Personal
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It's been a hectic – but very fun – few days in Munich, working with a group of 60-70 developers from all over Europe who are getting started with Autodesk's cloud services. I'm particularly focused on those working with AutoCAD I/O, which means probably 5-6 companies in total. Here's a quick summary of some of the problems that have come up, many of which are for pure AutoCAD… Draw Order warning One developer has a long-running custom operation that presents the following message: AutoCAD Warning: This operation may take a long time. To greatly improve performance, the system can disregard…
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The snow arrived, at last, and it's amazing. I spent the weekend on the slopes with my family before heading across to Zurich to hop on the last flight to Munich, last night. I had a sinking feeling, on arriving at the airport, as the information board said "More information at 20:15". This is generally not a good thing for a flight that's scheduled to leave at 20:15. In the end it was a mere 45 minute delay – which was quite the relief – which gave me some time to watch another episode of the excellent Mr. Robot (yes,…
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Some of you may remember this series of posts from the beginning of the year (I also mentioned it in the last post). It showed how you might use AutoCAD and .NET (in this case via F#) to animate the Star Wars opening crawl for the first 6 movies. Back then I said I'd update the video series to include Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, once it was released. Today is that day… due to some bizarre accident of international scheduling, I got to see it two days ago, here in Switzerland. I took a few snaps of…
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Last year I posted a holiday card serving up random links to posts from this blog's full archive (prior to that post). This year I wasn't feeling particularly inventive and so thought I'd rustle up a quick version that shows a random post from the subsequent year. Which may well be more useful: people typically find their way to code-centric posts using search and are hopefully interested in random links to more topical posts. Here is the 2015 version of this card, in any case: Looking back, I started the year with a series recreating the Star Wars opening crawl…
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A link to a video was posted to Autodesk's intranet, a few days ago. It's about Mark Webb, a friend and colleague based in our Manchester (New Hampshire) office. Mark and I started out at more or less the same time at Autodesk in the UK, in the charming town of Guildford. At least it's charming when you compare it with Farnborough, where the office is located now. Back then Mark was working on one of our early AEC products – some UK-centric extensions to AutoCAD that pre-dated the Softdesk acquisition and the launch of Architecture Desktop – while I…
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As is typical, for this time of year, there were some strange sightings at Autodesk Neuchâtel, today. Here I am dressed as Jabba the Hutt, getting a latte in our new coffee area. The costume's a lot of fun, if a little hot. It has an integrated fan, powered by 4 AA batteries, so at least there's some air circulating. It's a little tricky to walk in (especially when going through doors – I've learned to do a little spin to make sure the tail doesn't get caught and I end up falling on my nose), but at least my…
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My best attempt to describe this technical, industrial museum is as a Mecca for Makers. It's not a funky new space with a bunch of hipsters manning 3D printers – not that I have a problem with such spaces… I love those spaces 🙂 – rather it's a shrine to all manner of human invention and creation since before the industrial revolution. The first thing I had to see on entering the museum, this morning, was Foucault's Pendulum – with the museum playing a key part in Umberto Eco's incredible novel of the same name, this was a "must see"…
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I've headed to Paris with the family for a few days, this week. We're staying in our first Airbnb-booked apartment in the 11th arrondissement. So far, so good! As the forecast for today looked a bit rainy, we decided to postpone our daytrip to Disneyland Paris until tomorrow and take the opportunity to visit the Louvre instead. Which turned out to be a good thing, as it's closed on Tuesdays, and on Wednesday we've already planned to climb the Eiffel Tower. What fun. Anyway, as we were leaving the Louvre, walking to the île de la Cité to visit Notre…
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Birdly is an immersive Virtual Reality experience that let's you fly like a bird through virtual cityscapes. To get a sense for how it works, check out this video: Birdly - Splitscreen from maxR on Vimeo I first heard about Birdly from Brian Kling, a friend and colleague in our Neuchâtel office who tried it out earlier this year at the Lift conference in Geneva. He came back really excited about the exhibit, and his excitement was contagious. Since then I've been looking for an opportunity to experience it firsthand. I'm happy to say the opportunity finally presented…
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After getting home late on Friday from the Cloud Accelerator in Prague, on Saturday morning we celebrated my son's 9th birthday (how time flies) with a party for his classmates at Robosphere in La Chaux-de-Fonds, the heart of the Swiss watch-making industry. A fun fact: this town has also had a major impact on both architecture and the automotive industry, being the birthplace of Le Corbusier and Louis Chevrolet. Robosphere is a local organisation dedicated to increasing awareness of robotics and related fields. They have a couple of options for birthday parties: we opted for the "Primo" package – the…