Through the Interface

Mardi Gras, Super Tuesday and F#

I'm in San Rafael today, at Autodesk's headquarters, to present F# at an internal meeting. I've just come in for a few days, so rather than adjusting to the Pacific timezone I'm settling for living on Eastern time: I get up at 4am (whether I like it or not ;-) and go to bed as early as I can in the evening. Which gives me some time to catch up on email and think about blog posts.

It's a fun time to be in the US, on balance: I flew in (via New York, as it happens) just as one of the most exciting Superbowl finals in recent history was taking place. The crew provided regular updates over the PA system for all the Giants (or Patriots) fans onboard.

And as well as being Shrove Tuesday/Pancake Day/Mardi Gras, today is also Super Tuesday - possibly the most critical day in the run-up to next year's presidential election in the US. Being in California for this is fun, even if I don't get to vote. :-)

Anyway - on to some technical content. On the plane over I decided to update the F# sample I first posted here to create a PolyFaceMesh rather than a series of Faces. Thanks to Jeremy Tammik for pushing me to do this in time for today's presentation... although it was quite fiddly to generate the list of vertices and add them to the PolyFaceMesh object before adding the various FaceRecords connecting them together, it was worth the effort: the finer-grained control you have over the display of edges - and the convenience of having a single, albeit complex, object - make the sample much more elegant and useful, in my opinion.

Here's the updated F# project, for those of you who are interested. Incidentally, for the purpose of today's demo I chose to turn the edge display off for the entire PolyFaceMesh, as it looks better that way: if you're in a 2D wireframe view (the default in AutoCAD), you won't find the "wow" or "wow2" commands create any geometry when you click your center mouse button on the window that's shown: I recommend loading the template.dwg file into AutoCAD before running the commands - it simply has the realistic visual style set and is zoomed into the location the mesh will be created.

Heading for the hills

Well, through them, anyway.

Just letting you know that I'll be away from my desk, and from this blog, for the next week or so. We're heading through the Alps to Italy: first to Milan and then down to Ascoli Piceno, where an old friend is getting married.

We decided to take the train, which should be interesting. It's 4 hours from Switzerland to Milan, plus another 5 or so hours from Milan to the rail hub nearest to Ascoli P. Luckily we have family in Milan and so get to spend time with them and break the journey in each direction.

Back in a week!

YASA (Yet Another Simpsons Avatar)

For those of you that haven't noticed the current obsession in the CAD blogosphere of creating Simpsons avatars of oneself, check out this post from the Autodesk Labs blog for some background.

Now, to enter the fray myself. I spent some time a week or so ago playing around with the avatar creation tool on The Simpsons Movie website, but was pretty disappointed with the results:

But then I discovered the Simpsonize Me website, and my life changed. :-)

This site allows you to upload a photo, and it generates an avatar for you pretty much automatically (you have to specify a few parameters and can tweak the output, but this was a huge improvement, at least for someone with my extremely modest artistic talent):

The resolution of the output isn't as good as with the other tool, but you can get a fairly decent headshot for IM:

One year wiser?

Well, would you believe it: Through the Interface was started exactly a year ago today.

I hope you've found this blog helpful over the past 12 months; I've certainly enjoyed sharing my (and above all, my team's) knowledge with you, and look forward to doing so for a long time to come. But please keep the post suggestions coming, as many of the best posts over the last year (in my opinion, at least) have originated from suggestions from this blog's readership.

By the way, for those of you who are interested: I'm now back from Beijing - we arrived in Switzerland a little over 2 weeks ago, having stopped by Bangalore for 2 weeks on the way home to spend time with the DevTech team there and catch up with friends and relatives. As you can imagine, 2+ months away (7 weeks in China, 2 weeks in India) was quite tough, even if we were all together as a family. We very often missed our home comforts, it has to be said, but the experience was certainly valuable.

Two days after getting back from the trip to China & India, I had to head across to Munich for some internal meetings. This afternoon I'm heading to Boston for some more. But all being well I should have another technical post for you by the end of the week.

Merry Christmas, Joyeux Noël, Fröhliche Weihnachten, Buon Natale

I've just started an extended break with my family, so it's time for me to sign off and wish you all a very Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays for those of you that are non-denominational in your festive activities) and the very best for 2007.

I'll be back online the week of January 8th (unless I end up having trouble keeping away :-), but in the meantime, here's me making an elf of myself.

A quick announcement...

Our second son, Zephyr Ewan Walmsley, was born today (Wednesday September 20th) at 6:55 am CET, weighing 3.15 kg and measuring 49 cm in length.

I'll be on paternity leave for the next week or so, but will hopefully continue to post between nappy changes. :-)

Apples and Fireworks

[ Warning: this post is largely frivolous and non-technical, so please don't read on if that is likely to bother you. :-) ]

Yesterday was August 1st, the Swiss National Day. During the afternoon, we (my wife, our 2 year-old son and I) visited my wife's parents at their place in the hills just outside Neuchâtel. My father-in-law gave me a fantastic present that I'm yet (but impatient) to play with: an Apple Newton in mint-condition.

In the evening we went down to St Blaise, on the edge of Lake Neuchâtel, to watch the town's annual firework display. The last few weeks have been particularly hot here, but last night was cold and windy.

Anyway, there is a reason for me mentioning all this... last night was my introduction to cubic fireworks. I don't know if that's their proper name, but basically these are fireworks that, on exploding, form a 3D wireframe of a cube. I'd seen cylinders and spheres before, but cubes were new to me (although I checked on the web, and sightings seem to go back to at least the middle of last year).

This got me thinking. If it's possible to make cubes, spheres and cylinders, could it also be possible to make arbitrary 3D models from fireworks? I don't know whether you'd need to combine fireworks or you could make a single one that exploded into a complex 3D form... then you just need to hook up your design system to a rapid prototyping system that creates the fireworks automatically from the model...

... and you end up with the world's largest 3D display, although admittedly with the world's slowest response time. :-)