Through the Interface

Happy Halloween!

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... Read more →

Still time to register for DevDays 2013

I had a reminder from the Autodesk Developer Network team about their upcoming DevDays tour (of which I’m currently planning on attending the sessions in Las Vegas and Munich, although I’m not 100% sure I’ll get to Munich). One thing I didn’t fully appreciate when I wrote my previous post is that the ADN team is very actively looking to engage with non-ADN members who would like to attend this tour. If you’re interested in attending a session – and aren’t currently an ADN member – then please get in touch with a member of our ADN team. There... Read more →

Running drone-captured data through ReCap Photo

Earlier this year I came to know about a “local” company called senseFly. (When I say local, I mean they’re also in the French-speaking area of Switzerland, which is a relatively small region of a small country… I suppose that would be considered local by some standards. :-) senseFly started as a spin-off of the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). (EPFL is one of the two top technical universities in Switzerland, the other being Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zürich)). They specialise in making unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – drones – and now belong to the Parrot... Read more →

AutoCAD 2014 for Mac

Yesterday the first AutoCAD 2014 for Mac customers pealed the virtual shrinkwrap off their shiny digital copies. Here’s some info on this release from my friend Micah, the AutoCAD for Mac Product Manager: There's been quite a lot of press on the 2014 release already, both from Autodesk and beyond (here are but a few examples of the coverage to date). The release schedule for our Mac version has now been synced with Apple’s annual announcements, allowing us to take advantage of the latest & greatest OS X capabilities but also to be part of the launch event (however... Read more →

Kinect Fusion: comparing approaches for point cloud generation inside AutoCAD

Something you realise quite early on when working with the Kinect Fusion component in the Microsoft Kinect SDK is that it’s really meant to integrate into a 2D UI: it takes care of rendering the volume that’s being mapped, and you simply have to integrate the generated bitmap somewhere into your app’s UI. The primary benefit of this approach is its low latency: it all happens very quickly and the only data you need to move from the runtime into your app is the bitmap itself. With 3D systems such as AutoCAD, though, you really want to take the... Read more →

Sharpening the saw

It seems like I’m working on a number of things that I can’t talk about, at the moment, which – while the work itself is extremely stimulating – can get a little frustrating. Over my 7+ years of blogging, it seems I’ve developed a visceral need to share what I’m working on (I wonder if this is is an example of Social Media changing behaviour in general… something to ponder when I eventually find the time :-). This focus on more internal activities is, to some degree, something I anticipated when I started my “new” role but it certainly... Read more →

Senior technical position in ADN for an AutoCAD developer

My successor over in the ADN team (and long-time friend and colleague), Stephen Preston, has just pointed me to an online posting for a member of the DevTech team to be based in the Bay Area (meaning either of our San Rafael or San Francisco offices). They’re looking for a developer with AutoCAD experience who would be able to take a senior role within the DevTech organisation, interfacing with the local product teams and assuming some leadership responsibilities for DevTech’s worldwide, AutoCAD-focused workgroup. These positions come up very infrequently, so I strongly recommend applying if you’re interested. The position... Read more →

Awaiting async

Despite the fact we can’t currently use it inside AutoCAD – we’re still using .NET 4.0 in AutoCAD 2014 – of late I’ve been working more with the async/await capability in .NET 4.5, which has been really interesting. I’ve worked with asynchronous operations in .NET languages on and off for some time, having started with F#’s Asynchronous Workflows and then spent some time with C#’s async/await after hearing Stephen Toub speak at Microsoft Switzerland a couple of years ago. It feels like it’s been a while since I did much of that, though: I used the Async CTP sporadically... Read more →

Creating Penrose tilings in AutoCAD for a Burning Man sculpture using .NET

I had a little fun with the title for this post: unfortunately this one isn’t a “how to” and I’m not actually going to provide a code sample. But I did want to highlight how AutoCAD’s .NET API has been used for at least one exhibit at this year’s Burning Man, and a very cool one, at that. I first heard about Burning Man when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area back at (or soon after) the turn of the millennium. Our housemate back then (being British I have trouble with the term roommate… back in... Read more →

An interview with Ian Bell

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.... Read more →

Kinect Fusion updated to include colour

A few weeks ago the Kinect SDK was updated to version 1.8. I’d been eagerly awaiting this update for one reason, in particular: aside from receiving some updates to provide more robust tracking – something that was very much needed – Kinect Fusion has now been updated to include realistic colours in the output. There are some additional SDK enhancements, such as a background removal APIs (good for greenscreening) and HTML support (handy for interactive kiosks), but the ones that interest me most relate to Kinect Fusion. There are a few new Kinect Fusion samples that I need to... Read more →

Implementing MapReduce to de-skew large images in parallel using Google App Engine

I’ve been looking for an interesting problem to solve using MapReduce for some time now. I’ve been curious about the paradigm and how it can be applied to churn through large sets of data across multiple processing cores: something that’s especially relevant as we need to distribute processing – whether to cores that are local or up in the cloud – in order to improve software performance. I talked about much of this when I looked at F#’s Asynchronous Workflows way back when (nearly 6 years ago – ouch). MapReduce frameworks – and there are a number out there:... Read more →

Drawing lines between two AutoCAD curves using .NET

I was writing up a rather lengthy post following on from Monday’s when I realised I needed some diagrams. And then I realised they were going to be complicated enough to need AutoCAD to create them. And then I realised I needed to write some code to generate some of the graphics, as they were too complicated to draw by hand. :-) Which is what this post has ended up being about: it seemed quicker and easier to write this topic up than it was to finish the other one, which I’ll hopefully publish tomorrow, if i can find... Read more →