Personal
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I'd like to wish a very "Happy New Year" to all readers of the Through the Interface blog. I'm currently still up in the mountains, enjoying a few more days of snow before diving back into work, but thought I'd post a quick message to wish you all the best for the coming year. Over the next few weeks I'll post about some thoughts I've been having about some potential (and hopefully very fun) robotics integrations with AutoCAD – inspired by the very cool Thymio robot that my kids got for Christmas – as well as about my first trip…
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During the general wind-down before Autodesk's annual "week of rest", I've been spending some time this week getting more of my AutoCAD-Kinect integration samples working with the pre-release Kinect for Windows 2.0 device and SDK. Things are actually working pretty well: all samples – barring those that rely on capabilities that aren't yet part of the SDK – are functional and some have even been enhanced based on new capabilities of the 2.0 device. For instance, I've reworked the "piping" sample (the one that extrudes a circular profile through 3D space) to make use of the distance between the palm…
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Back in March, I signed up via Code.org to see if I could get help teach basic programming skills to kids. It didn't work out mainly because of my location – Code.org is really focused on the US – but I stayed on their mailing list and have been following their updates with great interest. For those of you who are not familiar with Code.org, it's a resource that's been established to promote computer science education for students. A great example of what's being provided is the Hour of Code, which has been put together for this week's Computer Science…
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Over the weekend I had some more fun with the ray-tracing application I'm writing for my BerkeleyX homework. This time, though, I ended up using AutoCAD to do some debugging (which was an interesting twist). The big problem with debugging an app such as a ray-tracer is that it's hard to picture a complex 3D scene in your mind – especially when there are lots of transformations being applied to the various objects in the model. At least it's not something my mind is at all good at. AutoCAD, on the other hand, is very good at helping you think…
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As mentioned in this previous post – in-between bouts of preparation for AU2013 and my other work responsibilities – I've been spending time following an edX class on computer graphics. It's been really beneficial: I've shored up some of the basics I'd missed out on studying formally at university and it was a great continuation of many of the concepts gleaned from the linear algebra class on Coursera. The final assignment in the class has been a challenge: I've had to write a ray-racer from the ground up. It's been really interesting, though: there are various steps to go through,…
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To celebrate this year's Halloween, we went along to Instructables (like several million other people – this is the site's big ticket event of the year, apparently) and found a really fun project to make, Halloween chocolate skulls. Living in Switzerland is great, but sometimes I miss the ready availability of various products that we enjoyed when living in the US. Getting started was easy enough: we managed to get Fimo very easily from the local shops (it's a European product, after all), and – with the help of a YouTube video and a few pictures – I used that…
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I recently sailed past my 18-year anniversary at Autodesk. Part of me finds this scary – in this world of post-millennial job-hopping – but then I really enjoy what I do. Long may it last. The company has grown a great deal since I joined (I had to look it up, but it seems that over this period we've gone from around 1,800 employees to around 7,500, with an additional 1,000 or so temps and contractors), so it should go without saying that I haven't met or interacted with the vast majority of the people who work at Autodesk. But…
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Well, that was indeed fun. For my first afternoon in Great Malvern visiting one of my favourite Autodesk customers – the Morgan Motor Company – I took a 1/2 day Morgan 3 Wheeler familiarization course. The course was run by a company called 3 Wheel Drive (what a great name 🙂 and involved focused, hands-on guidance from highly-qualified advanced driving instructors. My tutor, Norm, was a former professional police driver with many years of experience on the roads around Malvern. I started the day at the MMC Visitor's Centre: Norm met me there and introduced me to the Morgan 3…
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I had a fun Saturday morning, a couple of weeks ago. An old school-friend of my wife's is a partner in a temporary art tattoo business (which hopefully means a business that sells temporary art tattoos rather than a temporary business that sells art tattoos ;-), and they were looking for bald models to help showcase their wares. So I went along for my first – and quite possibly last – modelling assignment. The fact that they were only interested in the top of my head made the gig a lot easier. Here's the resulting image: What's interesting is that…
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Another year has come and gone. I managed to miss the 7-year anniversary of "Through the Interface": it's only this morning that I thought to look back and check the day of the first post, and – sure enough – it was June 19, 2006. I have it in my head that it's around late June (just as I know the anniversary of my joining Autodesk is sometime in late August), but I still managed to miss it. Ah well. So that's that. Thanks to all of you who have contributed to the blog, whether via one of the ~7,300…