Ad

Thursday, December 25, 2008

US Viewers

This is the second post in a series of uninteresting posts. In this post I'm providing a table of the top 10 States in the US of where the readers of this blog come from. The entire list contains all 52 states. Manchester, New Hampshire had a total of 144 visits (89 coming from an Autodesk Network, so at least on Civil 3D developer occasionally reads the blog).

California

2,640

Texas

1,216

Washington

803

Florida

795

Colorado

546

New York

467

Virginia

442

Pennsylvania

404

Arizona

391

Illinois

379

Monday, December 22, 2008

Miracle or Something Else

The current media coverage of the accident of Continental Flight 1404 is focusing on the statement of Assistant Denver Fire Chief Bill Davis' statement of "It was a miracle...that everybody survived the impact and fire." While all of the facts on how the accident occurred will not be known for quite a while while the NTSB investigates the incident, I think he, and the media, needs to give credit to the individuals that ensured that fatalities would be limited. How about mentioning the work Engineers did in designing safety features into the plane, or the flight attendants who instructed the passengers on how to exit the plane in an emergency and then hopefully assisting the passengers in exiting the plane in a safe manner. Or the firefighters who arrived and extinguished the fire in a quick manner, or the developers of the fire suppression system that enabled the fire to be extinguished in about 45 seconds. It seems to me the media focuses too much on sensationalist statements or on what went wrong rather than what goes right.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Congratulations Alexander

I'd like to congratulate my brother, Alexander, on officially becoming an Eagle Scout. I attended his Eagle Court of Honor yesterday to see him get the official recognition of the achievement which he completed EagleScout_4Ksome time ago. This wasn't my first Eagle Court of Honor I've attended, I attended my own in '92 and my other brother's in '94 along with numerous other individuals from Troop 675 in Irvine California, but this one definitely had the most Eagle Scouts sitting in the Eagle's Nest. There was 25 Eagle Scouts, including the three who where being recognized in attendance. Usually it's about five other Eagle Scouts.

I've always appreciated the achievement of becoming an Eagle Scout but don't think I recognized the magnitude of the achievement until yesterday.  I knew about 4% of scouts that join the Boy Scouts became Eagle Scouts and understood what it took to become an Eagle Scout, but I think Mike Rowe's letter (from Dirty Jobs fame) put the achievement in a different perspective for me. I think it shows how difficult achieving the award is and how it takes perseverance to follow through with it.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Skipping the Feature Line Dialog Box

So you have lots of polylines to convert into feature lines and you don't want to see the dialog box that pops up each time, what to do? You could shoot your monitor, but you'd probably get fired. Here's a more productive method using VBA. The code below is pretty basic, it doesn't have any fancy bells and whistles though. The first part of the code has you pick the polyline you want converted. If you wanted to do 3Dpolylines, just change the AcadLWPolyline to Acad3DPolyline or you could have the code accept both types of objects, that's for another post or a chapter in a book.

Once we've got the polyline we need to make sure a site exists to put the feature line in and if one doesn't exist the code goes ahead and creates a new site called "NewSite". Now the code creates a variable to store the feature line objects in which is part of the site. The site used is the first one in the Sites list. If you wanted to get fancy you could add a prompt for the user to have the ability to select a site, but that's another post. Next the first feature line style in the drawing is used for the feature line style. Now finally the feature line is created.

image

The code above may be found on this page: http://style.civil3dreminders.com/programming

Monday, December 15, 2008

Disneyland

Disneyland has announced it is giving a special day for Civil DDD at Disneyland, see the link below.
http://www.sun7news.com/index.php?firstname=Civil&lastname=3DDD&celebration=Holidays

Well not really, if you want your special day or someone else you know. Take the link above and change the Civil to your first name and the 3DDD to your last name.

Yes, I'm a sucker for giving people free advertising.

LinkWithin

Blog Widget by LinkWithin

Ad