What did we pay for AutoCAD? What did we pay for AutoCAD?

The left pane of the AutoCAD Help window for the REGION command:

Assemblies that fit together in sequence

At my work, we build stuff that connects together, one after the other, in a particular order. We build the stuff in the same order. And we -- the AutoCAD users -- draw them in the same order. We don't have to draw them in that order, but it often creates confusion when we don't.

Simple minds.

Anyway, sometimes in AutoCAD I want to open three or four drawings at once. I click FILE:OPEN and then select the drawings in order, one after the other, the same order described above, and then click the OPEN button.

Used to be okay to select the files and then just slam the ENTER key to open them, but that doesn't work any more. AutoCAD fixed that a couple years back, and now I have to click the OPEN button to open multiple files. That was an "improvement".

Anyway, I select the drawings in the order I want them, and click the damn OPEN button, and the files open for me. But one of them is always out of order. I think it's the first one I select. Always out of order.

In the free Blogger program I use to write my economics blog, I just selected 8 graphs at once and loaded them all into the post I'm writing. I like to number my graphs when I write. And in this case, since there were so many, I just identified them by number when I named the files.

I selected them in order, one through eight, and clicked the button to upload them. And you know what? Blogger kept them in order.

Blogger kept them in order, for free. Too bad AutoCAD can't do that.

Don't ask, don't ask

From some snake-oil commercial:

"Ask your doctor if you live in or have been to a region where certain fungal infections are common."

In that context, what does the word "certain" mean? Definite? Particular??

And how does it work?

1. Doc, do I live in -- or have I been to -- a region where definite fungal infections are common?

Are doctors often sure that infections are fungal?

Or

2. Doc, do I live in -- or have I been to -- a region where particular fungal infections are common?

Do any fungal infections occur often in the region?

Stats glitch

From the Blogger editor's Posts page for my test blog:

Ninety thousand people gave that one post a thumbs-up, but there were only three pageviews.

Anyway, that's the blog where I write and revise my stuff before posting it. It's not accessible to nine people, no less ninety thousand.

I wonder why that is.

Barry Ritholtz:

To put this into some context: The blog has garnered ~half a million comments over nearly 11 years. That is also the number of monthly unique visitors. Do the math, and you realize the individual visitor-to-comment ratio is > than 132 to 1.

This ratio is similar to that of large media sites. For example, The Guardian has found that less than 1% of all readers actually leave a comment.

Odometer-style Naming

Naming things is most important when writing code. Variable names and function names can make a lot of comments unnecessary. This shortens the code and creates less distraction. Reading code with good naming is like reading an outline of the work done by the program code. The code should be like an outline.

I automatically carry over my programming skills to my work with AutoCAD. Good naming for drawings and for blocks in drawings makes it easier to find the files I'm looking for. Let me give you an example.

The job I'm working on might have three main parts: Parts A, B, and C. (At my job, we actually use single letters to identify the main parts of a job. If you don't, you might want to look for maybe a three-letter abbreviation for each major part.)

Part A of the job might have Assembly Type 1, Type 2, and Type 3.

Part A Type 2 might have a Right-hand and a Left-hand sub-assembly. I would name these A2R and A2L.

The other guy at work might name them AR2 and AL2. (In the old days, he would have had long, wordy names for them. He has since taken to modeling his filenames after mine. But he doesn't get the nuance that this post describes.)

My naming works like an odometer: The rightmost character changes most often, and the changes are fewer as you step to the left. This is not by accident. It makes the file system automatically put things in order for me. I don't want all the "Rights" for Part A to be listed together. I want all the Type 2 of Part A to be listed together. That's what my naming gives me.

Maybe -- sure, maybe it works because I have adapted my way of thinking to take advantage of the way the computer works. But that's exactly what you want to do, to be good at this stuff.

And the naming rules that evolved during my many years of learning to program, those same rules work very well for my work with AutoCAD.

If you make a Moebius strip of double sided tape, is it sticky on only one side?