Through the Interface

Autodesk Search Beta

As Jeremy Tammik reported a few weeks ago, Autodesk Search Beta is now available. Here are the results of my quick “vanity search” on this site… this isn’t really egosurfing in its purist sense (although I admit I do Google my name pretty regularly – just to see who’s quoting my blog :-), it’s more about making sure that this blog is being indexed. Honest. Sure enough, a number of posts on this site came up in the results, which is encouraging. On a somewhat related note, I’ve been waiting for some time for our blogs to be indexed... Read more →

Wolfram|Alpha – a computational knowledge engine in the cloud

This is a fascinating site that will no doubt be of interest to people reading this blog: Wolfram Research, the makers of Mathematica, have just released an online computational knowledge engine called Wolfram|Alpha. To get a feel for some of the capabilities of the engine I recommend spending some time looking through their gallery of examples. Just playing around with it proves a genuinely interesting experience. Here are some of my own example searches: Information on the town where I live How Autodesk’s stock has been performing against Microsoft’s The results of mathematical formulae Fun with fractals The molecular... Read more →

Creating your own custom RSS feeds with Yahoo! Pipes

Some of you might consider this to be slightly off topic (unless you make some bizarre connection with the fact that Carol Bartz is now CEO of Yahoo! :-). Actually there is a more direct connection, as the technology I'm introducing in this post - and have just had lots of fun playing around with - has some really interesting capabilities for people who would like to filter and customize the various RSS feeds to which they subscribe. Firstly I'd like to thank my friend and colleague Shaan Hurley for telling me about Yahoo! Pipes. This technology - which... Read more →

Offline reading of "Through the Interface"

A member of my team recently asked me to extend this blog's standard RSS feed to include more than 10 entries: he wanted a feed that contained all the entries ever posted to "Through the Interface". It turns out he uses Outlook 2007's RSS capability to download the full contents of items in an RSS feed, so he can then use his Outlook-integrated search capabilities to search his various email archives - as well as this blog's contents - whenever he's researching a technical query. He had a number of the earlier posts missing from Outlook and wanted the... Read more →

A tale of tight turnaround

Just a quick post... I've been (and am still) on vacation this week (not doing anything very exciting, mostly cutting hedges and other miscellaneous garden work), but I queued up a few posts in order to keep things moving along while I was offline. One of the posts I put together was regarding the API to Project Draw, and it turned into quite an interesting chain of events. Here's a quick timeline, to explain what happened and when: Monday June 23 - I spend some time looking at Project Draw's API, and draft an introductory post. I send it... Read more →

Getting to know the Project Draw API

Last week David Falck, over at the Autodesk Labs team, provided me with an API key to have a play with the API to Project Draw. This post documents what I did, and how it all worked. Note: I'm not actually doing any coding whatsoever in this post: I used the handy API test page provided by the Autodesk Labs team, and so didn't need to write a single line of code. So, first of all, you'll need an API key. Here's the one I got from the Draw team: th1SIsnOTreAlLyMyapIkeyOfCourSE Just kidding. I've changed the above key for... Read more →

Looking for API developers to work with Project Draw

Over on It's Alive in the Lab, Scott Sheppard is looking for developers interested in working with the API to Project Draw. If you're interested, send an email. Read more →