Personal
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After a nice week on the slopes – children in Neuchâtel have their annual "semaine blanche" around March 1st, the day the canton celebrates becoming a republic – I eased back into work this morning by heading across to Geneva for the 86th "Salon de l'Auto". I was there when the doors opened so I could make it home for a late lunch. As usual there was plenty of shiny on display at this year's show. I liked the fact that I could watch the reflection in the paintwork of a physical car of a video that was certainly computer-generated…
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As part of the restructuring that went on at Autodesk, last week, I have a new role. This isn't a bad thing, thankfully: in fact it's the opposite… it's something I've been working towards for several years. I've been in the AutoCAD team for the last 4 years and was in the Autodesk Developer Network team for my 16+ years at Autodesk prior to that. These were great environments for me, for quite different reasons, but my ultimate interests lie in where the company (and the broader industry) is heading, technology-wise… one reason I've always felt drawn to the work…
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The last couple of weeks have been very interesting: partly for reasons that I'll go into in my next post, but also because I've had (or am having) the opportunity to visit three universities in Switzerland. My first visit, on Thursday of last week, was back to ZHdK – Zurich University of the Arts – to have lunch with Max Rheiner (who you may remember from my post about Birdly, some months ago) and discuss the possibility of collaborating on some research into the use of VR for CAD. It was a great discussion, and I'm very much hoping it…
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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"…