The Boss'

This post is technical.

If that’s not your cup of tea, move along. Nothing to see here.

For two full days, I struggled with this issue. I was trying to add a custom ‘add-in’ to Revit Architecture 2010. I built my custom add-in dll with Visual Studio, and followed the steps to modify the Revit.ini file so that my add-in would be loaded when Revit starts. Despite following the instructions meticulously…failure. The INI file was rewritten. My changes were tossed out and Revit recreated the INI file from scratch.

Follow instructions again. Failure. Uninstall Revit. Reinstall Revit…failure.

Repeat the above process complete with hair pulling and eye poking for two full days. At last, I broke down. I decided to make use of our Autodesk Developer Network membership and ask for help.

In just a few hours, the kind folks over at ADN Support sent a link to this knowledgebase article, where someone else was describing my exact problem, and the solution. And it was so simple.

Issue

I modified the Revit.ini file to add information about my addin and now Revit keeps rewriting Revit.ini on every startup and so my addin does not load. What could be the problem?

Solution

If you compare your modified Revit.ini file with the original one in a binary viewer then you can see that the UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark) is missing from the beginning of your file – possibly the text editor you used did not write out that part -, and so Revit finds the file corrupt. If you modify your file in Notepad then it should add the missing bit and it should work again. 

After reading this, I added my external command to the Revit.ini file in Notepad and, sure enough, works like a charm.

I post this in the hope that it may save someone else the frustration that I had to go through.

Have you ever noticed the little title over to the right in bold called “Tweets…”? Tweets is a real time feed of my Twitter updates. Whether you know what Twitter is or not, suffice it to say that it’s another way that I’m able to share what’s going on in our lives, in 140 characters or less. So, if you come to this site and you don’t see a new post, which would have been the case for the last couple weeks or so, you can still glance at my tweets for relevant news.

After making changes to my benefits via our company intranet, I clicked on a link named “Save Changes”. After clicking the link, the following message popped up…

Really? I just clicked a link called “Save Changes”, and this is the smartest thing you can think of to ask me? Come on.

Somewhere, a programmer needs to be taken out back and have his hair pulled. This message is the sort of insult to the users intelligence that have made people hate their computers.

In June, our TV, DVD player, Tivo, Digital Converter box, etc. were all damaged in a thunderstorm, and we’ve been without them ever since. In many ways, it’s been a blessing. Whenever the kids complained about not being able to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos, we could honestly say that God turned off our TV, and who are we to argue with God? In the intervening months, we haven’t really missed our TV. Part of it was the realization that we simply could not afford to replace the TV that we lost with our current resources. When we bought our 32” LCD a few years ago, I had just gotten a bonus from work, and that was before my employer implemented a 10% pay cut. So we were just at a different place financially, with different goals. It was also refreshing to be “the people with no TV”. It’s a bit of an avant garde thing these days to NOT be glued to the tube every night. Occasionally we’d feel a bit out of it at family functions where the topic seemed to revolve around the latest reality show drama or major sporting event that we weren’t watching. But, really, 99% of broadcast TV is crap, and that’s probably being generous. There is hardly anything worth watching. And even then, it’s only worth watching relative to all the crap. Even the “good” stuff is probably not worth watching when compared to taking a walk or sitting around reading aloud to the whole family.

That being said, there were a few times where I wished that I at least had access to TV content. (New Yankee Workshop, This Old House, Biggest Loser, AFV, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) There were a few shows that we tried to watch on Hulu.com, but our internet connection is not quite fast enough to stream video. So last week I thought I’d try a little experiment. I bought an inexpensive HD tuner for my computer . It plugs right in to a USB port and accepts coax cable on the other end. It comes with a stubby little indoor antenna to receive over the air HD signals. I thought I could use the Media Center application, built in to to Windows Vista, to record and playback just the shows that we really missed. My first attempt to make it work was a dud. The stubby little indoor antenna didn’t pick up any OTA HD signals. Pressing on, I remembered seeing a huge roof top antenna in my attic. I asked my dad why he thought that antenna was IN the attic, and not actually on, ya know, the roof, where a roof top antenna belongs. He said very matter of factly that what I had there was a Christian Reformed Antenna. Way back in the day I guess it wasn’t in good taste to advertise your ownership of a TV, so folks hid them in their attic. Sneaky. Anyway, I found the cable in the basement that ran all the way up to that monstrous antenna, and bought a $4 converter to switch it from that flat twin lead wire to coax. Long story short, I ran some coax over to my office, and lo and behold, all of the available OTA HD stations come in now. I’ve since discovered that the big ole rooftop style antennas are really good for HD because of their size…HD is broadcast at a low frequency and therefore a longer wavelength…don’t quote me on that but I think that’s how it works. Anyway, Media Center in Vista works beautifully for setting recordings and playing back recorded programs, as well as live TV.

So for an investment of about $60, I now have HD TV, with Tivo’ish recording and playback options, all with no monthly contracts or fees. I’m pretty happy with that.

Now if we can just avert our eyes from all of the crap coming at us over the air waves, we’ll be in good shape.

Well, the big storm the other night claimed a number of my electronic devices.

• 32” LCD TV
• Tivo DVR
• DVD Player
• Digital to Analog Converter Box
• Cordless Phone System
• Wireless Router
• Wireless Internet Antenna

Unfortunately, I think I have a $1000 deductible on my home owners policy, so that won’t be much help. All of the stuff listed above is likely worth less than a thousand dollars. It’s going to be a while before the TV/DVR get replaced, but I hope to get the internet connection back up and running soon.

Don’t even ask me how much time I burned up thinking about this…a total waste of time considering it will be YEARS before we can afford to remodel our kitchen. But, as I am prone to do, I couldn’t help but day dream about possible layouts…here’s one.

Here’s what I hope the basic wall layout will look like…this simply has one wall removed from what is there now. You can see it sketched on the floor…currently it separates the dining area from a small main floor laundry. We’re crammed into the dining area, so I’d like to remove the wall so we can get a bigger table in there, and relocate the laundry elsewhere in the house. All plumbing and window locations stay the same in this design to control costs. You will notice that in the corner of the dining room I’ve added two tall skinny windows…I have no idea how cost prohibitive that might be, but I thought it looked cool so I put them in.

Here’s the layout after I dropped in some cabinets…moved the refrigerator over a smidg, and added a little bit of an island. The dining area I spoke of is to the left. On the other side of the room, past the refrigerator, is our living room. Oh, and the stove/sink wall is south facing, if that helps.

Some close up views of the various sections.

View of the island…ignore the wierd ‘door’ looking thing on the upper cabinet. From the left I have a 30” base, 15”, 15”, and a 24” base. The 24” base would likely be a 3 drawer unit, while the 30” would be a door/drawer unit, probably with rollout shelves in it. The two 15” would be for trash/recycling.

This is the back of the island. I was thinking about using a couple of wall cabinets as 12” deep bookshelves for the back of the island. Here I’ve got a 24” and a 12”.

So, there it is…I think I’ll post these over at Ikeafans.com too and see if I can get a little bit of feedback on this particular design. One final image facing southeast with shadows turned on to show the effect of those corner windows.

I’ve been very happy with my Canon Powershot S2 IS 5MP Digital Camera ever since I bought it back in July of 2006. A couple of months ago however, the faithful camera just up and died on me. The lense had trouble deciding what it was going to do…retract, stay out, extend, etc. The screen went black with only the cryptic text “E18 Error” in the lower left corner. As I soon found out, I wasn’t the only one to suffer this fate. Indeed, there is a site called e18error.com. However, all of the tips, tricks, and potential fixes listed on the site didn’t help. The camera was broken. Suddenly, I was without my S2, and the thought of paying to get it fixed made me sick. One local quote to fix the camera was $175, and the guy at the camera shop was really crabby…like, you-just-lost-a-customer crabby. Equally unacceptable was the thought of having 5, soon to be six, kids, and not having a camera with which to capture their incredible cuteness.

One day, while retelling my digital camera sob story at work, one of my coworkers mentioned that he had an S2IS just sitting on his shelf gathering dust. He had replaced it months ago with a higher megapixel compact that he could more easily carry in his pocket or bike bag. He offered to let me borrow the camera and that’s what I’ve been doing for the last month. The other day I offered him $100 for it. That’s a little bit less than used S2’s are selling for on Amazon.com, but he took it, figuring that he wasn’t using it anyway, and he could use the pocket money for an upcoming  vacation.

So, I’m pleased to once again have the company of a fine S2IS…I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that my new S2 doesn’t suddenly exhibit the same bizarre behavior as my last one.

In other digital products news, we finally added a dedicated video camera to the collection of household gadgets. In trying to decide which camera to buy, I took some time and really thought about how we use video cameras these days. In our case, we really are just grabbing tiny video clips of certain funny/weird moments. Watching our home movies from years ago, I can’t believe the LONG shots that we took of the most mundane activities. Think about watching TV…how many camera cuts can you count in one minute? A lot. That’s what people expect today when they watch a video. In the past few years, we’ve been changing the way we shoot video with our digital camera to be more like that…short little scenes that are much more enjoyable to watch, and that can easily be put together to make a longer movie. Anyway, for this reason I went with a Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder. It’s a little bigger than a full-size iPod, and it holds up to 2 hours of 720p video. It also has HDMI out, and comes with a cable, so it’s easy to plug right in to any HD TV. That really sealed the deal. Another great thing about this camera is the ease of use. It’s really a one button operation. Push the button to record…push it again to stop. Even the kids can figure it out in just a couple of minutes. So far I’ve been pleased with the video quality, though, to be honest, filming indoors in the winter is never going to yeild the best results. I’m looking forward to getting outdoors with it and putting together some movies. I’ve done quite a bit in the past with photo editing and digital photo books, and now I’d like to try my hand at video production.

More videos coming soon. Stay tuned!