AU
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I've decided to interrupt my series on creating a face-recognising security cam to cover another Raspberry Pi-related topic, this week. I'll try to finish my series write-up for next Wednesday. At the recommendation of an old friend from University, I recently devoured the excellent "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline. Ernest was apparently born about a year before me, so to say that the copious pop-culture references from the 1980s resonated would be a massive under-statement. I just wish I'd come across it sooner (in time to have a shot at solving the Easter Egg and winning a 1981 DeLorean,…
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I registered for AU 2012, yesterday. I had originally thought it was opening early for speakers, but apparently not: anyone can now register to attend and receive an early bird discount of $500 (before October 15). If you're interested in seeing what classes are scheduled for this year's AU – which will be held from Nov 27-29 in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, Las Vegas – you can browse the class catalog online. Here are the classes I'm scheduled to deliver or participate in, for instance: As you can see, there's more detail on the class timings than I provided in…
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Last week, I received confirmation that I'll be presenting a few different classes at AU 2012, which will be held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas from November 27-28. My main sessions, this year, are in some way focused on cloud & mobile technologies. The subject matter of the first lecture is the recently completed cloud & mobile series, where we'll look at moving desktop functionality to the cloud and using it from a variety of mobile environments: CP1914 – Moving code to the cloud – it's easier than you think! It has a companion roundtable session –…
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Thanks to some recent coverage on a Channel 9 blog (which I consider a great honour – I've been a huge fan of Channel 9 since its inception :-), I decided to get around to posting an update to the AutoCAD + Kinect samples I demonstrated at AU 2011. While attending the recent hackathon, I spent a fair amount of time porting my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples from the Beta 2 of the Microsoft Kinect SDK (for the Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor) to the released SDK for the Kinect for Windows. It was pretty impressive just how many of the…
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As expected, Microsoft has announced at CES 2012 that Kinect for Windows devices will become available from February 1st, priced at $249. Those of you who attended my Kinect class at AU 2011 will probably remember me speculating about the eventual cost for this device, and that it would preferable for Microsoft to recoup more of their technology investment from the physical devices than they had from the equivalent devices for Xbox 360, and therefore avoid developers having to pay Microsoft directly for the use of their SDK. I think I suggested it'd be fine to pay $200 or more…
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On the day I left AU, I facilitated an unconference session (CP4459-U) on AutoCAD .NET development, focusing on tools and best practices. It was a really good session: well attended with plenty of participation. As promised during the session, I'm posting the notes to this blog even though they may not make a great deal of sense to anyone who didn't attend. We didn't complete all the topics we brainstormed at the start of the session, but I've nonetheless left those at the end of the notes. Source editing Main tools LISP: Notepad++, Multi-edit, Vi, Textpad, Crimson Editor .NET: Express,…
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What a great week! The highlight – and that's from a lot of great moments – was probably the AutoCAD + Kinect session: the demos were clearly fun to do, but there was a high degree of audience participation and we all laughed a lot. For those who weren't able to attend in person, I'm going to try to find some time to record the demos and upload them to YouTube. Watch this space. I'm now about to head home to Switzerland. For lots of very good reasons, I'm currently carrying the following electronic devices: MacBook Pro This is currently…
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So, here we are on Wednesday, day two of AU proper (although my team was busy with ADN-only sessions on Sunday and Monday). Yesterday was really fun: I was part of the "Meet the AutoCAD API Experts" panel (along with Stephen Preston, Albert Szilvasy, Mike Dickason, Bill Adkison, Davis Augustine and Fenton Webb), which is always a good session (and a privilege to spend some time alongside some of the brightest minds in CAD programming). I then had the honour of co-speaking a session on AutoCAD scripting with dave espinosa-aguilar, probably the all-time highest-rated AU speaker. It was really something…
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A quick one to end the week, as I really need to start packing for AU. 🙂 Thanks to Augusto Gonçalves, from DevTech Americas, for pointing out this DevNote on the ADN site in a recent email to an ADN member. The below code shows the steps to set the current visual style to "realistic" in AutoCAD. As with many AutoCAD features, you can also set the current visual style by sending commands to the command-line, but then why do something in 3 lines of code when you can do it in 40? 😉 Seriously, there are some advantages to…
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You're probably thinking I've been talking about little else other than making Kinect work with your PC, of late (and not only because I've had a class to prepare for AU, I also think this technology has the potential to be very significant), but I did feel it was worth pointing out this important announcement from Microsoft: early next year (which presumably now means weeks away) we'll see a version of Kinect that's specifically intended to work with Windows systems (rather than the current version of the device that's really intended to be a controller for the Xbox 360). What's…