I’ll start with the <GeometryItems> section because it’s something all GeoStudio users should be familiar with.  It will demonstrate some guidelines common to the other blocks as well.

<GeometryItems>

The “geometry” of your problem, as we refer to it, is composed of points, lines and regions.  But regions and lines are just collections of points, so let’s look at the <Points> block first.

<Points>

The <Points> block is a collection of <Point>s.  You’ll see this type of xml construct often in our files, as much of the data you define involves collections of objects.

Len=”8″

The first thing to notice is the Len=”8″ in the opening tag, which indicates that there are eight points in this collection.  This is not required in standard xml, but it is required for GeoStudio.  Specifying the size of the list up front allows GeoStudio to read the file more quickly because it knows how much memory to allocate.

ID=”1″

The next thing to point out is that each point has a unique ID.  This ID is what is used elsewhere in the xml to refer to a particular point.  I can’t remember off-hand if the IDs must start at one and be sequential, but since this file format was intended to be written and read by GeoStudio, not by humans, you’d be advised to stick to that rule.

X=”0″ Y=”40″

Now we finally get to the actual definition of the point, which is just an x,y coordinate, in the units you specified in Set Units & Scale (or in the <Coordinates> block of the xml file).

<Mesh>

You should generally leave this alone.  It indicates the version of the mesh generator that was used to generate a mesh.  If you’re generating your own file, just leave this out completely.

<Plane>

I have no clue what this is about!  Anybody else know?!

<Lines>

You can see that Lines are similar to Points in some ways.  There’s that Len=”9″.  There’s the ID.  But why does the <Lines> collection contain <Lines> instead of containing <Line>s?  And why are each of the nine <Lines> a block instead of a single element like the <Point>?  Wouldn’t it be more succinct to say <Line ID=”1″ PointID1=”1″ PointID2=”2″/>?

I wish I knew the answer.  Probably an oversight.  But the problem with publishing a file format is that once it’s out there, it’s very tough to change without breaking old files, so now that’s the way it is.

Both formats are valid xml, but GeoStudio will expect one or the other so always use another gsz file as an example when hand-crafting your own.

And that’s the inside scoop you only get on GrokkingGeoStudio.com!

<PointID1>, <PointID2>

Now we see why it was important for each <Point> to have an ID field.  A line is made up of two points, identified by the point IDs.

Note that the order of the two points does matter in some situations.  While it’s not legal to have two lines with the same points just in a different order, still the order is used when you get into things like interface lines, which allow you to assign a material to one side or the other of the line.

<Regions>

Regions, like lines, are a collection of point IDs.  Only in this case there can be any number of points, so they are presented as a comma-separated list.

A region is always a closed polygon, so it’s implied that the last point in the list connects back to the first point.

The order of the point IDs is obviously important for regions, as they define the region edges.

Interestingly, a region is not a collection of Line IDs.  That used to be the case, but as we’ve begun adding circular regions and lines that don’t belong to regions, that has become too restrictive.  As you work with the user interface you can think of a region as being composed of lines, but in the data file that is not the case.

Summary

So we’ve seen several common themes:  the Len tag, the ID tag, collections of objects.  We’ve seen how some things are done differently:  using a single xml element vs using a block.  And we’ve seen how the ID is used to point to one object from another.

If I write a Part 3 I’ll add to those concepts by digging into a more complicated part of the file.  I’m open to suggestions!

(If you’ve solved your analyses you’ll see several .xml files.  The definition file is the one in the root directory.)

I’m assuming you are already somewhat familiar with xml in general.  If that’s not a fair assumption, you may want to do some additional reading:

• XML Tutorial for the very beginner.
• XML definition on wikipedia.

The XML

I’m going to look at the definition file for SLOPE Tutorial.gsz, since it’s included with every installation of GeoStudio. You can also download it here.

There’s a lot of detail in the definition file. Today I’ll just look at the bigger blocks. I may delve into more specific areas in later posts, depending on what feedback I get from you.

Use Notepad or Internet Explorer to open SLOPE Tutorial.xml if you want to follow along.  The first line is:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ standalone=”yes”?>

That’s the first line of any xml file, and simply defines it as being xml.

<GSIData Version=”7.15″>

The next line is the opening tag that defines this as a GeoStudio file, the “GSIData” block.  (”GSI” stands for “GEO-SLOPE International”.)  This line also identifies the version of GeoStudio that saved the file.

Now comes the good stuff.  A while back I described how a GeoStudio file has “global” objects such as regions and materials which are available to every analysis, and how when you assign a material to a region you’ve just formed a link or “association” between those two objects.  Well this next level in the xml file describes all those “global” objects.

<Analyses Len=”2″>…</Analyses>

The Analyses block describes each analysis.  (From KeyIn - Analyses.)

The Len=”2″ part just indicates how many analyses there are.  It’s not strictly necessary in normal xml, but it helps GeoStudio load the file more quickly because it knows in advance how many analyses are in that block.

<BCs Len=”8″>…</BCs>

The BCs block describes each boundary condition.  (From KeyIn - Boundary Conditions.)  Note that not every boundary condition in the list is necessarily used by your analyses–in fact there are a handful of default boundary conditions created in every file because they’re so common.\

<Contexts Len=”2″>…</Contexts>

This is where the associations are recorded.  There’s a context for each analysis to record which regions and materials are connected, which lines and boundary conditions, and so on.

<Contour>…</Contour>

The Contour block describes how results are visualized.

<Coordinates>…</Coordinates>

Defines the engineering coordinates, page extents and so on.  (From Set - Units & Scale and Set - Page.)

<FileInfo … />

Contains information about the file.  (From KeyIn - Analyses, then click on the root item in the tree.)

<Functions>…</Functions>

The Functions block holds all the functions you’ve defined.  (From the various KeyIn - Functions.)  They’re split into several categories such as <Boundary>, which in turn contains categories such as <StressStrain>.

<GeometryItems>…</GeometryItems>

This is your geometry definition.  It contains coordinates for all the points, lines and regions.

<Materials Len=”2″>…</Materials>

All materials you’ve defined.  (KeyIn - Materials.)

<MeshItems>…</MeshItems>

The mesh that was generated from your regions.  Note that when you open a file, the mesh may be regenerated, so don’t edit this section, your changes may not be used.  If you want to adjust your mesh, you must do it in the GeometryItems section by applying mesh constraints to regions, lines or points.

<SketchItems>…</SketchItems>

Contains sketch lines, circles, text, images and so on.  All the “markup” that doesn’t actually affect results.  (From the Sketch menu.)

<SlopeItems Len=”2″>…</SlopeItems>

Each product (SLOPE/W, SEEP/W, etc.) can have its own section with data that’s specific to that product.  For example, SLOPE/W uses this section to describe slip surfaces, piezometric lines, and so on.  Like the <Contexts> section, there is one <SlopeItem> section per SLOPE/W analysis.

<View>…</View>

Your view preferences, most recent zoom and scroll position, and so on.

</GSIData>

And finally we’re done with the outer GSIData block.

That’s the GeoStudio xml format at a very high level.  I’ll dig deeper into specific sections over the next few weeks.  Let me know if there is anything in particular you’d like covered.

Giang, if you’ve discovered some gems of wisdom as you’ve been working through this yourself, feel free to share!

Updated 3 November 2009:  Exploring the XML File Format - Part 2.

Update 25 September:  version 7.15 has now been released.  The release can be downloaded from here.

(This feature will only be officially supported on Vista and Windows 7, though there are reports it sort of works on XP and Windows 2000 as well.)

For example, I’ve got some GeoStudio files in my Documents folder on Windows 7.  Rather than finding the name of the file I want, I can search right from the Start button for some words inside the file.

Here I’ve searched for “toe drain”, and (in amongst a bunch of html files) I’ve found two GeoStudio files that have “toe drain” somewhere inside them.

Open one of them up, and we can see “toe drain” appeared in several places:  the file’s comments as well as each analysis’ description.

In fact, Windows Search will search the author, file comments, analysis names and descriptions, and most other objects you can name (such as materials, boundary conditions, and so on).

If you are using Vista or Windows 7 already, I encourage you to download the beta and try this feature out.  Leave a comment here or email me with any suggestions or problems you run into.

Interesting question, and I’d like to hear more about what it is he’s trying to accomplish.  But in the meantime here are some thoughts.

Sensitivity

In SLOPE/W, take a look at the Sensitivity analysis (KeyIn Analyses - FOS Distribution - Sensitivity).

That will let you specify a range of values for certain properties (such as C, Phi and Unit Weight in the material properties), and will re-run the analysis many times.

In Contour you can then do things such as graphing how the FOS is affected by varying Phi. (In the menu that’s Draw - Sensitivity.)

Probability

Similarly you can do a Probabilistic analysis in SLOPE/W, where Solve takes care of varying the parameters in a random way using a distribution function you define. It then gives you a probability of failure instead of a factor of safety.

You can find an example of sensitivity and probabilistic stability analyses on the geo-slope.com web site.

Add-Ins

The other products (Seep, Sigma, etc) do not have sensitivity analyses built in.  (It’s a feature we’re considering adding, so email or leave a comment to cast your vote if you would use it.)

I could imagine doing something similar using an Add-In and a batch file. The batch file could make many copies of the file, giving each a unique name (”dam-1.gsz”, “dam-2.gsz”, etc), then solving each. An Add-In function would be used to specify the property you want to vary. The Add-In would look at the file name (the “1″ or “2″ part of it) to return a different value for each run.

Not a particularly elegant solution, but it would do the trick. Of course you’d end up with hundreds of files and no simple way to compare results or graph results across the varying parameter as you can do in Slope.

Add-Ins are beyond the scope of what I can go into today, but I have been wanting to delve into them on the blog at some point. Let me know if that would interest you.

XML

An even more adventurous route would be to edit the xml inside a gsz file.  (I mentioned in passing in a few other posts that a .gsz is just a zip file that contains a bunch of other files–one of the xml files it contains is what actually defines all the data in your model.)  The advantage would be you could avoid having thousands of files and instead have just a few files each containing a number of analyses.  That lets you share data (so that moving a point in one file wouldn’t have to be duplicated to all the others), and you may also be able to take advantage of the fact that GeoStudio can graph across analyses.

But editing the xml is not something we officially support, so you’re on your own if you choose that route.

I’m curious what it is you’re doing with your thousands of files. Can you share some more detail? Do the tips I mentioned help? We’re working full-force on the next version of GeoStudio at the moment, so this is a great time to hear about features that would be important to you.

But a QUAKE/W user showed me that’s not true in all cases.  He had a QUAKE/W analysis that was only using one of his four cores, and asked me why that was, or what he could do to change it.

That was news to me, and at first I thought it was a bug, but after some digging through the code and discussing with other engineers in the group, I learned a valuable lesson.

It turns out QUAKE/W will take full advantage of multiple CPUs when using the Parallel Direct Solver option but only for Initial Static and Nonlinear Dynamic analyses.  The Equivalent Linear analysis types are not currently formulated in a way that lends itself to parallelization, and thus even if you choose the “Parallel Direct Equation Solver” option, they will only use a single core while solving.

We did have some other suggestions, however, for how this customer could greatly speed up solving his analysis.  Some of these may help you as well.

Shorten the Earthquake Record

This customer had over 12,000 data points in his earthquake record.  That means over 12,000 finite-element analyses for each iteration. 

Much of this is unnecessary.  The first thing to do is to lop off the ends.  Normally in an earthquake record the beginning and end can be lopped off, as the vibrations are small enough as to not affect the final solution. 

In this case we suggested getting rid of the first five seconds and the last 25 or so, which I’ve highlighted here.

We’ve just cut down the number of data points to 5000, less than half.  That cuts the solve time less than half too.

Resample the Earthquake Record

This record’s data points are 4/1000 sec apart.  That kind of precision is likely not necessary for a geotechnical analysis. 

Use Excel to remove every other data point, then re-scale the record so it still has the same peak accelerations, and you’ve reduced the number of equations by half again, still likely without affecting your results.

Understand the Equivalent Linear Method

Remember what the EL method is all about.  You are looking for only one number for each element and taht is the maximum dynamic shear stress.  This usually occurs at one of the peaks.  All analyses after the peak has been established are irrelevant to the analysis.

Simplify the Mesh

Especially in the early stages of an analysis, when you’re trying to answer some initial questions, use a simple mesh.  For example:

• if you know all the important activity will be in one area, get rid of mesh detail a long way from that area;
• stick to just a few materials and a couple of regions;
• try a 1D column to start with.

Besides making for shorter solve times, a simpler geometry and simpler mesh also makes it easier to understand and interpret the answers you’re getting.  You can add complexity later and watch how (or if) it affects what you’ve understood so far.

Happy meshing!

A coworker recently pointed me to Dave’s landslide blog, by Dave Petley, the Wilson Professor at Durham University in England. Today’s article is an interesting look at a slide at a Tennesses power plant a few weeks ago (which amazingly claimed no lives).

The reason is that otherwise lines that appear to be vertical may in fact be slightly off. Many times that’s fine, but in SLOPE/W in particular nearly-vertical lines can cause a host of problems, and often be hard to detect.

So turn your grid on, and use these tips to draw foolproof geometry.

Grid Settings

Use the Grid Toolbar to make changes to your grid, or the Set - Grid menu item.

The button on the left turns the grid (and grid snapping) on or off.  

The two edit boxes adjust the grid spacing.  (You only need to adjust one of them–the other gets calculated automatically.)

Finer Detail

Adjust the grid spacing often as you work.  If you need to add details in between the grid points, don’t turn the grid off, just work with a finer grid.  When you’re done with detail area, you can make the grid coarser again.

Alt to Override the Grid

There are some times where you really need to work without the grid, or where you’re adjusting it so many times that you’d rather just turn it off.

Consider instead holding down the Alt key while you’re clicking.  The Alt key will temporarily override the grid, letting you click wherever you want.

There are, in fact, three ways I can suggest.

Importing Functions

Functions can be imported from any other .gsz file.

1.  From the KeyIn Functions box, click the arrow next to “Add” and choose “Import…”
   
2. Select the .gsz file that contains the function.
3. You’ll be presented with a list of functions in that file that are of the same type as those you’re currently editing.  
   
4. You can select one or more and click Import, and they magically appear in your list of functions.
   

Function Library

You may want to import a function from another analysis you were just working on recently.  But the next level of organization is to create a .gsz file whose only purpose is to store common functions.

Save a “Function Library.gsz” on a shared drive on the network and all your engineers can have access to the same standard functions.

Spreadsheet

An alternative to importing a function from another .gsz is to import it from a spreadsheet.  

In this case you aren’t really importing it, you just use the clipboard to copy the data points and paste them into the KeyIn Functions list.  (I discussed this last year in editing functions.)

I don’t suggest keeping a shared database of functions in a spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet only holds the data points, not the function type (spline vs step etc) or additional values like the spline curve or segment weight.  

But if you have a function from some other source, or you’ve written an algorithm in Excel to generate your unique function, this can be a good way to get it into GeoStudio.

But the reality is if you’re doing a finite-element analysis, the mesh can’t be ignored forever.

Start Simple

We always encourage you to start your model simply, and add complexity.  The same can be said for meshing.  Start with the default mesh, look at your results, and then decide if you need to use a finer mesh in certain areas (or everywhere).

Set the Global Element Size

If you want a finer mesh, the place to start is to use Draw Mesh Properties to change the “Approx. Global Element Size”.  This will change the entire mesh.

You’re setting the preferred length of each element edge.  So a smaller number will make for a finer mesh, and a larger number gives a coarser mesh.

Remember this size is “approximate”.  The mesher will do the best it can to stay close to the size you specified, but it won’t be exact.

Constrain the Mesh

Often you’ll find there are certain areas of your geometry that have more “activity”.  These areas may benefit by having a finer mesh.  You’ll get more exacting results at the expense of a longer solve time.

To get a finer (or coarser) mesh in specific areas, you select a region, line or point in that area, and change the Element Edge Length for the object you selected.  (You can also multi-select to adjust several objects simultaneously.) 

This is called “constraining the mesh”, because you’re giving the mesher specific instructions about this part of the mesh.

When adding a constraint, you are again specifying the preferred (or approximate) length of every element edge in this area.  But there are several ways to specify it:

1. Using a ratio of the global length.
2. Specifying the approximate length.
3. Specifying the exact number of divisions (this option is only avialable on lines).

Normally #1 is the better approach, just defining it as a ratio, like “0.5″ to make the mesh in this area half the size as the rest of the mesh.  That way you can later adjust the Global Element Size to make the entire mesh finer, and this area becomes finer yet.

Here’s an Example

Draw a simple geometry.  Choose Draw Mesh Properties to look at the mesh.

Make a finer mesh everywhere by adjusting the global element size.

Make the left side finer still, using a ratio.

Make the entire mesh finer by adjusting the global element size again.  Notice that elements along the left side are still half the size of the rest of the mesh.

Conclusions

Meshing is half science and half black art.  Making a finer mesh does NOT always give you a better result.  Discussing the ins and outs of how to mesh properly is beyond the scope of this article.  Read the engineering books that came with your software for a better treatment of this subject.

But adjusting and fine-tuning the mesh in GeoStudio 2007–or ignoring it completely–is easier than it has been in any previous version.

To start out, run two copies of GeoStudio side-by-side, one with the source file and one with the destination file.

Copy the Points

Choose the KeyIn Points command in both GeoStudio windows.

1. In the source file, select every point in the list;
2. copy them to the clipboard.
3. In the destination file, paste the points into the list.

When pasting the points, you may get this error:

You can safely hit OK and forget about it. The problem is just that when you copied the points to the clipboard, you included the last one in the list, which is just a placeholder and has “—” as the X and Y values. When you try to paste those values GeoStudio complains that they aren’t numbers. You can avoid the error in the future by selecting all but the last point.

Both files now have the same points. All that’s left is to hook them up together into regions.

Copy the Regions

Unfortunately you can’t copy and paste the entire list of regions like we did with points. Instead you have to do them one region at a time.

For each region in the source list:

1. Select the region;
2. Select and Copy the “Region Points” text;
3. In the destination, click the Add button;
4. Paste the points into the Region Points control.

For simple regions you may find it easier to just redraw them. At least all the points exist already at the same coordinates. But for complex region this tip will save you some time and avoid errors.

When you create analyses in KeyIn Analyses, they are always listed in alphabetical order. If you really want them to be displayed in a different order, just put a number at the beginning of each analysis name, and they’ll get sorted by that number.

Take this case, for example. We develop three analyses as an experiment, with increasing complexity:

• Dry Frictional Material with No Cohesion
• Wet Frictional Material with No Cohesion
• Wet Frictional Material with Cohesion

But GeoStudio displays them in alphabetical order, resulting in this:

To get the analyses displayed in a more logical order, simply rename them, like this:

P.S. Our own examples online do this all the time, but are not really good examples to follow IMO. Our engineers tend to go crazy and use numbering even when it isn’t necessary.

In my experience, most of the time the default alphabetical and parent/child ordering is fine.

While there’s nothing wrong with something like the following example, the numbering is unnecessary, because the parent-analysis / child-analysis structure will keep the analyses in sequential order anyway:

Background - Path Length

Windows imposes a maximum number of characters allowed for any path, including the drive letter, the directories, and the file name. In XP I believe the limit is 260 characters.

In this example (and in Mike’s case) his file name was within the 260 character limit that Windows imposes on paths.

The problem is a bit hidden, and has to do with how GeoStudio handles .gsz files.

A Gsz is a Zip File

I’ve mentioned before that a .gsz file is really just a Zip file that can be opened with WinZip or any other Zip reader.

When GeoStudio opens a .gsz file, it unzips any internal files it needs into your TEMP directory. In Windows 2000, Windows 98, and older versions, the TEMP directory is normally C:\TEMP. But in XP (and Vista) each user on a computer gets their own TEMP directory for privacy reasons, so the path is something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\Local Settings\Temp\

That’s a pretty long path to start out with. Maybe you can see where this is headed.

After that TEMP path, GeoStudio adds a unique folder name that is derived from the name of the .gsz, so now we’re up to something like:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\Local Settings\Temp\gs_Your Gsz File Name_89284fa64a8df8a7cf04a40a75c2b96c\

That’s the root folder the .gsz gets unzipped into. Nasty. But that’s not all, oh no, that is not all!

Inside that folder you get another folder named after each analysis. Now we’re at:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\Local Settings\Temp\gs_Your Gsz File Name_89284fa64a8df8a7cf04a40a75c2b96c\Your Descriptive Analysis Name\

Inside that analysis folder you get one folder for each time step:

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\Local Settings\Temp\gs_Your Gsz File Name_89284fa64a8df8a7cf04a40a75c2b96c\Your Descriptive Analysis Name\001\

And for the coup de grâce, in SLOPE/W we then fnish the path off with the name of the analysis again (in the flow products we use shorter names like “nodes.csv”):

C:\Documents and Settings\YourUsername\Local Settings\Temp\gs_Your Gsz File Name_89284fa64a8df8a7cf04a40a75c2b96c\Your Descriptive Analysis Name\001\Your Descriptive Analysis Name.frc01

You can see that even if you keep your filename and analysis names below the 260 character limit, you may still end up going over the limit inadvertantly. With SLOPE/W especially, keeping your analysis names shorter makes a big difference since they are used twice.

Verify

The good news is that in the latest versions, Verify catches the problem. In earlier versions it wasn’t so friendly. I don’t remember if it would crash, give strange results, or if the solver would just give an unhelpful error message.

If you get the “Path too long” error in Verify, just shorten your analysis name and/or the name of your .gsz file.

Betas

Two weeks ago I talked about how we let people know about updates to GeoStudio being released, and why there’s usually a delay between a release and when GeoStudio’s Start Page tells you about it.  I ended the article by mentioning that we now post betas weeks or even months before a release.

You can always find the latest beta on the Beta Downloads page.

Betas have turned out to be a great way to get small changes out quickly.  Normally when we become aware of an important bug, we can fix it the same day or at least within the week.  But we don’t want to post a new release every week–you’d probably be annoyed having to download a 70 MB file that often!

Instead we post a new beta, and email the person who reported the bug.  Anyone else over the next weeks who reports the same bug can be pointed to the beta as well and be quickly up and running again.

It is beta software though!

A word of caution:  a beta has not been fully tested, and could contain new bugs worse than what we fixed.

As a result, we don’t recommend everyone run the beta.  But if you encounter a bug with no easy workaround that has been fixed in the beta, using the beta can be better than waiting for the next release.

The Simple Story

The theory is simple.  Every time you run GeoStudio, it checks our web site to see if there’s a newer release.  If it finds one, it displays a message on the Start Page.

If you have version 7.10 or higher you get a message like this:

If you have an older version you get something like this instead:

In either case, simply click the link and you’ll get taken to a page where you can download the new version. Download it, run it, and it updates your current installation to the latest.

Exceptions to the Rule

7.13 was released last Wednesday.  But some of you are likely thinking, “hey, I ran GeoStudio last Friday and it didn’t say anything about a new version!”

In fact the very astute among you may even have noticed that you’ve been running version 7.11 for the last four months without getting any update notification, even though version 7.12 has been available on our web site since July.

What’s going on here?!

What’s going on is that we intentionally delay alerting people through the Start Page.  And in a few exceptional cases we may choose never to publish the alert at all.

The Overseas Bug

We almost always wait about a week from when a new version is released before publishing the notification that GeoStudio displays.  I think that practice dates back to version 6.18–did any of you experience 6.18?

We do some pretty rigorous testing in-house before every release, but we had some very embarassing days in March 2006 when we released version 6.18: we introduced a bug in 6.18 that only happened to people in Europe.  It passed all our tests, but within hours after we released it (and in those days we published the update notice immediately) our phone started ringing off the hook from irate Europeans.  And rightly so!  GeoStudio would corrupt any data file saved on a system where the comma was used as the decimal character.  Once you saved, you could never open the file again.

We found and fixed the problem quickly and posted a new update (and we could manually fix any corrupted files customers emailed us), but those were not happy days in our office.

Real-Life Testing

We do two things differently now:

1. We post betas before publishing a new release.  A handful of people from all over the world use the betas on real-life problems, so there’s more chance to find unusual bugs that our normal testing doesn’t reveal.
2. We trickle out new releases.  We don’t want everyone to download a new release the moment it’s out.  We let a few people download it, a few others get it on CD, and if we don’t hear any negative feedback within the first few days, then we’ll let the rest of our users know.

It was great to see some of you there.  Believe it or not, I always learn a tonne from talking with you and watching how you work.  I walk away from workshops feeling invigorated and excited about the potential the future holds.

There are often some embarrassing moments.  Like when View Slice Information crashed within the first hour or two of the workshop, on the presenter’s computer as well as many of the attendees’.  We’ve been fighting that crash for months and thought we had it licked, but apparently not.  

There’s a happy ending to that story, however.  As a result of watching it happen to a whole roomful of people, by the end of the next day I was able to find the bad line of code and finally fix it.  I think for real this time!  The next release (7.13–which we just released yesterday) includes this fix as well as a host of other improvements.

This was our first time to offer an optional fourth day.  The dynamics of that last day were much different than the first three.  The smaller group and more casual sessions allowed us to have more informal discussions and get to know each others’ backgrounds a bit more.

I’m definitely looking forward to next year’s workshop.

Last Year

This whole blogging thing was an experiment from the beginning.  I had a couple of goals:

1. Provide help for GeoStudio users to learn how to use the software, with a different focus than the manuals and online help.
2. Get a better feel personally for how our software is being used “in the real world” through feedback from readers.
3. Be a friendly personal face to GEO-SLOPE.

I tried to blog weekly, and although I wasn’t that regular, I did (coincidentally?!) end up writing 52 posts over the year!

Did I meet my goals?

1. Much of what I wrote about is not discussed in the online help or the engineering books, or is mentioned but is hard to find.  With the recent changes to the blog categories and layout, I hope that those 52 gems will be easier for newcomers to find, so the blog can be used as a bit of a reference tool.
2. I receive several emails or comments a month, and from those I do get a small feel for how the software is being used.  A big thank you to everyone who felt the freedom to write!  This is an area I’d like to improve on next year–I would love to see more feedback, especially comments left on the blog, and even to have readers responding to other reader’s comments.
3. I’ll leave #3 to you to decide!

Some interesting statistics (at least to me!):

• 52 posts;
• 12 comments from readers, and a similar number of emails (all of which I respond to);
• Around 48 regular readers, and growing slowy, 37 of whom subscribe by email, the rest using RSS readers;  The biggest jumps in subscribers come when the blog gets mentioned in a Direct Contact newsletter, especially when it’s the main article.
• The web site has been visited from 90 countries, but only gets about ten visits a day.

The most popular articles were:

1. Global vs Analysis Objects
2. Prettying Up Graphs

Next Year

Before starting to blog I wrote up a list of topics I wanted to write on, just to make sure there was enough to keep me going.  I’m mostly through that list now, but from the comments, from tech support we do, and from discussions at the Banff Workshop that just finished, I feel I have plenty more to keep this blog going another year.

To spice things up a bit, though, I’d like to have more guest bloggers this year.  It would be nice to hear some tricks from people who use the software regularly.  Do any of you have something you’d be willing to share on this blog?  Email me privately (hekman at geo-slope dot com) to discuss.

I’d also like to stretch my limits a bit and write about a few more engineering-related topics, like the Multi-Stage Rapid Drawdown article.  Those are harder for me to write, I normally have to sit down for a lesson with one of our engineers, but they are useful things for me to know and they are obviously topics you are wanting addressed.  If you have topic suggestions, please let me know by leaving a comment.

But mostly I intend this year to focus where my strengths lie, which is the user interface.  I’m going to take a look at DXF issues, dig deeper into functions and graphs, take a stab at plug-ins, and as much as possible help you to get past the software and focus on your modeling.

One change in particular I’d like to point out:

• The Categories have been rearranged, around commands, objects or concepts in the software.  That should help you if you don’t follow the blog regularly, or you only ran across it recently.  If you’re struggling to understand functions you can click on the Functions category and immediately see everything I’ve written about functions.

Summer is definitely over here in Calgary, with temperatures dipping and leaves changing colour.  When our workshop is over next week I will be getting back into serious blogging mode again and try to bring you a new tip every week.

As always, if you have comments, suggestions or questions, please leave a comment or email me.

Nate

I hope your summers have been going well (or your winter–do I have any readers from the southern hemisphere?).  This summer we’ve enjoyed beautiful weather here in Calgary, which has allowed me to rack up 800 km on my bike commuting to work.  Woohoo!

I’m going to take a short blogging break.  Grokking GeoStudio will be on holidays for the next couple of weeks, but I’ll be back in time to celebrate Grokking’s first anniversary, September 19th!

Will any of you be attending our annual workshop in Banff this year?  September 15-18.  Look me up, I’d love to chat with you face to face.  If you haven’t signed up yet you’ll have to wait for next year–the workshop is full and the waiting list already a mile long.

Enjoy the rest of your summer, and look for me again in September.

Nate

On the one hand it’s annoying to have that dongle to keep track of, and a big pain if the automatic license renewal doesn’t work for some reason.  But the nicer side is that it allows you to buy different types of licenses to better fit the way you want to use the software.

Even if you already own a full license, some of the other license types may still be useful to your office.

Viewer License

The Viewer license is free and is included automatically with every installation.  It gives you access to every feature of the software except two: saving and solving.

It’s great as an evaluation tool before buying a new product. 

It’s also great for your manager who needs to review your work but doesn’t do the modeling himself.  He can open your file, look at all the definition data, explore the results using graphs, contours, exporting data to Excel if necessary, all the tools the software provides.  All without spending any money on a license.

Student License

The Student license is also free, and also included in every installation.  It is a very “lite” version of the software, intended to help people learn geotechnical engineering concepts, not to perform real engineering analysis.

You can save and solve, but you are restricted to a small mesh, a small number of regions, and so on.

The Student license is most useful as a teaching aid for undergraduate engineering classes.

Basic License

Basic licenses are the most inexpensive licenses we sell–two different options for $995 each. 

Like the Student license, they limit access to some of the more advanced features, but are much more powerful than the Student license, and definitely powerful enough to use on the more routine geotech problems you’ll encounter.

There are two Basic licenses in the latest version:

• VADOSE/W Basic is a 1-D version of VADOSE/W and CTRAN/W.
• GeoStudio Basic is a single license that gives you access to all the products except VADOSE/W.  So for a low price you get SLOPE/W, SEEP/W, SIGMA/W, QUAKE/W, TEMP/W, CTRAN/W and AIR/W.

If your firm tends to do more routine analyses, you may want to consider the Basic license.

Full License

The full license, of course, gives you access to all the features of a particular product.

Picking Your License

You choose between those four types of license from the Start Page, before opening or creating a file.  In the most recent version the options look like this:

In version 6 (GeoStudio 2004) they look like this:

More Information

You can read more online about GeoStudio Basic, VADOSE/W Basic and the Student Edition.  The GeoStudio 2007 Product Details brochure shows which features are limited in the lite versions.

Default template

Choose File - New, select a template, then click “Make this the default template” if you want to use this template all the time.

The default template will be used any time you start a new file by clicking the “New File” button in the toolbar, or by clicking one of the product icons on the Start Page.

The default template should also be the one that is selected initially when you choose File - New from the menu (though that appears to be broken in the current version–I’m hoping we can fix it in the next release).

Creating a New File From the Menu, Toolbar or Start Page

As I alluded to, there are several ways to create a new file, and they all work a bit differently.

• Choosing File - New from the menu always shows the box where you get to choose a template, followed by the KeyIn Analyses box.  Since the default templates we ship do not contain any analyses, the KeyIn Analyses box is initially empty.  If your template does have one or more analyses in it, they will show up in KeyIn Analyses.
• Choosing the “New File” button from the toolbar uses the default template.  The result is as if you used the menu item, clicked “Create from this template”, selected the default template, then clicked Create.
• Clicking one of the product icons on the Start Page (next to the “New” tab) uses the default template and creates a new analysis.  The result is as if you clicked the “New File” toolbar button, then created an analysis.  So if your default template already has one analysis, you’ll end up with two (the template one and the new one).

Create From Existing

You can use any existing .gsz file as if it were a template.  Choose File - New from the menu, then click the “Create From Existing…” button and choose a .gsz. 

The .gsz file gets opened but has no name, so when you try to save it you get prompted for a new file name.

The Location of the Templates Folder

The templates listed when you choose File - New are all .gsz files from your Templates folder.  The location of the Templates folder can be changed in Tools - Options.  One reason you may want to change the location is to share templates with others in the same company–you could create a Templates folder on a shared location on the network.

No Analyses

You may want to create a template with no analyses in it, like the ones that ship with the software.  That’s handy if you don’t know what analyses will be used, but you want to set up some common defaults, like default boundary conditions, materials, or units.

To create a template with no analyses, you start out (unintuitively) by creating all the analyses you could possibly want (e.g., one SLOPE/W, one SEEP/W, etc.).  That gives you the framework in which you can define the appropriate boundary conditions, materials, and so on.  Don’t set any analysis-specific properties like time steps (because our next step is going to be to delete the analyses); only create global objects.

Now delete all the analyses you created.  The global objects (boundary conditions, materials) and the file-specific settings (units, scale, extents) will remain, but when you start a new file with this template you’ll have no analyses.  As soon as you add an analysis, you’ll see the global objects that apply to it.