Re: OT: Why you should not use Windows : issue 1

[T i m]

Because?

And why just pick on the 'loose', why not the 'understnd' or 'relly'?

Most of my posts would be worse than that if I didn't bother to run the spell-check before posting!

Cheers, T i m

[dennis]

Thunderbird apears to have lost the ability to spell chuck!

[T i m]

Hmm, I prefer a newsreader for news and an eMail client for emails. Not that either can't often do both of course but I like getting Chinese food (not a curry) from the Chinese restaurant and a curry (not fish and chips) from a curry house.

YM (and tastes) MV of course. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

All it does is grow or shrink a perimeter of a shape to produce a new "edge" displayed from the original but concentric with it and scaled as required.

So say you have a cube a want to make a box with a open top, you could draw another rectangle on top of the box to create the edges that would allow the inside of the box to be "pushed" down to created the cavity, or you could use the offset to make a shrunken copy of the existing edge of the cube. It does the same but unlike redrawing, you can get the alignment off.

You can turn on the "Large tool set" from the View -> Toolbars... menu. That does have a button for follow me.

(one of the most useful tools for taking complicated shapes and wrapping them round arbitrarily complex paths. Say you wanted to draw a crown moulding round the top of a furniture design. Just create the profile as a 2D outline, then use follow me to have it wrap around the top, automatically creating mitres at the corners as it goes)

I think they have been there for a while - but many folks turn off the pop up help when they first run it and hence miss them!

There are a bunch of things you can type after drawing or moving or copying things - they are very handy and quite powerful.

So indeed, drag a rectangle, and then type 10,5 to make it 10 units wide and 5 high. You can qualify the dimensions with units as well, so

100mm,3" or 1',2m would be acceptable for a 100mm wide 3 inch tall rectangle and a 1 foot by 2m one. Miss one of them out if you only want to change the one dimension and leave the other as drawn.

Draw a circle and then do 3S for 3 sides (i.e. a triangle) or 8S for a hexagon, or 40S for a much rounder circle than the default 25 sided one!

Use the move tool, tap CTRL to make it a copy, and drag in the general direction you want. After letting go, type a distance, and it will move the precise distance. Now type x5 to make 5 copies. It works on all three axes as well. So draw a rectangle and pull it into a step shaped box. Now move/copy it up and back as if making the second step of a staircase. Now type x12 for the rest of the staircase.

You can use /4 to equally space 4 copies between the starting and ending points.

(there are a bunch of modifier keys that make life much easier as well, like holding control with the erase tool, to remove lines, but leave them there as hidden geometry - makes surfaces look much smoother etc).

[T i m]

Done, easy. ;-)

Nope, can't do it and I started to feel the same levels of frustration I did when I first played with Sketchup (maybe I'm expecting too much for something like this to be more logical and intuitive). ;-(

See, if I click in the middle of an excising circle and then draw the mouse up along a different plane, why does the circle draw out over the first one and not on the new plane?

I'll try again in the morning ...

Cheers. T i m

[Bob Martin]

I prefer Synergy - no manual interaction needed.

I've been using it for years and love it. Threw away all my KVMs.

[T i m]

Yeah, we tried it in the (PC) shop and I tried it here. Not really suited for our needs.

Yeah, I'm sure it's perfect when your needs only start *after* the PC has actually booted but how much use it is for say changing settings in the BIOS?

How well does it work when the host PC has failed?

I can see how it might be good to be able to treat all the connected machines as one common tool where you can drag and drop stuff between machines but that isn't what we do, and if we wanted to do that sort of thing we can do so anyway via network shares or Dropbox.

My point is, if your *need* includes pre-boot access to more than one PC, or the host machine is down I can't see how software like Synergy would be any use *at all* (to 'hardware guys' especially ... unless it can do pre boot stuff of course?). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Huge]

"Our" main data centre had over 10,000 servers in it. How the hell are you going to connect up that lot with KVMs! :o)

No surprise there.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

With a *lot* of wires and a *lot* of swearing. Then you'll find some critical bit of the machine (e.g. the BIOS) uses a video mode no-one's ever heard of which sends the KVM into conniptions, so you have to send a meatsack along to reset it anyway.

Been there, done that.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Tim Streater escribió:

We did that as an emergency dial-in backdoor if the internet went down (a remote site on top of a dormant volcano, with irregular utility power and internet). Modems on a Cisco router with a hydra-head 16 port serial card and a serial link to ttyS0 on each of the important machines.

Was kinda rendered useless when the phone supplier changed to VOIP, so when the internet went down, so did the phones, so no dialling in :)

[John Rumm]

ok try this... once you have your first circle drawn, change your viewpoint (click and hold middle button to "orbit", middle button and shift to pan) so that you are almost looking at the edge of the circle - i.e. its being rendered as a low height ellipse. Now draw your second one - it will interpret the "up" movement of the mouse and dragging the circle in the vertical direction.

[T i m]

Right, that seems to have done the trick John and I have now been able to draw and using the 'Offset' tool, was able to create an outer 'wall' as I believe you suggested:

However, when I try to pull the vertical edge over (as with a pram hood etc) the vertical edge seems to kick out at the bottom and it doesn't seem to want to go to the bottom as you pull it over?

So, thanks for your assistance ... I think I'm getting there. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

Ah, ok - you were doing it slightly differently from the way I did (but that could work just as well!)

I trimmed the model down to give a quadrant of "roof" rather than the full half circle. Lost the curved line at the back, and the lines along the axis. Leaving one horizontal semi circle to act as a path, and a perpendicular arc quadrant (with thickness), that I then "followed" round the horizontal circle. So part way through we would have:

(so rather than pulling a semicircle down like a pram hood, I twisted a quadrant round the vertical axis)

You may find (due to the segment size of the circle, that the "cut" ends don't end up perfectly flat, and you might get some slight messy hidden geometry at the ends. When you are merging the shape with another this may not matter, since you can just bury the messy face in the next object.

However you can clean up edges like that by drawing a flat surface in the plane you want, moving it to intersect with the shape where you want a clean cut, and then using the "intersect with model" context menu option to create a set of verticies where the two things touch. That gives you a set of "vut" lines you can trim back to.

[Huge]

And have you any hair left? :o)

[Huge]

Well, yes, but those aren't KVMs!

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Huge escribió:

Oh yes. When things got a bit too much, I just took a step outside...

(Not my videos, but where I worked.)

[Huge]

Nice.

[Bob Martin]

How often do you do that? There are 4 desktops on and under my desk and I can't remember the last time I needed to go into bios, but when I did it took seconds to connect a USB keyboard. If you look for problems you will always find them.

[T i m]

Enough to make my use of a KVM switch far more pertinent than any other solution (and why I use one of course).

Or use one of the Function keys to temporarily change the boot order?

Of course it would (along with the mouse and video if not on the host PC?) but I choose not to do that. I choose to have full control on 2 (in my case, 4 in the case of two of my mates) PC's at all times without having to do anything at all!

How can I be looking for any 'problems' Bob? *I* have a solution that works for me. My mates (and millions of others I suspect) have the same solution that works for them. Are we all 'looking for problems' because we happen to find 'that' solution the most efficient?

But I'll ask you again, how *can* you configure the BIOS or access the Function keys, or access anything with the HOST PC or LAN is off or down with something like Synergy? If your answer is 'you can't', *I* don't care if you or anyone else isn't affected by that, it isn't an answer to my question. ;-)

So, judging on the non-reply to my question, I'll take it that you can't ... and *exactly* why I (and millions of others) will be sticking to our simple, reliable, predictable machine switching solution using a KVM switch (thanks). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Bob Martin]

You don't need mouse or video when changing BIOS.

I knew I was wasting my time ;-)