Autodesk
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Tickets are now on sale for this year's AU London. Until April 30th you can get the earlybird discount of £160 on the regular price: for the next several weeks the price is £540 + VAT instead of £700 + VAT. I'll be attending – and speaking at – this year's AU London. I'll be presenting a session entitled "Using Forge to Connect BIM to the Internet of Things" on June 19th at 3:25pm. Here's the class description from the AU London website: Autodesk Research has been working on the display of building performance data in a rich 3D environment…
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Many thanks to all of you who responded to the last "one man's trash" post offering a signed copy of The Autodesk File for one of the people answering John's question correctly: What was the first Autodesk product which, after having been sold, was subsequently discontinued? The answer is, of course, AutoScreen. Of the 15 people who responded, 7 gave the correct answer (the other popular – albeit incorrect – answers were MicroCAD and Lightscape). John's "bonus points" question really had people scratching their heads: What was the original in-house name for the product eventually introduced as AutoSketch? (In all…
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When I first visited Neuchatel I instantly fell in love with the city. This was back in the summer of 1995, during my second round job interview for Autodesk. From that moment I knew I wanted to live here, but it was only in early 1998 that I had the chance to do so: a colleague had moved across to San Francisco to join the Kinetix development team, which left a Swiss-based vacancy in the European Developer Support team. I was thrilled to have the chance to move across and fill that role. During my first few weeks in the…
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I know this one is going to be extremely popular with the readers of this blog. While starting the clear-out of her bookshelf, a colleague in the Neuchatel office, Maria Elena Santoyo Torres, found a copy of The Autodesk File in book form. I hadn't realised it had been bound into a book, so this was really exciting to me! I admit to having been more than a little tempted to hang on to it for myself. Ah well. (For those of you who are new to this series, we're using this blog to give away interesting items we've found…
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In response to the last "one man's trash" post I actually received two emails: the first from Kean Maizels, who ended up receiving the box, and the second from an old friend and former colleague from the UK, Phil Gill, who just missed out. Luckily the Neuchatel office's "recycler in chief", Francesco Tonioni, managed to find a second breakout box (he'd also found the one that launched this whole initiative, of course). A different model than the first, but with similar capabilities. I stopped by the Neuchatel office on Tuesday to pick it up, and I remember thinking to myself…
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I didn't think, on Monday, that I'd be visiting the UK this week. So it came as a surprise that on Tuesday I ended up buying a flight to head across to Birmingham on Wednesday, coming back Friday. You're probably thinking, "ouch, that must have been expensive!" – which was exactly my expectation, looking into flights – but it turns out that at this time of year (probably due to the demand from skiers) EasyJet runs daily flights between Geneva and Birmingham. And – this week, at least – the flights were nearly empty: I managed to get a return…
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I was really excited to hear, over the weekend, that our friends at Hackrod have launched a successful crowd-funding campaign and that there's still time to participate. The campaign is being hosted on MicroVentures, which means investors should receive interest on their investment as well as equity in the project, assuming things work out. This admittedly seems a nicer model than getting a T-shirt or coffee mug saying you supported their Kickstarter. 😉 I haven't yet decided whether I'm personally going to get in on the action (so to speak) but I thought I'd post about it in case others…
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Last week I received an important letter through the post. It was final confirmation from the Swiss Confederation that I'm being granted Swiss nationality. This is something I could have requested some time ago – due to the years I've been married to a Swiss person (something I lovingly refer to as "time served" 😉 – but it was the Brexit referendum that pushed me over the edge. The day after the vote I requested the forms I needed to fill out. It took me a few more months to get around to submitting them, but Brexit was definitely the…
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As Autodesk Neuchatel lurches steadily towards its closure, later in the year, people have started emptying desks and throwing out bits and pieces that have accumulated over the years. I don't like to see usable things get thrown away and so have decided to do a regular series of posts to find new homes for some of the quirkier items. I'm naming the series of posts after the proverb "one man's trash is another man's treasure", as I'm sure there must be someone out there with an interest in or a need for things that would otherwise be ditched. If…
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The project I'm currently working on fits squarely under the umbrella of "Generative Design for Architecture". We're using Dynamo Studio to generate layouts of residential housing – including both individual homes and apartment buildings – with the results quantified in a number of metrics that will be easily explorable by the user of the system. It's the approach The Living – the architectural studio in Autodesk Research doing pioneering work in the generative design space – has used for a number of projects, including Project Discover and the layout of the AU 2017 Exhibit Hall. I came across this video,…