It is Alive in the Lab

Back to Work on Monday

Ducks in a row outside our bedroom window

Today is the last day of my sabbatical. I had better get all of my non-work "ducks in a row" as it is back to work on Monday.

-- Scott Sheppard, Autodesk Labs

Project Cooper evaluated on CNET

Rafe Needleman from CNET evaluates Project Cooper on Win7 with multi-touch. If you remember a few years ago, multi-touch on the desktop was obscure and unsupported. Now you can see how multi-touch is entering the desktop environment. Check it out!

 

Project Twitch now runs on Windows XP x64 and Vista x64

[Frederic Loranger here as a guest writer while Scott Sheppard is on sabbatical]  ®

Project Twitch is a technology preview that lets you try AutoCAD® 2010, Inventor® 2010, Revit® Architecture 2010, and soon Maya® 2010 over the internet without the need to install these applications on your computer. A small application called the Autodesk Trials takes care of the communication between our servers and your computer. This small client originally supported only Windows® XP and Windows Vista™.

Since we first launched Project Twitch, many of you have asked our team to consider adding support for other flavors of the Windows Operating Systems. After doing some preliminary testing, we are happy to announce that we have now added Windows XP x64 and Windows Vista x64 on the list of available platforms.

Please give it a try and tell us what you think at labs.trials@autodesk.com

Frederic Loranger, Autodesk Labs

We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives: An OK Book

Scott prepares to attend a friend's surprise 50th birthday party that has a Beatles theme

With time on my hands during my sabbatical, I was able to read Paul Shaffer's book We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives in practically one sitting. As someone who grew up watching Saturday Night Live and Late Night with David Letterman, I could personally remember much of the content contained in this book. I am also the right age to read this book as I have an appreciation for celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and Buddy Hackett. Some interesting tidbits from the book include:

• When Paul met Bob Dylan, IMHO he said all of the wrong things. When I meet famous people, I separate the person from their work by saying "I enjoy your work" instead of "I love you man." After Paul gushed all over the place, Dylan's retort was "Paul, do you think you could introduce me to Larry 'Bud' Melman?" Larry "Bud" Melman was a minor character on the Letterman show played by Calvert Deforest.

• When Ray Charles hosted SNL, he had to memorize all of his lines. Unlike all of the other hosts, he could not read them off of the cue cards.

• Jerry Lewis is fascinated by the show Law & Order: SVU.

• James Brown got the idea for his famous cape routine by watching the wrestler Gorgeous George.

• Paul cowrote "It's Raining Men" with Ron Dante.

Though I enjoyed the book, I wish it would have contained more anecdotes about musical guests who appeared on SNL or Letterman. Surely interesting things happened during rehearsal or on-air.

Relaxing with a good book is alive in the lab.

-- Scott Sheppard

Facebook at Work?

This is Ben Cochran. Scott is on sabbatical, and I've been invited to be a guest writer while he is out.

Facebook is great! If you are like me, you have multiple e-mail addresses.  One for work, one for personal things and the one you use when signing up for some new on line service. The result is lots and lots of e-mail. Yuck! Along came Facebook, now with Facebook I keep in touch with my friends without writing yet another e-mail. It is a community of friends, many of whom I see when I am not at work. Some of my Facebook friends are also people I work with, but we never talk about work related things on Facebook. I still like to use e-mail for work related communication, but I prefer to use Facebook for personal communication.

Due to the popularity and connectivity of Facebook many new applications and ideas are floating around the Internet attempting to leverage Facebook for work related activities.

Is integrating Facebook at work a good thing? What Facebook applications do you use? What Facebook applications would you like to see?

- Ben Cochran

The Informant Is a Bad Movie

Yesterday my daughter and I saw the new Matt Damon movie The Informant. This could be the most uninteresting movie both of us have ever seen. It's not that the acting was bad. Although the film looked like a film from the 1970's based on its cinematography (on purpose), that was only a minor distraction. The real kiss of death was that the plot was just completely unengaging. So if your are still a theater-goer in this DVD-multimedia age, save your money and go see something else.

-- Scott Sheppard

Two More Blogs enter the Autodesk Blogosphere

Two new blogs launched this week:

• Vault customization/development blog by Doug Redmond:
  

  
  It’s All Just Ones and Zeros

• Northern Europe (German) geospatial blog by Matthias Liechti and Marcus Briglmeir:

  
  The Geospatial Navigator

Check them out.

For an alphabetical listing of Autodesk blogs, see http://labs.blogs.com/its_alive_in_the_lab/autodesk-blogs.html.

Look for Guest Authors on It's Alive in th Lab

We will fully relocate during my six weeks off.

Autodesk has a sabbatical program where employees earn a 6-week sabbatical for every four years of continuous service. In turn, our vacation remains at two weeks per year regardless of years of service with the company. In other companies, weeks of vacation grow with seniority. We get to enjoy a long break! It's a great company benefit. We come back recharged and ready to work twice as hard.

I start my sabbatical on Monday and will return to work on November 9. I may post a blog article here and there about my time off. There is an old Cheech and Chong routine about a student who had to write an essay about how he spent his summer vacation:

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

The first day, I got up. I went downtown to look for a job. There were no jobs, so I hung out at the drug store. The second day, I got up. I went downtown to look for a job. There were no jobs, so I hung out at the drug store. The third day...

I will try to avoid that. In the mean time, other members of the Autodesk Labs team will be posting here as guest authors. It will be great to get their perspectives on the world of Autodesk Labs.

Facebook Nexus Site is Fun

My Facebook friend network depicted as a constellation

Are you a Facebook user? If so, you might want to spend 5 minutes and play with a neat little tool I read about. Its called Nexus. If I recall my 6th grade vocabulary correctly, the word nexus means touch point or common ground. This site shows a map of your Facebook friends and their friends. Clicking on a node highlights the friend name.

Example of how I am connected to blogger Deelip Menezes

It's simple to generate, fun, and shows who knows whom.

User Interfaces and Connectivity Make the World Seem Flat (but it's round)

Quiz: Quick, what's the city associated with area code 778? Not sure - read on to learn more about our AT&T Wireless horror story.

Our son Steven has an iPhone. Our daughter has an iPhone. I have an iPhone. My wife may get one someday. We are on an AT&T family plan and are long time AT&T customers. In fact I looked back, and here is what our family has spent just on cell phone services:

YEAR	AMOUNT
2001	$791.53
2002	$1,006.81
2003	$1,416.46
2004	$1,767.94
2005	$2,419.71
2006	$2,086.62
2007	$2,502.83
2008	$2,777.46
2009 (so far)	$3,059.04
TOTAL	$17,828.40

These totals do not reflect the plethora of phones we purchased at their ever-changing AT&T, then Cingular, then back to AT&T stores over the years. Right now we have plenty of rollover minutes. Fear not, as part of our relocation to the Bay Area, we are now cell-phone-only people - no land line. We will use the extra minutes over the years.

Our son met the cousin of a friend. They met in Phoenix, but the cousin was visiting from out of town. They texted each other. As teenagers are wanton to do, over the course of Saturday 07/18/2009 to Thursday 07/23/2009, he sent her 233 text messages. Although he has unlimited text messages in the United States, unbeknownst to him, the cousin was from Canada. Although she was in Phoenix at the time, these communications were considered international text messages. Each cost 25 cents.

This part of the bill I got the other day caught my eye:

When we got the bill, my wife immediately went to our neighborhood AT&T store:

• AT&T offers an international text messaging capability available for an extra $9.99 per month, but my wife explained that we do not need this service since this scenario is unlikely to occur again. The visiting cousin of the friend has since returned home. All of our son's regular friends reside in the United States. Our son will enter the US Marine Corps in a month. In the event that he gets stationed outside of the United States and is allowed to take his cell phone with him, then this service may be of use. We may opt for it at that time.

• After 10 or so of these charge-inducing messages, we were surprised that we were not contacted. AT&T has our cell phone numbers. We too have unlimited text messaging. They could have sent me a text message via an automated process. Our bank certainly contacts us when it sees "unusual activity" on our VISA card.

• While in the store, the AT&T staff helped my wife place a call to an AT&T customer representative who was unable to waive or reduce these charges. She even spoke to the representative's supervisor who was less than helpful - rude in her tone. She was surprised that given what we have spent over the years, we received no consideration at all.

• The local store staff asked us to contact the store manager in the event we could not work this out with "the home office." I am happy to say that local AT&T store manager, David M. Perlman, understood our plight and issued us a $58.25 credit. Thanks David! Our story has a happy ending.

I know we all act as if Canada is part of the United States, since phone lines do not have to pass over water to get there, but it's not. :-) Beware. Texting a Canadian phone number does not require a country code, but the rates act like it does. If I want to call or text France, I have to enter 1 plus 31 (country code for France) plus the phone number. In contrast, the user interface for United States phones does not require a country code for Canada. Perhaps there should be alignment between the billing process and user interface?

Pondering how a user interface which emphasizes convenience can lead to problems is alive in the lab.

P.S. By the way, the correct answer is that 778 is associated with the Canadian Province of British Columbia.