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This moment has been a long time coming.  The first step I’d taken on this journey, and shown in previous posts, was to create a fractal scene piece-by-piece and then simply paste all the pieces together to create a final image.  The image was zoom-able but did not allow the user to pan in any direction.  I thought a good way to enable panning was to create a tile-based engine.  That is, the scene would be divided up into equal-sized square tiles and if the user panned from the left to the right, tiles to the left of the screen boundary would appear while visible tiles near the boundary to the right would disappear.  That seemed ok, and followed what existing tile-based game engines do (think Metroid or Super Mario Bros).  However with engines like that the tiles used to create the final image already exist.  For fractals, and their infinite nature, that can’t be done. ...

I recently couldn’t help but notice that one of the shrubs in our back garden had been reduced from something like this: To this: ...

A long time ago in a land far, far away, Adriana and I caught up with family and friends. And then I fell into some sort of Internet coma. I showed some signs of consciousness with Frex (still working on it), and now here I am with another post. So, Australia. We went to Oz back in May. I’d never been to Uluru before, even though I’d been to Alice Springs for a wedding (it’s not really that close to Uluru, but while you’re in the general area…), but at the time I was a university student with no money, and getting a day trip to the rock was well out of my price range. This time around I wasn’t going to miss it, so decided that a 3-day camping tour out of Alice Springs would be the ticket. We had a couple of days in Alice Springs to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in yonks, acclimate (that is, let all the Florida humidity I’d acquired over the years evaporate), and try and sync up with the timezone. We also accumulated enough red dust to last us till we returned to Florida. ...

After a lot of refactoring, Frex now has a code base that I can understand the next day. I took the opportunity to install version control on my laptop to save me from any potential “oh f%*k” moments, or at least make them not as bad. I chose subversion for this, and as the repository is located in my dropbox folder, I’m not worried about having to back it up. ...

Back in high school, a friend gave me his book on fractals (thanks Damo!), and I spent hours and hours generating fractals using the bundled ‘fractint’ software. It didn’t matter that I was using a hand-me-down AT PC (everything was ok though, as this was the 8 MHz version!), watching the fractal generate line-by-line was fine by me. Today I found the time and ambition to create for the Android platform a program that generates the Mandelbrot fractal. That’s all this program does (for now). It does it very slowly, with absolutely no bells and whistles. Say hi to “Frex” (“FRactal EXplorer”). ...

Adriana and I (way back in February now) spent a week in Costa Rica, dividing our time between the Arenal region (to see a volcano that turned out to be camera shy) and Quepos, a town on the southern area of the West coast. Hiring a car turned out being incredibly expensive, mostly due to the mandatory government insurance that can nearly cost as much as the rental itself. We found car hire necessary however, although we did not get a 4WD but instead opted for the cheap Toyota Yaris. For the one place that required a 4WD for access, we got there via a tour bus. ...

Ages and ages and yonks ago, we went on a drive up North to Georgia and South Carolina. On the way we stopped off in St Augustine and among other other things, saw Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the US. They were firing a cannon, so I filmed a somewhat shaky video of it. I procrastinated for ages in fixing up the shakiness, never bothering to fix it offline. Today Youtube came to my rescue by adding some new editing features. I used the powers of Youtube against the video and I’m pretty impressed with the results (I ain’t doing anything about the child-like glee at the end). I did notice a funky 3D-like parallax effect in areas where there was a lot of camera movement, but I think that also depended on the strength of the effect. Also, the higher the amount of shake reduction you want, the more cropping that will occur. Note that the brightness difference in the edited video below is intentional. ...

Adriana and I were out with friends at Markham Park in Broward on Sunday. It’s a pretty cool park that has a model airplane field, mountain bike trails, areas for jet skiing, a shooting range, and a Jamaican guy with a van that had a fully sick subwoofer, a couch, and 420,000 miles on the odometer. I got distracted by a very active jumping spider, which was indifferent to my efforts to try and get it to ‘sit’ still. When you only have a depth of field of several millimetres as I do with my macro lens at its closest focus point, shooting a moving object can be frustrating. Having a speedlight handy gives some extra light so you can increase the f-stop and get a much larger depth of field, so I was happy I brought my whole kit along. ...

From Arequipa we went on a guided tour of the Chivay/Colca Canyon region for a couple of days. The canyon is approximately four kilometres deep, making it about twice as deep as that of the Grand Canyon, so I was pretty excited about seeing that and possibly a Condor. The small tour bus took us around the extinct volcano Chachani towards the town of Chivay where we’d be staying the night. We went past a huge processing plant, which I could only guess was some sort of cement factory. The landscape at this point was a contrast of pale grey dust, green valley and man-made structures: ...