Autodesk University 2024 - The Old Revit Gang

 

Yesterday I made a quick road trip to San Diego to attend a breakfast gathering of the "old Revit gang" that were attending this year's Autodesk University. Jim Balding, center in red kneeling, organized it all. He expected 15 people might actually be able to attend we nearly doubled that number.

Some of these people helped create Revit from nothing, used Revit very very early, are still working on Revit or with Autodesk now as well as either working in or have created their own companies inspired by and to do things that enhance what Revit does...or some combination of all of the above. Put the names of the people you know/recognize in the comments. It's a test, haha.

While wandering the conference after our breakfast meeting, I got to see many other people, who have meant a great deal to me through the years. Later that evening I also got to briefly catch up with an old friend who was mixing the audio for the evening's entertainment, Counting Crows. It was a great day!

My hats off to you all, keep on keep on!

Post Echo - Units - Accuracy - Tolerance

I saw David Baldacchino's tweet yesterday sharing a link to a blog post for another software product called FME from Safe Software. The article goes into detail more related to their own product naturally but it does describe the math and computer problems that developers deal with. I found it quite interesting as well as confirming much of what I'd read and been told in the past.

Have a look! It's titled: "FME 2018 Infinity War: How Automatic Tolerance Defeats Infinite Precision without a Snap – but with Anchored Vertices!"

My Ongoing Saga of Autodesk Desktop Application

This poor half blind, lame in one-leg, incontinent piece of software continues to amuse and aggravate me. Twice in the last two weeks it has let me know I'm missing some updates.

Amusingly and aggravatingly ... they've all been installed already.

So I indulge it and try to install them again thinking that will help it see better. Nope ... sure enough ...the application that needs the update figures out it is installed already.

Typical response for all four items...

New Revit Utilities - PKH Lineworks

Phil DeBrandt announced at AUGI that he has made several utilities for Revit available at his web site. The utilities are branded as ReVVed.

The utilities are comprised of the following functions:

• Merge Text - merge multiple text notes into a single note.
• Change Case - changes the case of selected text notes to a user specified case.(Upper, lower, mixed)
• Upper Case - changes the case of notes to all upper case with a single click or hotkey.
• Web Link - opens a web browser to the URL stored in Revit components.
• Polyline - adjust the total length of end-to-end lines. (Like travel distances)

You can download the utilities from his site.

Dept. of Echo - Compiled Revit 2011 SDK

If the Revit API scares or intimidates you then Guy's post tonight might help take the edge off.

For anyone who reads this and has very little, if any, software or programming background:

• SDK stands for "software developer's kit"
• API stands for "application programming interface"
• "compiled" means the code is organized into a format that the computer can run and let a regular person like me use.

The examples that come with Revit are not compiled for the most part, tech speak for can't run them in Revit yet. Here's the first paragraph in his post:

...snip...
I’ve had some requests for compiled assemblies of the Autodesk Revit 2011 API SDK samples. They’re useful for those of you who don’t have Visual Studio installed or don’t know how to compile them. Or if you’re wondering what’s supplied in the SDK and just what’s possible with the API. This isn’t as user friendly as it could be due to the number of commands, but here’s a download of all SDK samples . The SDK is an impressive resource now.
...snip...

You can read his post and download the examples. Follow his instructions to get them up and running and check them out. They might even help get you interested in dabbling a bit with the API, though it isn't really a dabbler's environment, more a intense dabbler?

Thanks Guy!!

Hard Drive Space - A Little Off Topic

This morning was all planned out. Then an email in the first of the climb out of bed bunch changes things a bit. Living on the "left" or West coast means that most of the country gets at least a couple hour head start. I now need to download and install some stuff. Download done...start install, no disk space...huh??

But I've got a 150gb hard drive and most of my stuff is on an external drive. Where did it go? I'm not really sure...yet. I have been on a splurge lately installing various applications to check out etc. I guess I lost track of the impact on the hard drive. I swear it was half full last night...well, I think so...maybe.

Then again I've been enduring the same Microsoft Update attempting to install for the last month and a half. Install it and the little shield goes away for about ten minutes and up pops another warning, "Update Ready"... A check with Microsoft's site suggests running a check for Update status. Sure enough there it is and a couple others. Finally today...it appears to have stuck, or they've killed it so it doesn't hassle anyone anymore.

So I spent my day, in between doing the things I was supposed to do, deciding which applications I really need to keep on my computer. Throw in a disk cleanup session that ran for most of the day... Oh, well...10 hours later and I can now install what I started to install at 7:30 am.