Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #52

In this week’s episode we once again play some more games on a Commodore 64 that we find on random floppies. We start with a game I remembered we hadn’t had time to try last week, which turned out to be International Karate. As the directory listing stated “Seite A” (“Side A” in German), I decided to flip the floppy and see what was on Side B. Well, it had some real crackers (mostly cracked crackers, in fact) such as Enduro Racer, Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Yie Ar Kung-Fu II and Tetris. A fun episode! Here’s the cover art for... Read more →

Forge and digital twins at Autodesk University 2021

I’ve finally found the time to view the main information from the recent Autodesk University event, and thought it worth highlighting what I consider to be some of the “big ticket” items, especially from my own – somewhat Forge- and digital twin-centric – perspective. First-up, Forge was everywhere in the keynotes. If it wasn’t previously clear that Autodesk is serious about becoming a platform company, it should be from the messaging at this AU. On a side note, there are a number of internal organisational changes that have happened/are happening at Autodesk to accelerate this shift, so I’m currently... Read more →

Learn Forge website now available in English, Japanese and Chinese

While I was away on vacation I received the news that the excellent learnforge.autodesk.io website – a great resource for learning how to develop software that uses Autodesk Forge – has been translated into Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese. This will be of great use to customers and would-be Forge developers who are keen to learn more about the platform but have a better grasp of Japanese or Chinese than English. If you have more requests for languages (I know at least one more is in the pipeline), then please post a comment and I’ll pass it on... Read more →

Rome and Sardinia

This is my first week back after a lovely 10-day trip to Italy, most of which we spent scuba diving on the beautiful island of Sardinia. We’d planned this trip some time ago, but that didn’t mean it was without its worries: between last-minute doctor’s visits for medical certificates (not strictly required for scuba diving, but it’s generally a good idea to have them) and fast antigen tests for the (so far unvaccinated) kids, there were more logistics to think about than usual. We also needed to check a couple of suitcases – which were basically full of neoprene... Read more →

Floppy Friday #51

I’m just back from a fantastic 10-day vacation with my family on the beautiful Italian island of Sardinia. More on that in an upcoming post, but for now the first priority has been to get an episode of Floppy Friday out on schedule. Once again this episode had zero preparation, but I was very happy with the selection of games we stumbled across. The first three games came from a “team sports” floppy (an unofficial collection, it just happened to contain these games): MicroProse Soccer, International Basketball and International Hockey (which I was sure I’d played before in this... Read more →

Floppy Friday #50

We made it to 50 episodes! I’ll only record another 14 – to take it up to a round 64 – so we’re getting close now. I wanted to make it a special one, but as I was a little busy getting ready to leave on holiday I didn’t quite get the time to research each game ahead of time. I do think this episode has a nice selection, nonetheless. We started by playing Nemesis, which was released in some places as Gradius, apparently, and then played Flimbo’s Quest and Destroyer. All gdecent games. I also tried (and failed)... Read more →

Floppy Friday #49

In today’s episode we go more retro than ever, dusting off an old 1970s Pong console from Inno-Hit. We played all 10 of the games on the console, which certainly made the editing simpler than usual: no speeding up needed, at all! My 12-year-old daughter kindly joined me off-screen (out of respect for her privacy) for the 2-player games. It was fun to have someone join me. As mentioned in the video, my kids have already played this console for hours: the games really are timeless! Read more →

At the Forge Hackathon, counting down to AU2021

While I’m unlikely to be present for much of next week’s Autodesk University event – all being well I’ll be in Sardinia – I have been feeling the excitement mount ahead of it. Mainly from attending the Forge Hackathon, which is now nearing it’s climax. The event kicked off with a really interesting event held via SpatialChat. I hadn’t used it before, but was immediately hooked. There were different rooms (fine), but even within a single room you could have private conversations by moving off into a corner. The sound increases as you get closer to a sound source,... Read more →

Introducing VASA, a tool for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis

I’ve been hinting about this for a few weeks now, but today is (very excitingly) the day for the big unveiling. My colleague Rhys Goldstein has been working his magic, once again, taking the algorithms he developed for the 2D Space Analysis package and applying them to 3-space. If you were impressed by Space Analysis, what we’re showing now may just knock your socks off. The new package is called VASA, which stands for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis. It’s available today for download from the Dynamo Package Manager. It’s worth unpacking a couple of terms, here: voxel-based means VASA... Read more →

Floppy Friday #48

This episode of Floppy Friday is dedicated to the memory and legacy of the late Sir Clive Sinclair, 1980s computing pioneer. Sir Clive invented the slimline pocket calculator and worked tirelessly to democratize technology, whether home computers or electric cars. His impact on today’s computing landscape is undeniable, as he helped launch the careers of countless IT and software professionals (me included). Thank you for everything, Sir Clive. It felt like episode 48 was the right one to crack open the ZX Spectrum (48K, of course), especially given last week’s news about Sir Clive’s passing. On a side note,... Read more →

A minor update to Space Analysis (2D), and getting ready for 3D!

This week I’ve been getting my Revit installation working again – it had been a while since I’d used it, and it was overdue an upgrade from 2021 to 2022 – mainly because I have to publish a couple of new packages (or package versions) to the Dynamo Package Manager. The first is a minor update to the Space Analysis package, taking it from version 0.3.3 to version 0.4.0. There is a breaking change, however, in that people using the Visibility nodes from Python may have to modify their code to use the correct (newly added) namespace. We only... Read more →

Floppy Friday #47

[I’ve just heard the sad news that the computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair died last night. He changed the lives of many, many people who grew up in the UK in the 1980s. We owe him a very great debt. RIP, Sir Clive.] Well, that was something. I spent a full hour recording this week’s episode, although I managed to whittle it down to just over half of that, as there was a huge amount of waiting around. I hope it’s still watchable enough. It started well, playing what is apparently a conversion of a classic Atari 2600 game,... Read more →

Bundle optimization in Project Dasher

I mentioned recently that I’ve been working on updating Project Dasher’s use of 3rd party components, and that I had some learnings to share. We started the Forge-based version of Dasher in 2016, and (much to my shame) some of the components had stayed at more-or-less the version available at that time, largely due to the migration effort needed to deal with breaking changes. Biting the bullet to upgrade them was painful but necessary, and right now I (and Dasher) feel nicely refreshed. Last time I mentioned there were two big outstanding dependencies that still required attention: Bootstrap and... Read more →

Build your first Digital Twin at the upcoming Forge Hackathon

Other that my regular foolings-around with ancient tech, I feel like I’ve been neglecting this blog in recent weeks. That’s all about to change, though, as we enter the busy period leading up to Autodesk University 2021. For one I have some interesting learnings I thought I’d share from some of the foundational work I’ve been doing on Dasher’s codebase, but there are also some interesting updates for people performing analyses of 2D (and 3D!) spaces. Fun stuff! First though, it’s worth reminding people of the Forge Hackathon that’s around the corner. It starts in just a couple of... Read more →

Floppy Friday #46

We’re edging closer to the end of this series (which will come at episode 64, appropriately enough). There’s still plenty of fun to be had before it’s over, though! In this week’s episode we once again play games found on a series of random floppies. We start with a game I actually enjoyed a lot called The Arc of Yesod. The main character comes with a remote drone – how cool is that? We then loaded a German strategy game called The World, but not for very long. Afterwards came Kane, Forester and Hi Ska Do. These seem to... Read more →

A new brand for a brand new Autodesk?

I’m sure many of you will already have seen Autodesk’s exciting new brand identity. To get a sense of what’s behind it, I recommend heading over to our Brand Hub, where you can get much of the background. It’s a very interesting read. Employees and partners have had some time to digest this change – and presumably start stocking up on black printer ink ;-) – and I fully admit that it took me a little while to “get” it. If you find it a bit too different, I do recommend giving it a few days/weeks to settle in.... Read more →

Floppy Friday #45

This week’s episode contains another eclectic mix of ancient Commodore 64 video games. We started with Snoopy, which turned out to be rather basic and tedious. We then tried Trucking USA, which turned out to be in German. From there things became more interesting, with a fun platformer called Burger Time, a classic arcade conversion of a game called Sea Wolf, and finally a quirky little number called Pegasis. I rather enjoyed Burger Time and Sea Wolf – as you can probably tell from the video – but the whole episode was fun to record. Here’s the cover art... Read more →

A minor makeover – and a lot of core work – for Dasher

Over the last week I’ve been heads-down on core Dasher work, but with very little visible result. Here’s why. Early last week I received an email telling me that it was time to dig into Dasher’s use of 3rd party components and make sure there weren’t any security issues. (This isn’t something unusual – all our products go through this, and many of our research projects, too.) As anyone working on web development projects will know, it’s important to go through from time to time to reduce the technical debt that accumulates due to the use of old libraries... Read more →

Floppy Friday #44

Another mix of games in this week’s episode! It’s hard to know what the first game, Road Runner, was meant to be, as it really must have been corrupted – there’s no other reason for the graphics to be so messed up. The second, The Hobbit, was an illustrated text adventure I remember playing for hours on my ZX Spectrum as a boy. The third was B.C.’s Quest for Tires, which seems like it was probably a classic when it came out in 1983. We finished up with an obscure but playable title named Fortress Underground, which I actually... Read more →

A new face in the Autodesk Tandem team

My friend and colleague Hali Larsen has joined the Autodesk Tandem team as a Product Manager focused on connected workflows and sustainability. This is huge news, for lots of reasons: for several years Hali played an absolutely instrumental role in Project Dasher – in many ways she was our de facto PM, but also worked through many gnarly issues related to bespoke configuration for various Dasher pilot projects. Hali has a wealth of experience working with customers in this space, and also knows where most of Dasher’s skeletons are buried, so she is the right person to take on... Read more →