I’m this week’s “expert” over on the AutoCAD Exchange:
I don’t know whether people visiting that site will be interested in asking programming-related questions, but as I’m routinely re-directing support questions I receive by email or as blog comments across to the ADN site or to our discussion groups, I thought I’d point this blog’s readership at the chance to get questions answered without me wriggling out of them. :-)
Go on – ask me a question!
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 and available “in-product”, such as via AutoCAD’s built-in search feature.
Interestingly, it does appear that this blog has now been indexed via the in-product search, as I see the most recent post in the list. That’s cool.
I’m not sure why it says “Did you mean MEAN?” when provided my name, though. I’ve been trying much harder, lately! ;-)
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:
That said, you shouldn’t expect it to know much about programming languages. :-)
It turns out that this kind of tool is (one of) the brave new frontier(s) of search: Google is also due to launch its Google Squared service in the coming weeks, which will provide more interpretive, tabular display of data out there in the web.
This seems to be a key difference between the services: Wolfram|Alpha provides access to data that gets imported into its own servers (apparently 10 terabytes or so of the stuff) whereas Google Squared is about making sense of and tabulating the results of web searches. And from what I can tell I fully expect them to be complimentary: although not impossible for Google to duplicate, I can see Wolfram has made use of their twenty-odd year investment in Mathematica to create something really compelling. Time will tell.
Please do post your favourite Wolfram|Alpha searches (if we can really call them that – I suppose they should really be called “computations”) as comments on this post – I’m sure people will be interested to check them out.
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Oh, and it’s also possible to embed access to Wolfram|Alpha in your website, if you so wish... |
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 is currently in beta - allows you to bring in, manipulate and aggregate existing RSS feeds, as well as providing the capability for you to create your own feeds from all sorts of web-based content. Very interesting stuff.
Shaan's email came at just the right time for me, as I was struggling to aggregate our existing developer blogs (Through the Interface, The Building Coder and Mod the Machine) into a single feed for my team's SharePoint site (yes, believe it or not one of the things I do for fun is to work on my team's internal SharePoint site). It proved harder than expected using the out-of-the-box web-parts provided with SharePoint, so I jumped at the chance of hacking something together using Yahoo! Pipes which could then be consumed by the standard SharePoint RSS Viewer web-part.
Here's what I came up with:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/autodeskdeveloper/blogs
The RSS feed itself can be used from here:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=_pwmy5T93RGCMUcmrbQIDg&_render=rss
What does this pipe do? Well, it brings in the RSS feeds for each of the three blogs and performs some manipulation on them before aggregating them into a single feed, sorted by date and truncated to the 15 most recent posts. The RSS feeds for Jeremy's and my blogs don't publish the full contents of each post - we both decided against doing so, as our posts are often very long - while the feed for Brian's does. To make the various feeds consistent, I stripped off the "description" field from each item in Brian's feed by renaming it to "blank" (this could have been pretty much any name, I suspect). For each of the three feeds the Pipes implementation uses regular expressions to insert the blog name prior to the title for each post, making its source more readily identifiable.
Here's the map inside the Pipes editor (which is completely web-based and pretty simple to use, once you get the hang of it):
Hopefully you'll find some creative ways to make use of this technology: it seems to have some very interesting filtering capabilities, for instance, so you could quite easily set up your own feed to filter on certain keywords in my blog (although I'd much prefer you didn't filter too heavily, otherwise you'll risk missing some of the off-topic stuff such as this :-).
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 the purpose of this post: if you want a key, get your own. :-P
Seriously, though: just email labs.draw@autodesk.com, and they will generate and send you your very own key.
OK, once you have a key, you can navigate to the test page and start playing around. I started by copying my key (the real one, of course) into the startSession test rig, and I then hit Initiate:
The Project Draw API is exposed via REST, as opposed to SOAP (another popular - if more heavyweight, from a client perspective - mechanism for exposing Web Services), which means you pass everything the service needs to identify the session etc., in each call made to Project Draw. So you will need to use your API key along with the session ID provided in the response received for the API call we just made for each further use of the Project Draw API.
The other way to start a Project Draw session is via the setXML web method, but we'll come to that later. For now we don't have any XML to provide, so we're going to open the blank session and create some geometry from scratch.
Copy the URL provided in the response to your clipboard and paste it into a new browser window. You should get a nice, new Project Draw page upon which to draw some geometry:
I drew some simple geometry using the Project Draw interface and saved it using File -> Save. This is an important step: if you don't save to the server, then clearly any calls to access the session's geometry via the Web Service will not retrieve anything very interesting.
Here's my model - please note that I just threw some filled objects onto the canvas, and had no intention of drawing a symbol with religious or nationalistic overtones (there's something vaguely masonic about the image, I have to admit, but it's nothing I drew consciously, honestly... which should be obvious from the colours I used, if nothing else :-)
Once we've saved our geometry, we can head back to the API test page and see what we can do with it.
Firstly, we can retrieve the XML representation of this geometry, by calling the getXML web method:
You can copy & paste the returned XML fragment into a text file, if you wish. The XML returned for my feeble artistic efforts can be accessed here.
Secondly, we can retrieve a rasterized view of our design, in PNG format:
This provides us with a nice, high-quality raster of our design:
Now that we've extracted our XML content and generated a pretty image from it, we can (and indeed must) delete the session:
Now that we have some XML content - which we could have generated/transformed/manipulated programmatically in some way - we can use it to create a new session, via the setXML web method:
That's it for today's quick tour of the Project Draw API. As you should be able to see from this procedure - and from the XML representation of the design I created - it's altogether possible to populate and manipulate content in the Project Draw service programmatically, and - as the API is simply HTTP - you're able to do so from the programming language of your choice (something we did not touch on at all today).
A final, quick note: if there's something more you'd like to see exposed in the Project Draw API, don't be shy - let us know. The Autodesk Labs team is really keen to get external feedback on this technology.
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