Over the weekend, from Friday to Sunday, I spent far more hours than I’d have liked finishing off my AU Virtual class for this year, “Secure Your AutoCAD Environment” (I’m increasingly involved in security-related activities for the AutoCAD development organisation). Preparing material for AU Virtual is often pretty tough, whether it’s being recorded in person (I’ve done a couple of those) or being in advance and needing extensively editing.
This year’s format was a bit different, in that it required multiple modules to be recorded separately as opposed to a single, monolithic recording. Better from a consumption perspective, apparently, and probably also a bit better in terms of getting presenters to chunk up their material and record it separately, but it felt to me like it added some overhead during the recording and editing phase.
Anyway, it’s now all done and has been uploaded to the AU website. Hopefully that’s it until I start to get viewers’ questions through.
Now I can start to think about other things, once again. I still have my physical AU classes to prepare for, although thankfully most of the coding is done: I mainly need to update the various projects to make sure they work with the latest releases of products & frameworks that were in Beta when I wrote the code – particularly Visual Studio 2012, ASP.NET MVC 4 and Windows 8 – but it shouldn’t be too arduous.
Speaking of Windows 8… I’ve now installed the RTM build both on my dedicated build machine and inside a Parallels VM, and it looks great. I’m looking forward to using it more as a primary OS.
And speaking of Parallels, the big news on that front is that the Kinect SDK now has a version that supports working in a VM – something I begged Microsoft for over a year ago. Thankfully they listened (it wasn’t just me asking, of course) and delivered v1.6 of the Kinect SDK and its accompanying Developer Toolkit, which allow me to connect my Kinect up to my Mac and run my AutoCAD-related Kinect projects, albeit inside a Windows VM inside Parallels. This should help me do more with Kinect as I now no longer have to switch across to my secondary machine to work with it.
And the final bit of “hot of the press” excitement is around the newly expanded Raspberry Pi Model B, now with 512 MB of RAM. It probably won’t make much difference to the face-recognition security cam project, but may well let me run more advanced games in more complex console emulators. Happy days!
