Category: News

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 2 (Jan 22) General Session

Another amazing day at SolidWorks World 2008 started at this day’s General Session.  Both keynote speakers are greats in their own time.  Dr. Donald A. Norman has a pedigree too long for me to go into here without having to site multiple references and a lengthy list of achievements.  He was billed by the SWW8 introduction as being in the ranks of Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Thomas Edison for having been presented with the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute.  His speech was a cleaver.  He discussed the design of every day things in the context of what is good design and what is poor design.  One point he made was that a good design is intuitive.  It doesn’t need signs just so that the user can understand the product.  He spent quite a lot of time showing poorly designed products with signs everywhere on them and comparing these to well designed products that are so simple, no explanation is needed, or perhaps it only needs explanation once and then never again.  He showed examples of how pointless signs are, especially when their meaning is lost.  The irony of this is that I found such a pointless sign within an hour after his presentation right at SolidWorks World 2008.  Those of us who saw Dr. Norman’s presentation will likely have a deeper appreciation of this sign, and yet be just as confused by what it could possible mean as anyone else would be. 

Crazy meaningless sign posted at SolidWorks World 2008

Seriously, what in the world could this sign mean and why is it taped to the wall, and how come it mentions “Solid Works”?  Is this instructions to the SolidWorks software not to hit the wall, or randomly placed instructions for humans not to hit SolidWorks?  Or is it that for some reason, the sign’s maker was concerned people attending SWW8 would have sudden and uncontrollable urges to go around hitting this particular spot on the wall?  If so, what’s so special about this spot that makes hitting it worse than striking some other spot on the wall?  Oh, and why did they spell SolidWorks with a space in the middle as “Solid Works”?  So much information is packaged in this meaningless sign. 

The other keynote speaker was Dr. Robert Ballard.  He is another person with a long laundry list of accomplishments.  His most pop culture oriented claim to fame is that he was co-discoverer of the HMS Titanic.  Dr. Robert Ballard talked about his program to bring ocean exploration into the class room, literally.  This is being accomplished by using the most advanced communications technology available.  I think he was almost bragging about the fact that he has I2 access for his many projects.  I2?  A.K.A. Internet 2.  It’s the next generation of the Interest that is much faster and has much higher capacity than our slow old dumpy Internet.  DSL vs. Cable?  This is nothing and meaningless.  I2 is the future.  Of course, normal human beings cannot get access to I2 right now, and prolly won’t be able to for many years, but it was fun watching Dr. Ballard go into his many uses of it.  How does he use I2?  Because of its extremely wide bandwidth, he is able to transmit huge amounts of data.  This allows him to send a ship out to sea that can launch an ocean exploring robot.  That robot can be controlled from a land based location which is no where near where the exploration is going on.  Everything the robot sees is transmitted half-way across the planet where it is also being controlled.  This great feat was Dr. Ballard’s goal since the 1970’s and now he has made it happen.

Now, the question of this General Session really is, who is this mysterious female photographer who is silhouetted against the stage backdrop that was taking photos of all of us? 

Mystery woman of SWW8

Feeling Better after SWW 2008

*Previously written but accidentally left pending*

My head is clearing.  Thursday after the SWW2008 close I came down with something awful.  I found myself huddled in the fetal position all day and night.  Some of you may have seen me in that same position Saturday in the airport terminal.  Bless my wife for getting delta airlines to provide a coule of blankets while we waited for our 2 hour delayed flight.  Note to self – When running a 103 degree temp DO NOT GET ON A PLANE.  It took 3 days for my head to decompress.

Enough of the self pity let’s talk about the conference-

The week flew by much faster than I would like it to.  My time started Saturday moring with alpha testing.  Because of the NDA that uses my wife as collateral I can not comment too much about it but I do like the ideas that we worked on- Keep it up COSMOS group.

Sunday was filled with Round Table discussions.  I usually enjoy these because i get a glimpse into the minds of other users and how they are using the software.  honestly after these session I have enough content for a 3 hour stand up routine as well as 2 months worth of ideas I want to try to implement in my companies.   This year was a little different as I had much more to offer than most.  One of my concerns with the release of 2008 was the DimXpert.  Some of you may have already seen some of my concerns about this really cool functionality.  The SolidWorks Guy (forgive the mispelling) Avelon, was very attentive to my concerns and had some really good ideas for the continuation of this tool.  Here is a list of what I find problems with – 1. Many people have no idea what GD&T is and now they can make even more expensive and impossible parts with an easy button that is not really that easy.  2. Users have no idea what ANSI/ASME 14 standard this tool is pulling from. 3. With the epidemic of poor modeling to get the job done, this enables even more of that by allowing users to apply appropriate dimensioning &  tolerancing after the model is complete without any regard to how these parts will react when edited later..  Later on in the week Avelon did a great demonstration of DimXpert which really calmed me down.  There is a method to using this tool and it is now my job to learn that method and apply it to the teaches here at NTI.

Another topic I commented on is about Top Down Assembly.  Far too often I have found rascally users finding a part that was deisgned Top Down and Say “this part will work great for my new assembly” modify the part and completely hose up a released products documentation.  I asked for a Release To Production button that would take Top Down Assembly design and “completely” break references to the assembly changing up to surface to Blind and the current dimension so on and so forth.  I saw some SW employee eye brows raise to this idea.  Especially when another attendee discussed how his company remodeled every thing designed top down prior to product release. Productivity lost i say.

Anyhow overall Sunday was very successful for me.  I was able to vent and be heard in the same breath.  I was able to compliment and be heard when appropriate and I met several new people who share some of my concerns.

My next blog will discuss the actual conference proceedings.

Until then – Work Hard, Play Harder

Chris MacCormack

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1 (Jan 21) A Commanding Presence

One of the stars that kept popping up all over the place at SWW8 was the famous/infamous Matt Lombard.  As mentioned, I attended his Hybrid Modeling breakout session.  Before showing up, I didn’t know what to expect.  First of all, his breakout session was in one of the large rooms, that could seat possibly  500 people.  I don’t really know.  I know it was pretty full in comparison to other sessions this year.  I’m not going to go into too much detail about the session’s agenda since I covered that already.  Instead, there are other items of note. 

In a moment of surreal quality, right in the middle of an audience member asking him a question, Matt recognizes him and declares something along the line, “I’ve been looking all over for you! I have it right here.”  He then proceeds to find a copy of his SolidWorks book and brings it down to his faithful attendee.  At the same time, I see a hand reach out from the front row or so grasping some amount of dollar bills.  Matt makes the exchange, declaring some self-derogatory statement and continues the presentation. 

This photo here is of Matt lording over the model he is about to render subservient to his will.

Lord Lombard commanding his model

Two other moments came up where he recognized others in the audience (if I remember right, SolidWorks perennials of some sort)  and declared his complete amazement that they where there listening to little ol’ him.  Just because you write a highly regarded book about SolidWorks doesn’t preclude you from being in awe of others.

The session was informative and entertaining in the shear unexpected natural phenomenon known as Matt Lombard. 

SolidWorks World 2008 Animation

SolidWorks World 2008 Inspired to Design VEXplorer Video from Solidsmack on Vimeo.

This was the introduction animation (linked above) used each day at the start of the General Session.  In a presentation with Jeff Ray, VEXplorer was introduced.  This is a Student Design Kit where kids of ages 10 and up can build their own robot, and design other variations with the Student Edition of SolidWorks, which is now provided for free with the robot kit.  Honestly, I wasn’t that impressed with the robot itself.  I saw the live demonstration of the robot in the Partners Pavilion.  It would be fun for one or two uses for one or two times.  I don’t see what would keep the average kid coming back to it.  However, it is a start in the right direction to help inspire kids to explore design at a younger age.  It is certainly a good way to expose kids to SolidWorks as the preferred software for accomplishing engineering tasks.

SolidWorks World 2008 Day 1: The General Session

Each day of SolidWorks World kicks off with a General Session.  Each day had surprises.  Of course, to experience all of this requires getting up early enough in the morning.  The crowd quickly filled up the area outside of the General Session auditorium of the San Diego Convention Center.  Even on the first day, I developed quite the talent of surfing through the crowds to get closer to the doors into the General Session auditorium to get a good seat when the door swung open.

 Outside the General Session, NorthCrowd outside of General Session, South

It was standing room only in the General Session.  Even with thousands of seats, hundreds of people where left standing.  Estimates ranged over 4700 attendees.

General Session, facing the stage 1 General Session, facing stage 2

General Session, facing doors

On Monday, the surprise guest was Danny Forster, whose trademark is expressing his deep fear of heights.  He is the host of Built it Bigger on Discovery Channel, and a prominent architect and engineer.  Despite the fact that he did give a rather interesting and engaging presentation that discussed everything from home design to the marriage of architecture and engineering that went into the University of Phoenix Stadium, I am surprised he didn’t get booed off of the stage early on as he made it a point to state that he used AutoCAD to design one of his buildings.  SolidWorks users must be a more forgiving bunch than I would’ve thought.  I know he did it on purpose; the rat.

KIVA Systems made an interesting presentation where they showed off a robotic system that replaces the need to send people into a factory to retrieve items.  Another robot highlighted at the conference in the SolidWorks intro animation was of a robot being designed and built.  It turned out that this robot is a built-it-yourself kit and being sold for the ages 10 and up crowd.  Included with the robot is SolidWorks Student Edition!  Talk about hooking the kids young!  More on this later on.

There was another surprise on Monday; one that was both fascinating and a bit scary at the same time. See, there’s this guy named Theo Jansen.  He is a kinetic sculptor that builds “Beach Beasts”, based on skeleton like designs that are powered by nothing more than the wind.  He’s designed the creatures (as he also called them) to become so sophisticated, they are able to mechanically sense their environment, and mechanically respond to it.  For example, if one of these creatures walks up to the ocean’s edge, it knows to start going the other way to avoid the water.  It does this without the use of any electronics at all.  It’s all plastic tubing.  During his presentation, Mr. Jansen appeared to be one of those people that successively balances the line between genius and insanity.  However, off stage was a different story.  I talked to some of the facilities contractors for SolidWorks World 2008 later that night at one of the local bars.  They where the crew that helped Mr. Jansen assembly one of the creatures for an on-stage demonstration.  Those fellows couldn’t wait to tell me that they think he had crossed well into the realm of insanity, often talking about his creations as though they where actual pets; and that he wanted his creatures to survive long after he passed on.  He was definately the most provocative presenter during the Monday session.  The video about him is too long to post here, so check out this YouTube link.

At the end of the General Session, everyone filed out into convention center’s maze of hallways, filtering into the many different Breakout sessions, Hands-on sessions and the Partners Pavilion.

Lorono’s SolidWorks Resources

This is minor announcement about Lorono’s SolidWorks Resources.  This is my website with tons of SolidWorks related file downloads, weblinks, tips, tricks, etc.  Recently, I improved functionality of the site so that when new content is added, notification will appear on the homepage.  This will allow for easier navigation to areas where new content is added.  Of course, all content is still easily accessable by exploring the site’s many areas directly.