Redefined Horizons Blog

Lathrop High School ACE Team

Last Wednesday evening I gave  group of high school students a crash course in 3D modeling using SketchUp. It was an interesting demo, as I hadn’t used SketchUp for a long time. The students are required to use SketchUp to prepare a 3D model and rendering of the monument they are designing. The students are designing the monument to represent the City of Sacramento as part of the Sacramento ACE design competition.

The American Surveyor – Footsteps Column

I wrapped up the article graphics for two (2) of my latest articles on boundary surveying that will be published in the Footsteps column of  The American  Surveyor Magazine. The graphics for my article on Best Practices for Very Large Boundary Surveys were completed on Friday. Today I completed the graphics for an article discussing the court case Fripps versus Walters. I’ll start working on the graphics for my article Determining Property Corner History tomorrow. The first of these 3 articles, Best Practices for Very Large Boundary Surveys, should be published in the February issue of the American Surveyor.

CCVGPG Working Groups

I started work today on the web pages for the working groups of the California Central Valley Geospatial Professionals Group. I hope to have the the web pages up this week.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Here is a reading list I found for improving presentations when I was looking for the Slideology book web site. It looks like there are at least a couple of titles there that I need to add to my bookshelf.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I’ve been working on a redesign of the Redefined Horizons web site. As part of that process I’ve been analyzing the layout and styling of other web sites that I admire. I wanted a way to mark up screen captures of these web sites with my comments on their graphic design. I have Adobe Standard at work, but not at home. A Google search turned up a cool web application called Crocodoc. It allows you to load images and add mark-up comments. You can then share your mark-up comments with others. You can view a mark-up I did of the American Public Media Marketplace web site. You can also view a similar mark-up of the NPR home page.

It is a very slick web application and was well-suited for my purpose. My only complaint was that the PDF export of my mark-up documents didn’t work on my Ubuntu Linux desktop or my Microsoft Windows 7 laptop. I’m sure this is a bug they will get fixed.

If your looking for a free mark-up tool, give Crocodoc a try.

The Sunburned Surveyor

The newsletter from Cadalyst recently had a tip on how to prevent text mirroring in AutoCAD. (This happens when you use the mirror command in AutoCAD. Typically you want to mirror the text anchor point, but not the letters of the text. If the letters are mirrored, its very hard to read…without a mirror.)

Since mirroring the letters of text in AutoCAD has always irritated me, I wanted to share the tip with my users.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I use BricsCAD on my Linux computers. They’ve recently released Version 12. You can learn about the new features in this verison from the Bricsys web page with the list of BrcisCAD Version 12 features.

The most exciting features to me are the hatch trim, custom hatch patterns, PDF underlay enhancements, and associative dimensions.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I just got an e-mail announcing the release of TurboCAD LTE 4. I was surprised to learn that TurboCAD has Ruby scripting and support for import of Google SketchUp files. Most impressive. Too bad they don’t have a Linux version. Looks like I will be sticking with BricsCAD for now.

The Sunburned Surveyor

The OpenLayers book as an entire chapter devoted to developing web applications with Firebug. Firebug is a web development plug-in for the Firefox web browser. I took the plug-in for a drive with the GIS web viewer application I’m developing. What I’ve seen so far I really like. Firebug allows you to execute Javascript code, tweak your CSS, and tweak your HTML and dynamically updates your web page. (The changes are not saved back to your files, so you don’t have to worry about breaking anything while you troubleshoot or experiment.) I hope to post more about the Firebug extension for Firefox as I work with it. In the meantime, give it a try yourself: its free and open source!

The Sunburned Surveyor

The August 20^th to 26^th issue of Economist Magazine has an article entitled Winning Streak that talks about the recent success of HBO. (According to the article HBO made 4 billion dollars in 2010.) The article describes a key element of HBO’s success. What is that key? Quality content. The article states that HBO has “…lavished good, smart product on its viewers, and in the process raised the entire industry’s creative game.”

I think the example of HBO provides a valuable lesson for media companies and web developers. There is no short cut or gimmick that can replace the hard work needed to create great content. I was pretty disappointed at the lack of entertaining and informative programming on my favorite cable channels (Discover, Science, History). As technology continues to revolutionize the media industry, media companies are going to have to find a way to produce great content. That will be the best way to survive.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I tried Typekit a while back. I never could get the service to work properly in my own web sites. Using the web fonts provided by Google was always easier.

Today Adobe announced it was buying Typekit. From the press release, it seems this is part of a move by Adobe to offer more services “from the cloud”. I’m not sure what the overall strategy is here, but it will be interesting to see how this purchase changes fonts on the web.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Autodesk recently release a free 3D modeling program called 123D. Here is a Desktop Engineering video showing some features of 123D.

Autodesk doesn’t usually do “free”. Is this an attempt by AutoCAD to compete with users that like SketchUp?

I’ll have to download the program and give it a try. (From the video it sounds like the program has some pretty strict hardware requirements. It may not run well on some older or wimpy computers.)

The Sunburned Surveyor