Personal
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I arrived yesterday morning on the EasyJet flight from Geneva to Tel Aviv. I'd ended up spending the previous night at an airport hotel – I'd have had to leave home at 3:30am, otherwise – which meant a somewhat more tolerable 4:40am wake-up. I admit I'd been a bit concerned about security, arriving in Israel the day after Ariel Sharon's funeral, but it turned out to be an extremely smooth arrival. Someone with my name on a board was waiting for me at the end of the jetway and they whisked me through security and customs (I could really get…
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I was up in Adelboden, this weekend, for the Men's FIS World Cup Slalom and Giant Slalom events. Yes, just watching – not participating 🙂 – although I did get the chance to catch a few much gentler slopes on my snowboard during the course of the weekend. On the Saturday – during the Giant Slalom – there was a pretty amazing incident: a young Norwegian competitor, Henrik Kristofferson, very nearly hit a television worker during his first run down. Thankfully no-one was hurt, and Henrik was very understanding about the whole thing (he was given a restart but, given…
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Yesterday I was reminded that 200 sessions from Autodesk University 2013 were recorded and have been made available on-demand – for free! Many great classes are available as well as the keynote and innovation forum sessions. I believe you need to create a free Autodesk account to view them, if you don't already happen to have one. In fact, here's a screengrab from the closing keynote which happens to include a photo (taken by Shaan Hurley, of course) of me with Scott McFarlane (love the sweatshirt 🙂 and Owen Wengerd at the Blogger's Social. I did a quick search for…
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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…