing this out:

Microsoft is installing .NET 4.7 as part of their auto updates and it is causing many legacy Autodesk applications to crash on any ribbon interaction. Touch the ribbon, away goes your software.

If you can keep from installing the 4.7 framework do so. If the damage is already done then uninstall .NET 4.7 and install .NET 4.6.2 using this download link. Note that the uninstall of the offending version must be done first!

AutoCAD 2013 to 2016 and Inventor are affected, and possibly other products. BricsCAD users are unaffected.

It is also reported that you can work around the problem by hacking the registry to identify an earlier .NET version as being installed (the usual caveats apply). That’s described in this Autodesk Knowledgebase article that works around a related but slightly different issue.

Don’t you just love the way continuous automated updates enhance and enrich the user experience?

AutoCAD 2018.0.2 arrives

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AutoCAD 2018.0.1 is dead, long live 2018.0.2!

Here’s the readme.
Here’s the 64-bit direct link.
Here’s the 32-bit direct link.

This supposedly fixes stuff that 2018.0.1 broke, such as the signed VLX thing. Will this one break other stuff? I guess we’ll find out.

AutoCAD 2018.0.1 mystery deepens with silent withdrawal

Autodesk updates Design Review

1 Reply

Despite the previously announced end-of-active-life for Design Review (Autodesk’s DWF viewer), there is now a new release available. This wasn’t supposed to happen, because we should all now be using cloud-based solutions.

A new version of DWG TrueView was needed to deal with the new DWG 2018 format, and one knock-on effect is that a new Design Review was needed to be compatible with DWG TrueView 2018. It’s still only 32-bit, so it appears to be a matter of Autodesk just touching it up enough to keep it compatible.

Interestingly, the new Design Review is not called 2018. Here’s where to find it:

Download page
Readme – read this because there are many limitations and workarounds described
Direct download link

On the bloatware theme, if there’s a particular reason this download (421 MB) is over eight times the size of its predecessor (49 MB), it’s not readily apparent. The installed application is 212 MB, so it’s all a bit mysterious.

The downloaded executable is a WinZip self-extractor. If you’re a CAD Manager, there’s no point in having the unzip happen 100 times for 100 users when it could happen just once, so you’ll want to grab the extracted files and install from those. This installer makes that difficult, but not impossible. If you want to do that, read on. If you’re just installing it once, skip the next two paragraphs.

Running SetupDesignReview.exe (note the lack of version information), the extraction started but I couldn’t find out where it was extracting to. I eventually found it in the folder %Temp%\XXX.tmp, where XXX is a random name, e.g. _AID0D9. This folder gets automatically erased on completion or cancel, so what you need to do is run SetupDesignReview.exe once, wait for the unzipping to finish but don’t go ahead with the install, copy the %Temp%\XXX.tmp folder elsewhere, then cancel the initial installation. You can then run as many installations as you like using the extracted files.

It would be useful to have these things documented. The Installation Help, System Requirements and Readme links in the installer all rather unhelpfully point to a generic Knowledge Network search.

The install proper will uninstall Design Review 2013 without asking, which is antisocial. For example, if you wanted to keep using HP Instant Printing (not supported in the new release), this installation would mess you up. In my case it also threw up an error during that uninstall, although it still seemed to go through with it.

Note there’s no sign of a release number. The only versioning I can find is in Help > About, with a build version of 14.0.0.177. When you run it, you’ll notice that it hasn’t had the UI of Doom treatment, so it looks like a cut-down AutoCAD from a few releases ago. Not a bad thing.

How about the product itself? Seems to work OK. If you go to open something, it will show you DWG files as well as DWF(x) files. What happens if you try to open a DWG file? This.

Everybody familiar with versioning knows you never put “the latest version” on anything because it’s meaningless. I was once told about a Head Drafter in the early CAD days who had special stamps made up to stamp paper plots with THIS IS THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS DRAWING. The above message is about that smart.

What happens when you pick the Learn More button? Nothing. So I learned nothing.

Anything else? Well, on my system, it takes about twice as long to start up this simple DWF viewer than it does to start up a full-blown CAD application. Want to take a guess at which application I mean?

Can’t complain too much. This product is free, Autodesk is still providing it and still making efforts to keep it up to date. Props for that much, at least.

AutoCAD 2018.0.1 mystery partially resolved but questions remain

6 Replies

If, like me, you don’t/won’t/can’t have Autodesk desktop app running on your systems, the only current official way to get at the download is using Autodesk Account (but read the whole of this post before you go there). That’s also how you get at information about the update. Go to Management > AutoCAD > Downloads > Updates & Add-ons. From there, it’s not obvious how to get the information, but it’s under More options.

From there, pick View Details. This will show you the following information (after you pick More):

As you can see, the severity is considered high. If you pick View release notes, you can see the readme, or you can go straight to it if you have this direct link. Here are the fixes described in the readme:

Occasional crashes when ending an AutoCAD session using specific API code no longer occur.
Publishing annotative multiline attributes no longer results in incorrect annotative scaling.
PFB fonts can now be compiled successfully as SHX files.
The border of a mask is no longer plotted in PDFs when “Lines Merge” is turned on.

Although it would be easy to have a go at Autodesk for shipping a product that needs fixing within hours of release, that wouldn’t be entirely fair. No software is flawless. Stuff happens, and the sooner fixes are provided to resolve that stuff, the better. So I commend Autodesk for getting this fix out quickly.

That doesn’t mean Autodesk is blameless, though. Read on.

First, the way the information about this update was (or wasn’t) disseminated was sub-optimal. It has required too much prodding and guesswork to get to the point we are now, and we’re still not where we should be.

Next, there’s scant information in the readme. I don’t see any documented way of including this fix in a deployment, for example. That means it’s not possible to create a one-step automated install without resorting to trickery.

Further, this update isn’t available on the main Autodesk site. It needs to be. Even if you know the version number to look for, a search at autodesk.com will come up blank:

Using the Autodesk Knowledge Network Download Finder won’t help, either:

Fortunately, these direct links appear to work:

This brings me to my fourth point of criticism. See that the 64-bit executable has “r2” on it? The one I downloaded on 23 March doesn’t. The 64-bit executables are similar in size to each other but the binary content is different. The 32-bit 2018.0.1 has a date of 22 March and the 64-bit 2018.0.1 r2 has a date of 24 March. So it looks like the patch has been patched, at least for 64-bit users.

Information on this patch-patch is non-existent. Should somebody who downloaded and applied the 64-bit 2018.0.1, download and apply 2018.0.1 r2? Will that work? Do they need to uninstall 2018.0.1 first? How should they do that? Will the 32-bit 2018.0.1 also be updated to r2? Should those users hang off a few days to avoid wasting time or go ahead with what’s there now?

Over to you, Autodesk.

AutoCAD 2018 – there’s already an update

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If you downloaded and installed AutoCAD 2018 yesterday and don’t/won’t/can’t have Autodesk desktop app running on your systems, you may already have another download to do, because AutoCAD 2018.0.1 is out.

At the time of writing there is no sign of this update on Autodesk’s main site, but you can get at it using Autodesk Account. Go to Management > AutoCAD > Downloads > Updates & Add-ons.

All that’s downloaded is an executable. No readme, nothing. There is currently no official information about the reasons behind this update, what it includes, what it might affect, how to include it in a deployment, etc. You’ll need to make up your own mind whether to install this update now or wait for information about it. I suggest the latter.

Of course, if you’re using desktop app and allowing automatic updates, you don’t need to worry about any of that that. Just trust Autodesk to not break anything and hope for the best.

What’s the worst that could happen?

Edit: see this post for further information.