Personal
-
For fun, here's a quick preview of this year's Halloween costume (our what-now-seems-to-be-annual Halloween Party is on this coming Saturday, but as it's the 31st I thought I'd put it on to scare any kids coming to the door). I hope those of you on the path of Hurricane Sandy have made it all safely through the "Frankenstorm" and that life returns to normal for you very soon.
-
I had a fantastic surprise at the beginning of the week: a friend from work – to whom I'd shown my retro-foolings with the Raspberry Pi – brought a plastic bag to my desk containing an original Sinclair ZX Spectrum and power supply. He had talked about my project to a friend of his back home in Rome, who thought I'd like it (he was otherwise going to throw it away). The computer was in very good condition externally, at least: I was impressed by the condition of the keyboard, in particular, as these very quickly became dirty and damaged,…
-
I've decided to interrupt my series on creating a face-recognising security cam to cover another Raspberry Pi-related topic, this week. I'll try to finish my series write-up for next Wednesday. At the recommendation of an old friend from University, I recently devoured the excellent "Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline. Ernest was apparently born about a year before me, so to say that the copious pop-culture references from the 1980s resonated would be a massive under-statement. I just wish I'd come across it sooner (in time to have a shot at solving the Easter Egg and winning a 1981 DeLorean,…
-
This post is to belatedly congratulate Jim Quanci (Director of the Autodesk Developer Network, blogger over at Dances with Elephants and my former manager) for his recent win of the Singlehanded TransPac race from California to Hawaii. Jim sailed his 40ft boat, the Green Buffalo, singlehandedly from San Francisco on June 30th, 2012, arriving in Hanalei Bay, Kauai, on July 13th. The Buffalo crossed the line 3rd – as you can see from the interactive race viewer – but given the handicaps applied to the various classes of boat, Jim won the race by nearly 8 hours. By all accounts,…
-
As I ended up not being able to post during the last week or so, I've switched to the past tense now that I'm back in Switzerland. I'll start back on more technical topics in the coming days, but as I'm still re-adjusting I may as well wrap up my holiday's travelog, first. 🙂 After the unexpected highlight of visiting the Shard, I was worried the remainder of our time in the UK might prove a disappointment. Thankfully, my worries were completely unfounded: we had a great trip to London's Natural History Museum (with a quick stop by Harrods for…
-
Today's post was going to be "Enjoying England" – just to complete the series on our European tour – but that's now going to have to wait. We are indeed enjoying England, but yesterday had a pretty unique and amazing opportunity that deserves a post of its own. Before yesterday, I admittedly didn't know very much at all about Shard London Bridge (which I'll refer to from here on as "the Shard"). But then a friend of ours offered us the chance to go to the top, which was pretty unique (he's been working on the project for the last…
-
After a great week in Brittany, we took an overnight, cross-channel ferry from Roscoff to Plymouth to begin our fortnight in the UK. The ferry was a pleasant surprise – far removed from the Dover to Calais "booze cruises" I remember from my student days. We had a cabin with a window and breakfast delivered an hour before arrival. All very civilised. On arrival, we headed on up through Devon and Somerset, stopping in Glastonbury for an early morning visit to the Tor. We then decided – somewhat on the spur of the moment, as it was a bit out…
-
This year's Autodesk football tournament was excellent – congratulations to the IPG 1 team, this year's well-deserving winners! (I've included a picture from their 2-1 quarter-final victory over us, below.) Towards the end of our last game of the day (thankfully) I managed to sustain a thigh injury after a collision with Fenton (he was playing for the GS-ISM team, while I was playing for Swiss 2). This made walking around pretty painful for the next few days, and certainly made the drive up to Brittany (with an overnight stay at a fantastic guest-house in Blois to break up the…
-
I'm hopefully sunning myself on the beaches of Brittany, at this point, but here's some information that Mikako Harada kindly brought to my attention. Adam Nagy has put together a fantastic series of posts on the AEC DevBlog that I think will be of general interest: Revit model viewer for iOS – part 1 Revit model viewer for iOS – part 2 Revit model viewer for iOS – part 3 Adam was apparently inspired by Philippe Leefsma's Inventor viewer for Android – something I'll also link to, once I see it's been published.
-
Last week, I received confirmation that I'll be presenting a few different classes at AU 2012, which will be held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas from November 27-28. My main sessions, this year, are in some way focused on cloud & mobile technologies. The subject matter of the first lecture is the recently completed cloud & mobile series, where we'll look at moving desktop functionality to the cloud and using it from a variety of mobile environments: CP1914 – Moving code to the cloud – it's easier than you think! It has a companion roundtable session –…