CADalyst articles from October 2003

CADalyst archives from October 2003

Celebrate your success: sometimes a turn of events blows the dust off an old saying, making it sparkle with relevance. I experienced this recently with the phrase "nothing succeeds like success," which previously seemed simply a statement I could not argue with. Now I see it as a fundamental truth, almost essential to meaningful existence. And all because I've taken the advice of a business coach.(Editor's window: opinions, comments, and predictions)
October 1, 2003... Chris Mullins (www.mullinsmediagroup.com) advises clients to record successes each day in a journal. At first I did not appreciate the value of this exercise, and I defined successes too narrowly as major accomplishments. But I've learned that...

Corrections (1).(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2003... Table 1 on p. 41 of "Simulation speeds product design" (August 2003) misrepresents Daratech's market data. The PLM market, which includes totals for Mechanical CAD/CAM and Virtual Prototyping, is around $7.5 billion. The figure for Virtual...

Desktop computers.(hardware)(iBM ThinkCentre S50, M50 and A50p)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... IBM announced its new ThinkCentre desktop line: the ThinkCentre S50 ($7291), M50 ($9791), and A50p ($6991). The S50 is 62% smaller than the average IBM desktop, and the A50p is geared toward multimedia. The ThinkCentre M Series desktops feature...

Itanium 2-based workstations.(hardware)
October 1, 2003... Hewlett-Packard announced its Intel Itanium 2-based servers and workstations--the zx6000 starts at $4,896 and delivers 50% faster application performance than the previous Itanium 2-based systems, according to the company. Versions of the...

LCD monitors.(hardware)(Eizo Nanao Technologies FlexScan L695 and ColorEdge CG21)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2003... Eizo announced the 18.10 FlexScan L695 LCD Monitor ($1,189) and the 21.30 ColorEdge CG21 ($2,899). The FlexScan L695 offers hardware support for portrait and landscape modes and includes picture-in-picture capabilities from two PC sources....

What's next for MCAD? The quest for intuitive software.
October 1, 2003... Much confusion is circulating in the MCAD marketplace about PLM (product lifecycle management). What does it mean, and how is it changing product development? Though CAD remains a keystone of PLM, both are changing rapidly. Our design processes...

Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional: new PDF options protect your design data.(cadalyst labs review)(and related article)(Software Review)(Product/Service Evaluation)
October 1, 2003... After it sat unused for a year and a half, I finally threw out my fax machine and turned off my dedicated fax line. No, I haven't suddenly, after more than twenty years in this business, become a Luddite. What doomed my fax machine is the PDF...

Hot new graphics cards shine on dual AMD Opteron system; graphics cards for every CAD user.(First look reviews: brief hands-on product reviews)(Hardware Review)(Product/Service Evaluation)
October 1, 2003... This special First Look roundup spans the range of workstation graphics card performance, from entry level to top end. The entry-level graphics card is a newly introduced ATI FireGL T2-128 card with 128MB of RAM. The top-end card is NVIDIA's FX...

Holy Battman, Robin! AutoCAD dynamic duo makes short work of block attribute editing.(Learning curve: strengthen your knowledge of AutoCAD commands)
October 1, 2003... Captain LearnCurve spent the morning water-skiing, the afternoon windsurfing, and was now sitting by the campfire with his gorgeous wife, waiting for the wood-fired sauna to heat up. Suddenly, he was inundated with an e-mail from a reader who,...

Master VBA dialog boxes: drag and drop to build dialog boxes to gather data for your VBA routines.(Lessons in programming: how to customize AutoCAD)
October 1, 2003... One time-saving feature of VBA (Visual BASIC for Applications) is its ability to create forms and dialog boxes to gather data for your programs. Using AutoCAD, we'll look at how to code VBA controls for user-defined forms or dialog boxes by...

Clipbard chaos: copy vector vexation.(Autocad clinic: AutoCAD helpline answers your support questions)
October 1, 2003... When I use the Copy Vector command in AutoCAD Release 12, only selected vectors copy and paste into third-party applications. In AutoCAD 20001, the whole vectors, background, and the proportionate area paste into the third-party application....

Tips from our readers.(hot tip harry)
October 1, 2003... $50 BONUS WINNER LAYOUT SWITCH Tip #1900 [layout_sw.lsp] Layout_sw lets you assign different LTSCALE, DIMSCALE, and TEXTSTYLE values for each layout tab, including model space, in AutoCAD 2000 and higher. Go to the layout you want...

Corrections (2).(Correction Notice)
October 1, 2003... TIP #1893. Chris Ridder, the author of lumber.lsp (August 2003), says that the ACTION_TILE calls the wrong key. Line 2920 should be: (ACTION_TILE "width" "(cdtk:lmbr-w_p $value)"). We've added the updated file to August's code. TIP #1987....