Mike Puckett's Blog

Riverside Municipal Air Show

One of my favorite weekend activities to do is attend local air shows.  The end of March each year kind of kicks off the air show season in So Cal.  First up is one of the largest municipal airport shows in the state.  The show always gets some real good military aircraft support, along with lots or war birds and acrobatics.  Here are a few of the near 1,100 pictures I took:

Next up is the March Air Reserve Base show in the beginning of May featuring the Thunderbirds, then it's the Chino Planes of Fame Museum show at the end of May, and then the Edwards Air Base and Miramar Naval Air Station end out the season in October.

A Free Graphics Card? Membership Has It’s Privileges!

What is the number one computer component you can think of that has the most affect on Solidworks performance? I would say the video card. But who has $700 to spend on a high end graphics card? Well for the members of the Los Angeles Area Solidworks User Group, they all have a shot to win one for free. The Quadro FX line of video cards from nVidia is some of the best video cards available for Cad applications like Solidworks. The Quadro's and their drivers are specifically engineered for use with many Cad programs including Solidworks. The nice folks at nVidia have graciously donated a $699 Quadro FX 1700 to be given away at the April 10^th meeting of the L.A. User Group. At the Feb meeting, members were given a set of rules to model a household item. The submissions will then be judged by the meeting attendees, and a winner will be announced. Stay tuned here for a wrap up of the entries and the winner after the April 10^th meeting.

If you have never attended a User Group meeting, there are many similar benefits you are simply missing out on. Now while not every meeting has prizes of this level to give away, you will be surprised what is given out from time to time. So instead of wishing you lived in L.A. so you could have a shot at the video card, head over to the Solidworks User Group Network Page to locate a group near you. Just about every group around the world is free to attend, and many of them meet every other month.

Note: I chose to promote this card for two reasons. First, I believe in promoting products that I have used myself, and can honestly recommend to others. Second, nVidia offered to donate one to give away without asking for anything in return. From time to time I will try to offer up other reviews of products that I have used that I feel some of you can benefit from! I will only discuss products that I would personally use myself.

Vista 32-Bit Showing 4GB Ram?

It's true, Windows Vista 32-bit now shows the current amount of "installed" memory:

Ah, but there is a catch, the word installed is in quotes because it is simply a reporting change, and 32-bit still doesnt take advantage of anything over about 3.25:

"This change occurs because Windows Vista with SP1 reports how much physical memory installed on your computer. All versions of Windows NT-based operating systems before Windows Vista Service SP1 report how much memory available to the operating system. This change in Windows Vista SP1 is a reporting change only"

Taken from a Windows Support Page

Is The Grass All That Greener?

As we all work our way around and sometimes through software bugs, and annoying feature problems in Solidworks, we sometimes wonder is there something better out there we don't know about:

"The Future of CAD Software"

By reading those comments, you certainly get a better feeling that those dreams of vast open green fields are actually dead and brown! Good thing that company only claims to be have 80% of Solidworks capabilities, if they had 100%, those users would probably choose to become a monk!

Is Minnesota Bad Luck For Me?

On our last trip I forgot my 160GB iPod Classic on one of the planes (that Solidworks World iPod sure has come in handy now), and even though the airline was going to try to recover it for me, they never did. This trip I get to the airport and discover I left my spare laptop battery at the hotel! Luckily for me, the cleaning lady had no use for it, and turned it into the front desk. They assured me they will have it to me before I leave for Germany next week. So I'm stuck wondering what I will forget or leave behind next time we come out. Given the scope of the project we are working on, I will have to figure out a way to make sure I don't end up leaving anything else behind on the future trips! Good thing my head is attached at my shoulders!

Back In The Snow

What can be worse than leaving a Sunny So Cal 80 degree Easter Sunday? Coming back to a cold 20 degrees with snow on the ground Minnesota! While we are only here for about 20 hours, it's well worth it since we are here to review an initial design for a new customer. The next few weeks are shaping up to be a travel fest however.

I have always thought it would be cool to travel for a living, and I will get to experience that in the next month or so. We fly back tomorrow the 24^th and a week later on April 1^st we leave for a nine day trip to Germany and Vienna. April 9^th we return back to the U.S., and on the 10^th I have a User Group meeting to host. On the 11^th we fly back out again for a trip to New York for 4 days before returning home. The pre-scheduled trips for now conclude with a very special trip May 7^th-11^th on the East coast that I will start to divulge details about over the next few weeks. Here is a hint about my May trip: On the plane today I was working on my speech which has surpassed 3,000 words. More to come on what should be a fun trip!

Hunting For Departure Gates…

There will be no Easter egg hunt for me today, and Easter dinner will more likely be comprised of peanuts and sodas on a plane. Today we are once again heading back to Minnesota for a meeting with a new customer to review some initial design concepts. This time is just a quick one day trip, and I should be back late Monday night. Of course a week later I get back on a plane and leave for a 9-day trip to Germany and Vienna! Enjoy your day, and remember, if you don't find all the eggs you hid, that's ok, because in a few weeks, the smell will make it very apparent just where those eggs are hiding!

Solidworks, Vista, Server 2003, OMG, LOL, :)

Ever since Vista's release a year ago, you hear nothing but bad comments like "Using XP to upgrade Vista" etc. All along I have had one issue with the Vista platform, they had too many versions. The decision to release so many versions just created confusion that was unnecessary. Anyhow now that the Vista matrix can now be deciphered, that's all in the past. Here at the company I work for, we received a new project that called for an additional seat of Solidworks, and that meant a new computer. Being that my current desktop was the oldest computer in the engineering department, the computer-hand-me-down pecking order allowed for me to get something new. I was previously running a Pentium-D with 4GB ram and a Quadro FX3500 video card. It performed fairly well for the tasks I needed. For the new computer I picked up a Core 2 Duo, Intel motherboard, 4gb of high performance ram, and decided to keep the 3500. The kicker of the deal was to abandon XP, and go for Vista Ultimate.

The assembly went as planned, and all the components went in exactly as they should with one exception, the 3.5" floppy drive. Now who still uses these? Well Microsoft officially categorized the 3.5" floppy drive an accessory a few years back, but those little disks of 1mb capacity sure are an easy way to transfer information without having to worry about USB thumb drives installing stuff on a computer just to be able to read them. The problem I had was that the motherboard I selected didn't have a floppy interface on it. So what to do? Store the drive with the computer stuff and keep it as a spare. For the $6 price, I wasn't too upset.

Installing Vista is just like installing XP, but it goes much quicker, and there is less interaction necessary. After getting Vista installed, I put in the CD containing the motherboard drivers, and it installed all necessary software to get the onboard sound, network interface card, and other misc drivers working correctly. Vista was actually able to get these items up and going during its install, but I am a firm believer in installing a full set of motherboard drivers. I will say that installing the motherboard drivers was more of a pain than installing Vista. After each driver was installed, the computer rebooted itself requiring me to input logon credentials each time.

Joining the computer to the company network was as simple as turning on the computer. The networking of computers at the business level has been around for years, and the future is to carry that into the home. With the various home networking products available now like Microsoft Home Server, it's just a matter of time before your computer in the den is connected to Billy's computer in his room, and you are instant messaging him telling him it's time for bed.

Once the computer was joined to the network, it was just a matter of installing the Office suite of products, and then Solidworks. Solidworks 2008 for Vista comes on the same DVD as the XP version, and installs exactly the same. What's different is the look of the interface. The whole Office 2007 look of toolbars and buttons is fully visualized under Vista. All the rounded buttons and toolbars seem to fit much more nicely into the Vista environment. There are also a couple of quirks that are related to Vista. For example, turning off thumbnail graphics in Vista is no longer an option thanks to the new file explorer and file>open menu in Vista. You can actually thank Apple for this one because Microsoft has chosen to pretty much duplicate the look and functionality found in the OSX platform. It's a good thing though, because browsing folders is much easier.

Performance of Solidworks doesn't seem to be tied to Vista at all. I am experiencing what feels to me to be a faster work flow, and overall it seems speedier. Much of that can be attributed to the high performance ram, and the upgrade in processor. So as far as using Solidworks as an excuse to not move to Vista, I will say that's a non-issue, it works perfectly.

A lot of people are scared of change, and when things change as drastically as Vista has over XP, it's understandable that some people are going to not like the new way of doing things. The problem with that is that at some point you will find yourself behind the times, and the learning curve is that much more difficult. I am a very vocal advocate for embracing new stuff be it hardware or software. I'm the guy that implements the new version of Solidworks companywide before the shipping and receiving guy can even sign for the discs from the DHL guy! Is that a good or bad thing? At one point in time it's both, but the good eventually overcomes the bad, and when that time arrives, you are that much further ahead of the crowd. Vista is undoubtedly the future. This summer, Microsoft will officially cease the distribution of XP, and you will no longer be able to buy it. All the software we use day to day including Solidworks works just as good if not better on Vista now than it does on XP, so the time to upgrade has really come.

So if you're worried about making the move to Vista because you're not sure of how well it will integrate with Solidworks or Server 2003, I can say you will not have an issue with either.

What Is It With Me & C.E.O.’s?

Ok, so at Solidworks World I received the unique distinction of having one of my blog posts mentioned in what was a bit of an uncomfortable situation at the press dinner by Solidworks C.E.O. Jeff Ray. About a week later I'm attending the Pacific Design Show, and have a conversation with Alibre C.E.O. Greg Milliken about some comments he made about Solidworks. Well today I guess Greg finally caught wind of that post I made and is adding his comment saying it was a dishonest fabricated story. Now while arguing on the internet still baffles me to this day, I might as well go ahead and 'answer' his comment.

Greg,

I am somewhat surprised that your memory of our conversation we had at the Pac Design show is so fuzzy in such a short time. I afforded you the benefit of being 100% honest with you up front of who I was. I could have just as easily walked away and wrote a one sided account of our interaction, and I also could have pretended to be some unassuming CAD user like the guy you were dishonest with. What I originally wrote about in regards to our conversation was 100% accurate. If I am fabricating the whole story, then I guess your business card you gave me after telling the other guy you were fresh out, is not actually sitting on my desk still, I must have fabricated it too.

P.S.

Thanks for checking out the blog!

Want To Win An iPod Nano 4GB???

3DContent Central is giving away three of them. If you ever have trouble finding a model there because it doesn't exist, you can request that someone upload one. Hopefully some nice person comes along, uploads the requested model, and you are set. The contest is designed to help fill those requests. Submit models to fill requests, and you get entered into the contest. The three people with the most submissions by the June 30^th deadline win! So head on over to the Model Requests Page on 3DContent Central and start submitting!

Solidworks 2008 Performance

One of the guys that work with me the other day was working in an assembly and made an interesting comment while waiting for it to rebuild "Well, I guess it's a good thing that I can work faster than Solidworks". Now that's a challenge for Solidworks to stay focused on improving performance for 2009!

The Solidworks Salad Days

This time of year is what I like to call the Solidworks salad days for a few reasons. The newest version is in full use, and it's also at a service pack that has for the most part solved critical issues. Solidworks World has passed, beta for the next version is a month or two away, and the roll-outs for the next release is six months away. Ah yes, time to bask in the warm 80 degree spring days (at least that's what it's been here), and enjoy life as it is. Soon we will be wrapped up in debugging the new version all competing for cool prizes in the Beta contest, and then before we all know it, we will be hearing how some people wish that they would bring back Solidworks 2008, and forget about 2009! So enjoy this time when things are normal, and life is good, but don't forget to get your service packs in the mean time.

Spring Forward

Don't forget to set your clocks forward this weekend. Daylight savings time officially begins at 2:00am Sunday morning. Thanks to the passage of The Energy Policy Act of 2005, we now get to lose an hour of sleep three weeks earlier. Are we losing it, or regaining it? I always get confused. One way or the other, don't forget to change, or you may end up getting to work on Monday an hour early! (Or late? I'm so confused)