Vanishing Point Game

Have you heard about the Vanishing Point game? It’s a mysterious series of events and online puzzles that were launched this week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The first event was a spectacular water show at the Bellagio with a video projected onto the fountain, similar to what’s done in Fantasmic @ Disneyland. The video included a series of clues to puzzles now hosted on VanishingPointGame.com. Those who solve the puzzles will be eligable to win prizes including Windows Vista based PC’s and laptops, copies of Windows Vista Ultimate and Office 2007, Xbox 360’s, Zunes, iRiver’s, and Windows games. It’s obviously a marketing campaign for Microsoft’s upcoming launch of Windows Vista and Office 2007, but certainly a clever one. The grand prize winner gets a trip on the “Rocketplane” XP vehicle, which will take them to “the edge of space for a view of the ultimate vista”.

Apparently there are three more events scheduled, each with their own set of puzzles and clues. The puzzles remind me of puzzles I saw in games like Dr. Brain, Myst, and 7th Guest, and some seem very complicated and challenging, but fun. The cities and times for the remaining events are listed on the website (including places like Miami, Phoenix, Austin, Sydney, London, Berlin, Toronto, and finally Seattle), but only lat/long’s are provide for the specific locations, so you’ll have to look ‘em up if you want to attend (and the upcoming events sound like they’ll be at least as cool as the first one).

Anyways, it’s an intersting contest - worth checking out. I wish I had more time to try and solve all the puzzles, as I could sure use one of the new PC’s they’re giving away….we’ll see.

Technorati tags: Windows Vista, VanishingPoint, CES

Free Chrismas Concert Downloads

Last year I discovered the FM100 Christmas Mini Concerts, which were held just across the street from my work at the ZCMI Center. They had a lot of great local artists performing some really fun music, and they offered recordings of the concerts as free MP3’s you could download and play on your computer/iPod/whatever. Anyways, they’re underway right now again for this year - if you’d like some fun, free Christmas music (and some other stuff mixed in, like Ryan Shupe & the Rubber Band’s hit song, Dream Big), go checkout their website by clicking here. Tonight we’ve been listening to the John Schmidt concert, with his rendition of the Charlie Brown Christmas Medley - it’s pretty good stuff - go check it out.

New LDS Blogs

I’m so excited to see so many well done blogs from members of the LDS Church popping up lately. Today I learned about LDS Chief Information Office (CIO), Joel Dehlin’s new blog at ldscio.org. He was recently hired from Microsoft, and has been doing a great job during his first few months at the Church. I really enjoyed his post about the way his co-workers at Microsoft responded when he told them about his new position - “Huh? Does your chapel have a server or something?” He also mentioned that the Church is currently hiring both Java and .net programmers, which I think is great news - as a .net programmer already working at the Church, I’m happy to see more of that technology used where it makes sense.

Cameron Moll also announced yesterday his decision to accept a position as the Principal Interaction Designer at the Church. I remember reviewing Cameron’s portfolio when he was interviewed for the Web 2.0 Show back in July, and being quite impressed with his work. With talented designers like himself, the team at NorthTemple.com, Internet Coordination Group Director Larry Richman, and of course all the others who aren’t yet blogging, I think we can look forward to a lot of great tools for the Church.

Lost and Found Saves the Day

Thank goodness the Venetian hotel has a good lost and found policy. They just let me know that they’ll be shipping a lost item back to me at no cost. Yay!

In the rush to get everything packed, eat breakfast, check out, and hurry down to a meeting place before the last AU class started on Friday morning, I accidentally left my nice shaver on the bathroom counter. When I first noticed it was gone I just resigned myself to the fact that these kinds of things happen, and this was lots better than forgetting my keys or a more valuable item. But then I went out today to purchase a new one, and for as much as a decent shaver costs ($75-$100 to match my old one) I figured it would be worthwhile to go through whatever hassle and possible cost of seeing if they found it and could ship it back to me. To my surprise, it was no hassle at all, and they even said they would ship it for free. It’s nice to still have a good customer service experience once in a while.

Autodesk Univerity, Days 2 & 3

We’re nearing the end of our third day here at Autodesk Univerisity, and it’s been very informative to say the least. I’ve learned new things from writing scripts for automating drawing cleanup, to sharing more design information via DWF, a crash course in LISP and .NET automation, BIM’s impact on the way things are designed and constructed with CAD, a bunch of tips for having more successful deployments, and lots more. It’s certainly been a worthwhile trip…I just hope I can remember it all once we get back to the office.

Shaan Hurley from Autodesk listed a bunch of AU-related posts on his blog that you can access here. I’ve also added a ton more pictures to my flickr photoset for AU.

Autodesk University - Day One

I’m in Las Vegas this week attending Autodesk University at the Venetian. I flew down last night, got settled into the nice room they gave me in Venetian tower (great view, by the way!), and spent some time getting acquainted with the hotel and adjacent Sands Expo Center. This place is huge!

The conference kicked off this morning with a keynote address from Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. He had a lot of interesting things to say, and also introduced several presentations from companies who use various Autodesk products (there are so many now). There’s a lot of really cool stuff being done, especially around the concept of 3D visualization - being able to see a very realistic rendition of something before it’s built.

One of the demonstrations involved a tool that the military was using to visualize areas in Baghdad before entering them for a mission. Several information sources from geospatial data (where the buildings are located), infrastructure (plumbing, electrical, sewage, etc.), lines of sight, etc. are all integrated into a 3D model that the commander can explore and analyze before taking his men in. I know there’s all sorts of cool technology being used in the military - this was just a small and very interesting sample.

Another demonstration showed techniques and tools being used to create a to-scale model of London for planning and visualization purposes. Now, Google Earth and just recently, Windows Live Maps both provide 3D views of major cities, with some even applying texture maps to the building models. However, this seemed to be much more intense and thorough, and had detail down to a very fine level (every chimney and tree in the whole city, etc.).

After the keynote all 7,500 or so attendees (there’s a TON of people down here) split for individual classes centered around whatever industry or tool you use. I attended a class about how to develop and implement successful CAD standards, another about a tool for digitizing scanned drawings (Autodesk Raster Design), and a third about centralizing AutoCAD/Architectural Desktop content on a network for multiple users to access. It’s all been interesting and useful so far….but I’m glad they’re recording the sessions and making them available online after the conference. Some of this stuff will take further review to fully understand and implement.

Anyways, I’ve been taking a bunch of pictures throughout the day, and have just created a Flickr photoset containing them all. If you’re interested in seeing photos from the conference (and a few misc. photos from around Vegas), you can access them at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jertheanderson/sets/72157594396864797/.

Technorati tags: Autodesk, Autodesk Univerity, AutoCAD, Venetian, Las Vegas

Installing Windows Vista with a Virtual CD/DVD Drive

I’m surprised at the amount of traffic that one simple post about testing Windows Vista brought to this blog. It looks like a lot of it came from the trackback I sent to help.net’s article about using the “Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP” to mount Vista ISO’s to get Vista to install without burning a DVD. That method has helped me install Vista several different times now, and I’ve since realized that I didn’t really spell it out very well. If you’d like to try out Vista without having to burn a DVD, here’s what you need to do.

• Download the desired ISO image and save it to an easily accessible location on your hard drive.
• Download the Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP. It’s an executable archive that contains 3 files: VCdRom.sys (the virtual cdrom driver), VCdControlTool.exe (the control panel application), and a readme file. Extract those files somwhere handy and run VCdControlTool.exe
• Click “driver control,” “install driver”, then browse to and select the VCdRom.sys file. This loads the driver for use in Windows.
• Close the driver control window.
• Click “add drive” to obtain an available drive letter for your virtual drive. That drive will appear in the list at the top of the control panel with the message “no image mounted.”
• Click “mount,” then browse to and select your ISO file. The file will be mounted as a virtual drive at the drive letter you specified.
• You can now use this new virtual drive as you would a regular DVD drive to install Vista however you’d like. VirtualPC recognizes these virtual drives, but you can also install Vista from within WindowsXP if you’d like.

This technique works for installing linux ISO’s into VirtualPC as well. I hope that makes more sense than before…..

Autodesk University Website Much Better Now

I thought I’d mention, since I posted a somewhat lengthy complaint earlier about having login and session preservation issues with the Autodesk University registration website, that they’ve since fixed the problem and the site is working much better now. It’s nice to be able to signin once, navigate around the site, and actually be able to stay there without getting accidentally logged out. Not sure what the problem was before, but thanks to whoever got it fixed.

They’ve recently added a neat new feature to the site called AU Connect. Each conference attendee inputs some information about themselves, including what industry they work in, which Autodesk tools they use, what skills they might have, what their core interests are, and so on. That information is then used to map out which attendees might be best for you to network with while at the event. Interesting idea….I’m looking forward to seeing how well it works.

Testing Windows Vista Pre-RC1 on Virtual PC

I noticed a post on Paul Thurrott’s Internet Nexus blog this afternoon about Microsoft making Vista build 5536 publicly available. I’m not sure why they did it, but I was happy to learn that I’d be able to test a more recent and less buggy version of Vista, so I downloaded it right away. Using the now free version of Virtual PC 2004, as well as a handy little tool from Microsoft called Virtual CD-ROM control panel, I had the ISO image for this build mounted on my PC as a virtual DVD drive, and had the entire installation done in about an hour. I’m quite impressed, much more so than I was with Beta 2 (which took about 2-3 hours to install), and am looking forward to trying it out over the next few days.

Here’s VirtualPC running Vista on my Dual-Monitor XP machine:

Here’s the new blue theme, the sidebar, and Windows Photo Gallery:

Frustration with Autodesk University Registration

After spending more time with the AU registration website and helping others from my office use it, I’m feeling a little embarrassed about my comments from the other day. Although I really liked being able to build my schedule so easily, I’m getting really frustrated with the login problems the site seems to be having. The praise I posted in the survey they presented seems a little too glowing for the experience I’ve had since then.

Shortly after signing up I learned that a few other guys from my office were also given approval to go, so we got together to look at the class schedule and get everyone signed up. I had lots of positive remarks about how easy the registration website was and recommended that everyone check it out. Upon doing so we ended up in what seemed like an infinite loop of trying to login, getting bumped out, trying again, loosing the session, and so on. After about 6-8 tries, we finally made it into the system, found a class to enroll in, and clicked the button to get on the list. Suddenly we were logged out again and had to go through the whole process over again. It’s been that way ever since and quite frankly some of us are about ready to pull our hair out.

Perhaps its something with our firewall, or who knows what else, but something’s definately gone wrong there. Some bold red text on the login page states that pressing the back button can cause problems as well, which seems to indicate they have some kind of problem preserving the session. I seem to remember having similar problems with some of the sites we’ve developed in-house, but they were soon resolved with some attention paid to the way a session was stored on the server. Whatever it is, I hope they can get it figured out soon - the site is great, but it’s really frustrating to use when you can’t stay logged in.