Dear Reader,

So sad for England! Unfortunately, England was knocked out of the World Cup even though it felt they were the better side against France. Also, Morrocco could not make it through to the final. So, all in all, it was a sad experience for me as I was really rooting for these two teams. Now, we have France and Argentina in the final, hopefully it will be a wonderful game. Who do you want to see crowned champions? Some part of me wants Messi and co, especially as a true testament to his awesome talents and attribution as the Greatest Of All Times (GOAT).

Welcome to this week's newsletter. Here are the reflections for this week:

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of ABAQUS
2. Behind the Scenes at CM Videos: Updates on Software Products
3. Quote for the Week: Laziness versus diligence

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of ABAQUS

There are so many finite element software available to computational modellers to use in numerical analysis of their work. Each of these software has their excellent features (what I call Good), their sort of mediocre features (I call it Bad) and what is certainly detestable about them (I call it Ugly). I intend to make a series of videos for the CM Videos YouTube channel where I reflect on these issues from one FEA solver to another. I will like to begin with ABAQUS.

As most of you know, I am a great advocate of the ABAQUS software and do most of my modelling in there. I have had now 18 years experience working with ABAQUS having started learning it as a PhD student in 2004. Over the years, I have grown in my knowledge and appreciation of the software. I feel that I am in a position to argue on the good, bad and ugly sides of ABAQUS. This is not to demonize a software that I love but more to expose its strengths and weaknesses to users, so that you can make up your minds for yourselves.

The Good

There are too much to love about ABAQUS and some of the reasons why ABAQUS is amazing are these:

• ABAQUS has an amazing documentation to help you with queries about the model
• It is very stable and particularly excellent for research work.
• Can easily be integrated with MATLAB, Python and Excel.
• It has a great Graphical User Interface called ABAQUS CAE, that integrates all stages of the model creation, simulation and post-processing.

The Bad

The features that I find bad when it comes to using ABAQUS are the following:

• No inbuilt material library that links material behaviour to material properties. Users have to define their material properties from scratch and determine what material model is best for their study.
• It is difficult to adopt for inexperienced users hence a high adoption threshold.
• Limited market penetration in comparison with say ANSYS.
• Periodic Boundary Condition is not traditionally incorporated into the model by default.

The Ugly

Much as I love ABAQUS, I find these features really detestable. It is a huge turn-off to many who would have wanted to work with ABAQUS. It is something SIMULIA - developers of ABAQUS - needs to consider in future developments and releases for the code. Two ugly featuresof ABAQUS are the following:

• It is quite expensive in comparison to other similar solvers.
• Not very good for student experience as the student version ABAQUS only allows for 1000 nodes maximum.
• No multiphysics incorporated by default with separate solvers for standard, explicit, fluid and electromagnetic studies.

Those are the immediate points that come to mind. Do let me know in a reply if there are other features of ABAQUS that I have missed and where will you classify them: good, bad or ugly.

Behind the Scenes at CM Videos: Updates on Software Products

I have been receiving a lot of questions (direct messages) from you my CM Videos Insiders as well as my audience on the YouTube Channel. All of these mainly relate to information about software products. Here are my updates on the software products:

• The most requested software is: PBCGen3D which is the version of the periodic boundary condition generator dedicated to 3D representative volume elements. It is not available for public use but am working on it.
• The second most requested software is: MontCarlGen3D which is another code dedicated to creating 3D RVEs where the inclusions are truly random (according to the Monte Carlo methods). It is designed to work for 3D RVEs with spherical inclusions.
• MontCarlGen2Dv1 is already out there and continues to be downloaded by many users. I am rather proud of the effect these software products are having on your projects.
• MontCarlGen2Dv2 is an improvement of the version 1 and the improvements have been necessitated by my Erasmus Student (John Hanna) who require hollow inclusions for his work on modelling self-healing concrete and also syntactic foams.
• I have been working on developing MontCarlGen2Dv2 and it is in a version ready for John to use. Over the holidays, I will explore getting it ready, with the relevant documentation, for launch early in the new year.
• As regards the other software, I will be prioritizing working on them in the new year. I will explain my vision for software developments in a future newsletter.

Please let me know which of the software above (as well as any other) that you will need from me so that I can decide on what is truly in high demand from this community. Thank You!

Quote for the Week: Laziness versus diligence

I am taking my quote for the week from the Book of Proverbs, one of my special books of the Bible. In this quote lies a common tug of war tugging on everyones life. We are being either pulled by the tug of laziness, to simply do nothing and yield to our basic human instincts. Or on the other hand, we are constantly being pulled by the necessity for diligence. It is the tussle between these two arch enemies that determines what outcomes many experience in life. I know it is simplistic to think this way but please bear with me and ride along in this rudimentary philosophy of the requirements for enriched life full of positive outcomes or a defeated existence with ample evidences of poverty.

A slack hand is a metaphor for a lazy lifestyle where instead of taking the bull by the one, you decide to be negligent and just lazy about things. Our biology wants this default way of living however, it has this caustic consequence of leading as the quote say: such persons will live impoverished lives. No none wants to be there!

On the contrary, when we live busy and diligent lives we are increasing the odds of us bringing riches into our lives. I know when we hear of riches, we quickly think of money but I see it differently. Riches can be in terms of happiness, fulfilled lives, career satisfaction, entrenched confidence in ones work and much more than money. Of course, if money comes from our busy work, then that is also good.

So, as I reflect on this quote for this week, I want to encourage you to keep being busy and productive. It is about identifying tasks you want to achieve and setting SMART expectations about them. As you achieve them, tick them off the list and keep going. It is the repetitions that we put into our productive lives that ultimately leads to a life of riches. It is my wish for you to experience a life of riches!

That is it for this week's newsletter. Thank you for consistently reading these words. I also want to appreciate those who have been emailing me back with their impressions and questions about this newsletter. It means a lot to me. As a lead up to Christmas, I want to also wish you a Merry Christmas.

Adios (Bye by in Spanish) and this is a nod to Argentina- which speak Spanish too - and especially as the Argentines prepare for the Messi-Mbappe World Cup Final.

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