Through the Interface

The Forge Data Day in Munich

Today I’ve been in Munich for the inaugural event in the Forge Data Days tour. As I decided to attend at fairly short notice, I didn’t even look into flights: flying from Geneva or Zurich to Munich is expensive at the best of times (considering the distance), and with less than a week of advance notice it would have been ridiculous. So I took the bus, which cost about $20 each way. It’s an hour and half to get to Zurich from my place, and the direct bus to the centre of Munich took another four hours. Not bad,... Read more →

Come to the Forge Data Day in Munich on Tuesday!

I talked recently about the first in-person event tour that’s been held for Forge developers in at least a few years, this time focused on the new Forge Data offering (including the Data Exchange API that’s now in public beta). At the time I wasn’t sure which event I’d attend: there’s an in-person (finally!) Forge Accelerator next to the Barcelona event, which made that one especially interesting, for instance. In the end the timing for the Munich event worked best. I’ve now booked my hotel and bus ticket, and I’ll be there for the first event in the global... Read more →

A new book on Innovation in Construction

The Autodesk Construction Cloud team kindly shared a post on LinkedIn, last week, about a project I participated in. There’s a new book from Springer on “Innovation in Construction” for which I contributed a chapter called “Cutting-Edge Practical Research on Generative Design, IoT and Digital Twins”. This chapter weighs in at 29 pages – of an overall 454 for the book – and here’s its abstract: This chapter explores two areas of research undertaken by Autodesk over the last decade and how they both have the potential to impact the construction industry. The first area relates to the Internet... Read more →

Our 20th anniversary balloon trip

My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary back in November. We celebrated as a family with our three great kids making vegan sushi for us all. At the time my wife said that there was a present on its way, but that it may take a while. I didn’t think much of it, until this weekend. On Saturday I was told “you need to get an early night, as tomorrow we’re leaving for our anniversary surprise at 5am.” At the time it didn’t seem like much of a gift – getting out of bed at 5am isn’t... Read more →

The Autodesk Gallery opening and the 2m Dar Smart Bridge at DCW 2022

A few events have happened over the last few weeks that I would have loved to have attended, had I had the energy (and been in better shape). The first was the grand opening of the Autodesk Gallery on May 11th. I received an invite – because of my participation in the NEST project – but as I was planning on actually being at the NEST building that day I declined. And I ended up being home with Covid, so there’s that. The gallery was opened by SF Mayor London Breed. Here’s a snap of Andrew Anagnost showing the... Read more →

Smarter Bridges Conference 2022

On Sunday I flew back across from Zurich to Schipol for a small, 2-day conference attended by various stakeholders in the MX3D smartbridge project. Very confusingly there were two flights leaving for Amsterdam at exactly the same time – 17h35 – so I very nearly ended up at the wrong gate. Luckily I realised in time. On arriving at Schipol I took the train to Amsterdam Centraal, where I saw an overnight train back to Switzerland was about to leave. (I had tried hard to find a space on this train to come across for the conference, but it... Read more →

The NEST building’s HiLo roof

This week I was supposed to be back in Zurich for a couple of days, visiting the NEST building on Tuesday and the ETH campus on Wednesday. As it was, though, I managed to pick up Covid at last week’s TechX event in Atlanta, so I ended up staying at home feeling sorry for myself. I haven’t had particularly bad symptoms, thankfully: neither headaches nor fever, just mainly a heavy cough and a bit of brain fog, both of which are thankfully clearing up now. Given the value of last week’s event I’d certainly say that getting it relatively... Read more →

TechX 2022 in Atlanta

On Monday I flew from Geneva to Paris and then changed flights to head across to Atlanta for TechX 2022. TechX is Autodesk’s annual internal technology geekfest. This year’s TechX – the first in-person event since 2019’s in New Orleans – has been held in the Atlanta Hilton. I have a room that’s on a high floor, and as I’m waking up with jetlag for the first time in nearly 3 years, I managed to see the view across the city as the sun came up. The mornings have kicked off with keynote sessions. Andrew Anagnost, our CEO, showed... Read more →

Working around the Chrome bug affecting the timeline

The amazing Mike Lee – who has been doing a great job of driving the timeline project for Dasher – has used his sleuthing skills to figure out a way around the bug affecting Intel-based Macs running Chrome v100 on Monterey. He was about to submit a bug when he discovered this ticket filed against Chromium, and a workaround buried within in. (Mike has since gone ahead and submitted his own report tracking this.) You need to go to chrome://flags and disable “Use passthrough command decoder”. After restarting Chrome and launching Dasher, you should now see the timeline is... Read more →