What I did with Rev last month

[Stephen Barncard]

A few weeks ago I was in upstate NY producing a record when the 
project was cancelled so I went to visit some friends near Albany. 
They're into high end exterior lighting design and use AutoCad 
drawings to illustrate lamp layouts. When they go out into the field 
it's important to know the inventory of lamps to take to the job. 
They use objects in the drawing with three or four character codes to 
indicate lamps and mountings. But their Autocad is PC, the rest of 
the office was Mac, and Autocad didn't have the kind of reporting 
they needed.

I had showed up unexpectedly and they were working hard, and I felt 
like I wanted to contribute rather than take up space, so I figured 
I'd offer to fix their network or do any kind of cyber-handyman work 
they needed.

They told me they REALLY needed an accurate way to get a listing of 
lamps/mounts from the drawing. Aha. A challenge. At first they had 
tried using PowerCADD, which can read AutoCad files directly. But 
PowerCADD's reporting was hard to use and quite baffling. But 
powerCADD can export in DXF, a text description language.

So I whipped up an executable Mac app that could read a DXF file and 
report on the lamps found from a list in a field. Total time: about 6 
hours, most of which were spent on interface. I even included a 
custom icon of Bob, the "subgenus" dude. I hid the lookup lists 
inside the executable, and provided a 'reveal in finder' Applescript 
call so they could edit the lists in TextEdit. This provided a time 
shortcut for me so I wouldn't have to take time to make an editor.

They seemed very happy with it.

>Hello.
>
>A simple PGP Encrypt/Decrypt program that uses GPG for it's backend. 
>It's not worthy of publishing, but it certainly gets the job done.
>
>Thanks,
>Brent Anderson
>Fiery Ferret

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stephen barncard
s a n  f r a n c i s c o
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