CEEFIT: I miss you

I first noticed on Sep 24th that the web-site that hosts the C++ implementation of FIT (CEEFIT) was gone. I get a "DNS Error. Cannot find server" error for the URL http://ceefit.woldrich.com/. Even http://www.woldrich.com/ is no longer found, with the same error might I add.

This is not good. Indicates that the company that hosted/developed CEEFIT is gone taking some of the documentation for CEEFIT with it. While the source code for CEEFIT is still available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/fit/files/, some of the implementation details that were key for me to customize various aspects of CEEFIT are no longer available. If you use any of the downloads that I provide through the "My Downloads" section, you have the necessary header files and libraries to use CEEFIT in your IntegratedTests. But you would need the original source code and documentation for any customizations.

I have emailed Dave (using an old email address I have, which unfortunately is part of the woldrich.com domain) and hope I will hear back from him. I have requested he upload the documentation for CEEFIT to sf.net and I am really, really hoping he grants wishes.

In the short term I am screwed, but fortunately there is an alternate implementation of FIT in C++ available through http://www.fitnesse.org/. I have briefly tried fitnesse and have found the requirements they place to use their library (that I learn their Wiki markup to create tests and the ability to run a HTTP server on my build machine to run the tests) quite burdensome. But if I am going to continue C++ development and want to run Integrated Tests, I guess I have no other choice. But this time, I will be careful enough to create a personal mirror of www.fitnesse.org for myself, in case this too disappears off the face of the world(wideweb).

But honestly this is one more of the reasons why I love open source. If CEEFIT was a closed source library and the company developing it, shut down, then I would definitely be screwed. Since I have the source for CEEFIT, I can continue to develop it (if I had the requisite skills, of course).

So does CEEFIT going AWOL affect you?

Did uninstalling SolidWorks delete half my hard drive?

I recently had to re-install SolidWorks 2009 on my laptop. During the uninstall process I noticed that several of my programs in the "C:\Program Files" folder went missing. Now I am not the one to start pointing fingers just yet, but this episode completely freaked me out. I had SolidWorks installed under "C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp" so would be more than surprised if this was in fact an error on the part of the SolidWorks uninstaller, but at the time of uninstallation, my laptop was not being used and no other "application window" was open. I also rarely log on with administrative privileges on either my XP or Vista laptop, so pretty low chance I accidentally deleted these folders myself (if I was that insane). I also did the usual checks for viruses, spyware and other junk, in vain.

Oh well! That's life I guess.

But during the reinstallation process I realized a quirk in the SolidWorks installation. Does it make sense to put header files required for SolidWorks Add-in development under the "samples" directory? Well that's what SolidWorks has done. So if you are developing SolidWorks add-ins, don't forget to select the "Examples" option in the SolidWorks Installation Manager, during the installation. Else you will not have the headers (e.g. "amapp.h") that you need for VC++ Add-in development.

Who uses BRL-CAD? An Anonymous answer

This post is more of a response to a comment I received on my previous post titled And the World's Oldest Source Code Repository is.... Since the commenter chose to remain anonymous, I had no way to respond other than to blog a new post. I will resume posting "useful" information with my next post.

Firstly, Thanks 'Anonymous' (I knew I should not allowed people to comment on my posts anonymously, but it encourages more commenting from what I can tell), for your very detailed answer. I wonder if you are one of the seemingly many contributors to the BRL-CAD source code.

I would have been happier if you were able to provide some links to sites or people who use BRL-CAD, but I think I may be able to find at least 1 contact inside the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) who could enlighten me further.

It has been a long time since I downloaded and tested the latest version of BRLCAD. I am hoping to be surprised by their user-friendliness though from their screenshots (mostly updated in Mar 2008), it still appears command-driven rather than menu-driven.

And the World's Oldest Source Code Repository is...

Many years ago (actually in 2006), I had written about an Open Source CAD program known as BRL-CAD (note: the links to tutorials I had included in that post are no longer active and give a message "BRL-CAD became an open source project in December of 2004 and is no longer hosted on FTP.ARL.ARMY.MIL").

Well surprisingly  BRL-CAD has been in the news for a while. Were you aware that according to Ohloh, BRL-CAD has the world's oldest open source repository? Can you believe that? The repository supposedly has been active since 1983.

Well if you thought that was interesting then check this. BRL-CAD was also a participating organization in the Google Summer of Code 2009 and had 3 student interns who worked on as many projects.

So the oldest CAD program is still being actively developed. That is interesting, but what I want to know is who is using BRL-CAD? I work for a CAD tools company and we have never been requested to even look at BRL-CAD as a possible CAD system to support. BRL-CAD's About page says that the U.S. Military is one of the clients. I have been on a Civilian installation of the U.S Army and have seen BRL-CAD installed on their lab computers. But none of the modelers were using it to deliver designs. So the question still stands - who is using BRL-CAD?

Do any of you have any experience with BRL-CAD at your work? Does anyone use BRL-CAD for anything? Let me know.

Which Free 3D CAD program would I suggest?

A few months ago I received a comment on one of my posts, asking me which free 3D CAD program I would suggest. You can see my response here.


Answering JOE's (the commenter) request reminded me that I had posted a few articles in the past about Open Source CAD programs. Since then though I had pretty much given up searching for an open source CAD program that would provide at least a usable modeling tool (primarily because my initial search was futile).


But I did keep my eyes open a little bit and came across NaroCAD a few months ago. Having followed NaroCAD's feeds for that period I noticed that it is under quite active development. From the developer's blog "NaroCAD is an opensource CAD design tool written in C#/.NET and is built on top of proven OpenCascade library". In fact NaroCAD reached 1.0 milestone a few months ago and they even provide .NET bindings for OpenCascade (including IronPython).


In my comment, I had recommended to JOE to use Alibre Design Xpress, since it is free, and offers great capability at that price (check out Alibre's CEO's blog - they even have a sale on Alibre Design Standard at the time of this writing, Aug 18 2009). I have not experimented with NaroCAD myself but considering its infancy I am relatively certain that its capabilities don't match Alibre's.


If the fact that I have a blog titled "Open Source Software and CAD" and am recommending a non-open-source program to my readers, alarms you, then don't be. I simply am recommending what I think is feasible. Most CAD users are not programmers. They may be versatile in creating Mapkey Automation or Macro scripts but mostly simply care about how complete their 2D/3D tools are for modeling purposes. In my experience with open source, attempting to use a program which has not matured, would usually result in much frustration to users who are not adept at looking at source code to solve any problems they may have (this is not to taint NaroCAD itself, it may be a great program, but just to explain my reason for the recommendation).


If you feel upto it, I would suggest downloading NaroCAD and experimenting with it. I am relatively certain that you may need to download OpenCascade separately as the installer for NaroCAD does not seem large enough (15.6MB) to accommodate all of OpenCascade (175MB).

UPDATE (8/30/2009): I stand corrected. One (of the 3 contributors to their blog) of the developers of NaroCAD (ciplogic) left a comment (still visible below this post) that NaroCAD uses only a subset of OpenCascade, which means that the ~15 MB download of NaroCAD is really all you need. So what are you waiting for? Have you downloaded NaroCAD? I have.