When I heard that Bricsys had shipped Bricscad for Linux, I was anxious to get to work on supporting the Linux platform. The first order of business was getting familiar with Linux. For that, I chose Ubuntu 10.10 32-bit running on a VMWare Workstation 7.1 (http://www.vmware.com/workstation) virtual machine hosted on my Windows 7 64-bit workstation. ...
If you’re an ObjectARX programmer, you may still be using Visual Studio 2008 because you’ve been told that you must. It’s true that you need Visual Studio 2008 installed to compile native ObjectARX code, but with Daffodil you can do all your work in the Visual Studio 2010 IDE. ...
If you’re upgrading to AutoCAD 2012, don’t forget to also disable InfoCenter (unless you really need it). Just download and install AcadInfoCenterOff to disable it on any version of AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT. If you already have AcadInfoCenterOff installed, you can just run a repair install to apply it to a newly installed instance of AutoCAD 2012.
One of the stages in simplifying an AutoCAD software problem is to rule out (or in) third party add-ons as the cause. To do that, you’ll need a “plain vanilla” test bed configuration that consists of only the out-of-the-box components with no add-ons loaded. ...
When a customer reports a drawing-specific issue, the next stage in simplifying the problem is to eliminate all drawing content that has no bearing on the problem. Unless the drawing object that causes the problem is obvious and can be immediately ascertained, I use the divide-and-conquer method to zero in on the cause. ...
One type of support request that I occasionally receive from CADVault users goes something like “when I create a vault, AutoCAD crashes”. I’ve learned that problems like this are usually drawing-specific, so before going any further in simplifying the problem I ask the customer to check whether the problem occurs in an empty drawing. But there’s a trick to this. ...
One of the most important skills in resolving technical problems is not problem solving, but problem definition. Stripping a problem down to its essence often makes the solution obvious. I think this is generally true, but especially true in my experience with software tech support and tracking down software bugs. ...
Excited news stories this morning about how your computer is vulnerable to attack from a phone plugged into your USB port (http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20028919-245.html) made me chuckle. This “novel hack” involves making an Android phone mimic a USB keyboard in order to send keystrokes to the computer. Cool, but why wouldn’t a hacker just use a USB keyboard in the first place? ...
One of the required tools in a programmer’s toolbox is a tool for comparing files. File comparison utilities have come a long way since the original Unix diff command, but this genre of utilities is still referred to as diff tools. For Windows, I use an open source diff utility called WinMerge. WinMerge includes a shell extension that makes it easy to use from within Windows Explorer. ...
Heap corruption bugs in C++ code can present some difficult debugging challenges. Often the actual corruption goes unnoticed until some apparently random point in the future when the corrupt memory is accessed by unrelated code. In such cases, it’s almost impossible to infer the location of the bug using typical debugging tools. ...
Notes on the Windows offline files cache and RoboCache, a command-line tool for managing it.
Over the years, I and others have provided instructions for turning off the AutoCAD InfoCenter (or Communication Center in older versions). The instructions are different depending on the AutoCAD version. To make things simple, I decided to roll them all up into a single one-size-fits-all MSI file that disables InfoCenter for any and all versions of AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT in one fell swoop. ...