Through the Interface

Floppy Friday #51

I’m just back from a fantastic 10-day vacation with my family on the beautiful Italian island of Sardinia. More on that in an upcoming post, but for now the first priority has been to get an episode of Floppy Friday out on schedule. Once again this episode had zero preparation, but I was very happy with the selection of games we stumbled across. The first three games came from a “team sports” floppy (an unofficial collection, it just happened to contain these games): MicroProse Soccer, International Basketball and International Hockey (which I was sure I’d played before in this... Read more →

Floppy Friday #50

We made it to 50 episodes! I’ll only record another 14 – to take it up to a round 64 – so we’re getting close now. I wanted to make it a special one, but as I was a little busy getting ready to leave on holiday I didn’t quite get the time to research each game ahead of time. I do think this episode has a nice selection, nonetheless. We started by playing Nemesis, which was released in some places as Gradius, apparently, and then played Flimbo’s Quest and Destroyer. All gdecent games. I also tried (and failed)... Read more →

Floppy Friday #49

In today’s episode we go more retro than ever, dusting off an old 1970s Pong console from Inno-Hit. We played all 10 of the games on the console, which certainly made the editing simpler than usual: no speeding up needed, at all! My 12-year-old daughter kindly joined me off-screen (out of respect for her privacy) for the 2-player games. It was fun to have someone join me. As mentioned in the video, my kids have already played this console for hours: the games really are timeless! Read more →

At the Forge Hackathon, counting down to AU2021

While I’m unlikely to be present for much of next week’s Autodesk University event – all being well I’ll be in Sardinia – I have been feeling the excitement mount ahead of it. Mainly from attending the Forge Hackathon, which is now nearing it’s climax. The event kicked off with a really interesting event held via SpatialChat. I hadn’t used it before, but was immediately hooked. There were different rooms (fine), but even within a single room you could have private conversations by moving off into a corner. The sound increases as you get closer to a sound source,... Read more →

Introducing VASA, a tool for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis

I’ve been hinting about this for a few weeks now, but today is (very excitingly) the day for the big unveiling. My colleague Rhys Goldstein has been working his magic, once again, taking the algorithms he developed for the 2D Space Analysis package and applying them to 3-space. If you were impressed by Space Analysis, what we’re showing now may just knock your socks off. The new package is called VASA, which stands for Voxel-based Architectural Space Analysis. It’s available today for download from the Dynamo Package Manager. It’s worth unpacking a couple of terms, here: voxel-based means VASA... Read more →

Floppy Friday #48

This episode of Floppy Friday is dedicated to the memory and legacy of the late Sir Clive Sinclair, 1980s computing pioneer. Sir Clive invented the slimline pocket calculator and worked tirelessly to democratize technology, whether home computers or electric cars. His impact on today’s computing landscape is undeniable, as he helped launch the careers of countless IT and software professionals (me included). Thank you for everything, Sir Clive. It felt like episode 48 was the right one to crack open the ZX Spectrum (48K, of course), especially given last week’s news about Sir Clive’s passing. On a side note,... Read more →

A minor update to Space Analysis (2D), and getting ready for 3D!

This week I’ve been getting my Revit installation working again – it had been a while since I’d used it, and it was overdue an upgrade from 2021 to 2022 – mainly because I have to publish a couple of new packages (or package versions) to the Dynamo Package Manager. The first is a minor update to the Space Analysis package, taking it from version 0.3.3 to version 0.4.0. There is a breaking change, however, in that people using the Visibility nodes from Python may have to modify their code to use the correct (newly added) namespace. We only... Read more →

Floppy Friday #47

[I’ve just heard the sad news that the computing pioneer Sir Clive Sinclair died last night. He changed the lives of many, many people who grew up in the UK in the 1980s. We owe him a very great debt. RIP, Sir Clive.] Well, that was something. I spent a full hour recording this week’s episode, although I managed to whittle it down to just over half of that, as there was a huge amount of waiting around. I hope it’s still watchable enough. It started well, playing what is apparently a conversion of a classic Atari 2600 game,... Read more →

Bundle optimization in Project Dasher

I mentioned recently that I’ve been working on updating Project Dasher’s use of 3rd party components, and that I had some learnings to share. We started the Forge-based version of Dasher in 2016, and (much to my shame) some of the components had stayed at more-or-less the version available at that time, largely due to the migration effort needed to deal with breaking changes. Biting the bullet to upgrade them was painful but necessary, and right now I (and Dasher) feel nicely refreshed. Last time I mentioned there were two big outstanding dependencies that still required attention: Bootstrap and... Read more →

Build your first Digital Twin at the upcoming Forge Hackathon

Other that my regular foolings-around with ancient tech, I feel like I’ve been neglecting this blog in recent weeks. That’s all about to change, though, as we enter the busy period leading up to Autodesk University 2021. For one I have some interesting learnings I thought I’d share from some of the foundational work I’ve been doing on Dasher’s codebase, but there are also some interesting updates for people performing analyses of 2D (and 3D!) spaces. Fun stuff! First though, it’s worth reminding people of the Forge Hackathon that’s around the corner. It starts in just a couple of... Read more →

Floppy Friday #46

We’re edging closer to the end of this series (which will come at episode 64, appropriately enough). There’s still plenty of fun to be had before it’s over, though! In this week’s episode we once again play games found on a series of random floppies. We start with a game I actually enjoyed a lot called The Arc of Yesod. The main character comes with a remote drone – how cool is that? We then loaded a German strategy game called The World, but not for very long. Afterwards came Kane, Forester and Hi Ska Do. These seem to... Read more →

A new brand for a brand new Autodesk?

I’m sure many of you will already have seen Autodesk’s exciting new brand identity. To get a sense of what’s behind it, I recommend heading over to our Brand Hub, where you can get much of the background. It’s a very interesting read. Employees and partners have had some time to digest this change – and presumably start stocking up on black printer ink ;-) – and I fully admit that it took me a little while to “get” it. If you find it a bit too different, I do recommend giving it a few days/weeks to settle in.... Read more →

Floppy Friday #45

This week’s episode contains another eclectic mix of ancient Commodore 64 video games. We started with Snoopy, which turned out to be rather basic and tedious. We then tried Trucking USA, which turned out to be in German. From there things became more interesting, with a fun platformer called Burger Time, a classic arcade conversion of a game called Sea Wolf, and finally a quirky little number called Pegasis. I rather enjoyed Burger Time and Sea Wolf – as you can probably tell from the video – but the whole episode was fun to record. Here’s the cover art... Read more →

A minor makeover – and a lot of core work – for Dasher

Over the last week I’ve been heads-down on core Dasher work, but with very little visible result. Here’s why. Early last week I received an email telling me that it was time to dig into Dasher’s use of 3rd party components and make sure there weren’t any security issues. (This isn’t something unusual – all our products go through this, and many of our research projects, too.) As anyone working on web development projects will know, it’s important to go through from time to time to reduce the technical debt that accumulates due to the use of old libraries... Read more →

Floppy Friday #44

Another mix of games in this week’s episode! It’s hard to know what the first game, Road Runner, was meant to be, as it really must have been corrupted – there’s no other reason for the graphics to be so messed up. The second, The Hobbit, was an illustrated text adventure I remember playing for hours on my ZX Spectrum as a boy. The third was B.C.’s Quest for Tires, which seems like it was probably a classic when it came out in 1983. We finished up with an obscure but playable title named Fortress Underground, which I actually... Read more →

A new face in the Autodesk Tandem team

My friend and colleague Hali Larsen has joined the Autodesk Tandem team as a Product Manager focused on connected workflows and sustainability. This is huge news, for lots of reasons: for several years Hali played an absolutely instrumental role in Project Dasher – in many ways she was our de facto PM, but also worked through many gnarly issues related to bespoke configuration for various Dasher pilot projects. Hali has a wealth of experience working with customers in this space, and also knows where most of Dasher’s skeletons are buried, so she is the right person to take on... Read more →

Floppy Friday #43

This week’s episode is an interesting one, in that it includes a couple of Italian games that I’ve found no reference to on the interwebs. And both were really fun to play! The first was Miami Race (that’s right – not Vice, but Race), which was a very playable (i.e. fun and easy) racing game, while the second was called Pogo, which was a puzzle platformer with some really interesting 3D rotational effects. We then went on to play Mandroid and the first text adventure we’ve tried in this series, S*M*A*S*H*E*D. We then tried – but ultimately failed –... Read more →

Going viral during a pandemic

I’ve been getting quite a bit of unsolicited email of late. It started with this one, in late July: Hi Kean, Did you know that a QR code of your email address is currently being circulated all around the globe in a viral meme? Cheers, It came with a couple of images attached: Perhaps somewhat rudely I largely ignored it, as I thought it was some elaborate spam or phishing attempt. I did scan the QR codes and found some curious things encoded: my email address, the URL to blogs.autodesk.com, my old Autodesk office phone number, the location of... Read more →

Previewing and viewing PDFs inside Dasher

A couple of days ago we were looking for the datasheets for the various sensors installed in the MX3D bridge: as you’ve probably already read, there are nearly a hundred sensors in and on the bridge, although of only about eight different model types. My colleague Josh Cameron said, in passing, “it would be really handy to have these datasheets integrated into Dasher!”. As usual, this sent me down a rather fun rabbit-hole for a day or so, to see how we might reasonably integrate these PDFs into Dasher. Firstly it’s worth pointing out that these days the Forge... Read more →

Floppy Friday #42

In this week’s episode we take a look at four games, with a brief interlude of Nothin’ Special. The first game was a Pac-Man clone that’s apparently called Munch Man 64. We then went on to play two “patrol” games (which basically have nothing in common beyond the name): Falcon Patrol II and Park Patrol. We wrap up by playing Ace of Aces, albeit - once again - very poorly. Here’s the cover art I could find for three of this week’s games: Only one had a review in Zzap!64 magazine: Ace of Aces was rated very highly in... Read more →