The H-Factor

Reducing Entropy

Recent Posts

Welcome

Recently our previous blog service (Typepad) ended their business – so, we have a new home. It will take a bit to get images back and displaying properly, but we are working on it! Final pageview count of original Typepad blog: 387,232

art's avatar by art

Using a Non-Standard Pipe Type in HydraCALC

A customer called today asking how to enter a 1″ black plastic underground pipe for the calc. This particular situation sounded unique enough that I did not tell him to add that pipe type to our database, as I would have if he expected to see this pipe type used repeatedly. I told him to…

art's avatar by art

Using the Hydratec Software Download Area

Hydratec uses ShareFile to distribute our software installs and updates. New customers, or those without access, must request access to be able to get at these downloads. Access is only available to customers with a Hydratec subscription or those on an update plan. You can access the download area and request access by picking the…

art's avatar by art
July 2007
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
3031  

about

Hunting for Easter Eggs

Little known secret – Autodesk’s programmers hid ‘easter eggs’ in various versions of AutoCAD

In AutoCAD 2004:

  • Start the Color dialog (e.g. with the _COLOR command).
  • On the Index tab, Ctrl+Left click on the color box 152 (the "Autodesk blue").
  • And, voila – Autodesk developer team presentation will run

In AutoCAD 2005:

   

  Start the new Layer Manager dialog (e.g. with the LAYER
command). Press and hold the Shift+Ctrl keys and click on the "Inverse
filter" option (lower-left corner). And voila – the Autodesk team
presentation in a "Matrix style" is launched. You can control the
playback using mouse right-click. 

There were no easter eggs in 2006 or 2007, making us think these were gone for good, but it appears that some folks at Autodesk do like having fun and they put an easter egg in 2008.

In AutoCAD 2008:

  1. Set the rendering environment to the photometric lights mode (LIGHTINGUNITS=1 or =2) 
  2. Display the Sun properties palette (the SUNPROPERTIES command) 
  3. Click on the spyglass icon in the Sky properties field 
  4. In the "Adjust Sun&Sky Background" dialog go to the "Sun angle calculator" field
  5. Set the date to 23.3.2007 (AutoCAD 2008 release date) 
  6. Click on the Time value and hit the Home key (resets time to midnight)
  7. While holding the Ctrl key press twice the Down-arrow key
  8. The presentation is launched, with music and all…

Posted in

Leave a comment