…and trying to figure out how to do this in Flash.
Category: Programming
A Flash Break
Today I learned how to do object oriented programming in Flash. Click on the movie to bring it into focus, then use the arrow keys to move around.
A Little at a Time
Little by little this thing is coming together. I got around the IE6 fuckup bug by redoing the layout as absolutely positioned DIV tags, rather than floated DIV tags. The only browser which will be broken by this will not load the stylesheet at all.
While studying up on some artists I came across Olga’s Gallery , a huge collection of scans of artists from all eras, from all over the world. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Titian, all four Brueghels; well over a hundred artists and over a thousand works of art.
This is the only place on-line where I have found Ivan the Terrible and His Son by Repin, scanned with any skill at all.
And so to bed.
A New Look
So here I am with a new look and feel. Still ironing out the bugs. The worst one is an IE 6 quirk which doesn’t precisely render 70% and 30%, thus sending the navigation down to the bottom of the page, below the content. Also, IE6 has a problem rendering the page if I have in-line images within the content. Basically, IE6 can bite me. So can any other browser which renders in a manner inconsistent with Mozilla.
I returned Flash Math Creativity. Everything in it can be found on line, and I felt the $50.00 could be better spent. SO yesterday I picked up The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins and A Writer’s Diary: 1873-1876 , volume 1 of a two-volume set of the writings of Dostoevsky. I picked up the Dawkins because, as I was thumbing through it, I found screen-shots of the Biomorph artificial evolution simulator. I spent hours playing with the thing a year ago. And again just now.
In other news I am, for the first time in my life, watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
More Free Swag
Added two more texts to the Project Gutenberg section: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Club of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton. I also tweaked the XSL stylesheets for pg.es.o and es.o. Done properly, you will never notice.
I must be doing something right because people who have blogs of their own have been reading my blog, and two of them – who are great in their bloghood – have sent me emails in response to one post or another. So in thanks and appreciation, here they are:
May your hit-counters never stop rolling.
Free Swag
I updated the Project Gutenberg section and added two new texts: Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and Dead Souls by Nicolai Gogol. Before you go a’clickin’ on those links I should warn you that Tom Sawyer is just over 400k, and Dead Souls is just over 800k.
In the interest of laziness open-ness I have linked those files in before completing the XSL and CSS stylesheets. Both will continue to evolve as I mark up more texts, and need to account for more variation.
What Is It With the Ants?
I got the idea for the Langton’s Ants experiment from Kevin Lindsey’s experiment . The code is my own, but the results were carefully double-checked against the original.
The “ant” follows four rules:
The ant toggles the color of its current square
The ant advances in the direction it is facing
If the new square is off, then the ant turns to the right by 90 degrees
If the new square is on, then the ant turns to the left by 90 degrees
Possible future riffs on this idea include multiple ants, multiple colors, and a hex/octal grid.
Back to School
More of the Same, Yet Different
Still another variation as I climb toward Cellular Apotheosis. This one elegantly captures the elusive beauty of the poetically named “Rule 149”. It shouldn’t beat up any computers too badly, but it will run faster on more powerful machines. Obviously.
More CA
Scott played around with my code, then I played around with his code, and this is what we did . It should be much easier on the processor than was yesterday’s experiment. Just sit back, grab a beer, and enjoy.