Flutterby™! : QCad 2003-02-25 04:22:51.762235+00

QCad

2003-02-25 04:22:51.762235+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Had a good QCad experience today. I'd originally looked at it as a solution to some of my GIS questions, and didn't feel like it quite fit the bill. Today I needed to do some technical drawings, and needed something that understood dimensions. The interface is a little quirky, but once I got over the initial learning curve it did quite well to help me draw out instructions for the machine shop, and clarify a few issues about how things would fit together. As the FAQ says, it isn't a replacement for AutoCAD, and it sure isn't a general vector drawing program, but it some of the quirks that made it unusable when I tried to do that with it became quite helpful in today's exercise. If you don't have a CAD program handy, this makes a decent little 2d fallback.

There is so many different aspects of GIS and so little written in OpenSource that it's hard to decide where to start. It looks like my first foray will be in developing a couple differential GPS solutions using low-cost receivers and a web-based post-processing system. I have a more immediate need for DGPS capabilities as I have a plethora of commercial mapping software available to me. GIS appears to still be a wide-open field with many applications just being discovered - and hence the derth of OpenSource apps - even what's available in the commercial domain has trickled down from either military apps or oil and mineral surveying.

If I ever get all of my work caught up in the lab, I may start exploring the OpenSource software. The problem is that I really have my hands full trying to support the commercial software. BTW, anybody have any idea why a printer shared off an NT4 Domain Controller would accept a print job from a machine outside of the domain (with a domain login) but not actually send it to the printer?

QCad sounds handy since most of my CAD needs are very rudimentary - usually sketching specs for things like bookshelves.