dregs

Longer days and warm weather in these parts- I almost entirely forgot about the little creatures I started making a few weeks ago.

However, yesterday morning I found myself stalled out on the wrong side of the road. Facing the sidewalk, wondering if the oncoming truck would be able to swerve in time, I immediately thought “Hey… it’s snowing… that reminds me….”.

As soon as I got home I started hacking out the version I have here.

First, try running it with Java Web Start. If that doesn’t work, try downloading binaries appropriate to you platform:

• linux (or amd64)
• Mac OS X (or PPC)
• Windows

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one out left

nickels and dimes
needles and nines
look what you find when you look to the sky
pretty plain people made pitifully pettty
the ones with the guns always come in down heavy
i’m ready to fly on away
but forget to forgo the fun of the game
run away and i’m shamed but fight and I lose
i know i must die but what means will I choose

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Okay. In a previous post I described a project of mine to render the Lorentz attractor (actually, any function in three parameters) in a visually elucidating way. I’ve now packaged this application up so that you can use it at home.

• Launch with JavaWebStart
• Binaries (if you are a Linux user like me and can’t get Java Web Start to work):
  • Linux-i586
  • Linux-amd64

This is the ‘alpha’ version… no docs, no help, no options, no nothin (except this):

• Right-Click and drag zooms away from and toward the axis lines
• ‘P’ will pause

I do have the Java source available here, in case you want to take a look. Compiling requires JOGL (I use the Netbeans JOGL IDE plugin).

Well, I was playing around with Processing the other day, and the inner muse inspired me to create a charming winter wonderland in the spirit of the season. I started out with an approach that used a tree data structure to accommodate the growth, but I had a mess of a time detecting collisions effectively.

Ultimately, a discrete (grid based) representation seems the best bet for now. In fact, as soon as I’d printed out some handy hexagon-tiled paper, the algorithm came to me in a flash. I’ll go over it below, and discuss the implementation in a later post.

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