walkway paint in santa cruz

A raccoon outside my apartment window; it seemed to be humping the fence.

mazes

Homework for data structures class is to make mazes; just make.
A "maze" is a grid of hex values, to look at it you can't tell if it's a valid maze. To make sure my program was outputing good stuff I drew it, and drew and drew more...

Using Circa Sample

Here's a movie of circa being played with. I sped it up about 3 times. The movie is ~2 minutes, 4.5MB and shows a rendered version at the end. Sorry about the crude quality, the data went through several pipes...
CircaTwiddling.mp4
I think people might be confused on how to use circa, I'm trying to show how I use it. Dis a first attempt at a video tutorial.

graph drawing experiments

So, I'm in a "computer data structures" class and it's graphs and trees, trees and graphs... These are screengrabs from a java app to draw graphs. I wanted to do it myself first, but I've found two graphing libraries I may be able to switch to (GINY and JUNG).

This is the "Explore" window in the Trochoid app. Notice the center pattern is garbage compared to the others. The pattern in the center is where all the circles of the trochoid cancel out, putting the entire curve into the point <0,0>. In this window the drawing function tries to scale the pattern to fit it's place, but in the case of a point the scale becomes infinity and all the numbers go wack.

Trochoid ScreenSaver

Posted a trochoid based screensaver for OS X at the "Apps and Movies" link. (link in Blog Banner). Note: I think there's a problem with the 3App zip file upload (post below). I'll remark here when fixed. (I hope this screensaver upload works). Here's a screen grab after running for 10 seconds.

jint

stills

paleolith

IFS sequence... invertable

Found the code for IFS trochoids and it still compiles! Made this 9 pic progression...

found IFS

Here's some more IFS trochoids I found while meandering through 80 gigabytes of unorganized backup data; including the Sierpinksi like one.

Iterated Function System

There is a type of fractal called an iterated function system (IFS) that applies a 'function' to your 'system' then applies the function again and again to the output (iterates). I tried this for trochoids and below is one of the creations. In this case the system is the sequence of circles comprising the trochoid (a circle being 2 numbers, radius and frequency). The function is a list of simple functions. The simple functions...well, I'll show how it works sometime, it's difficult to explain.

As I was hoping, the trochoids are somewhat fractalish in being self similar. I couldn't find my favorite example though; it looked just like a (slightly bulged) Sierpinski Triangle. I should be able to remake it sometime....

utilities

Knowing how to write a program is great when your computer doesn't work exactly how you like, such as iTunes not showing an estimated time remaining for a podcast download. Luckily I knew the trick to making a transparent window and a plugin that can take pictures of the screen. Armed with these I can put the window over the iTunes progress bar, take a picture of that area it defines and make an algorithm that scans the image and figures out how far along it is, keep track of time and that's all I need to estimate remaining time. It does all this each second. This is what it looks like...



As with many of my utility apps I expect my "iTunes image recognition progress meter" to be outdated in the next iTunes update (ie iTunes will show remaining time), but it was fun to make:) I've tried image recognition programs before but this is my first success.

pre artichoke

surface

Trying to visualize the set of the raise operation, it's a tricky one

circa preview

I've been working on a program named circa that I would like to share, but I don't have a good place to post it yet. When I find a place I'll link to it from this blog, along with the others I used to have out there; Trochoid, TroTorted and the Laser Scanners. These are some screen grabs on circa as I worked on it. It's in no way finished but it's fun and works for the most part.