Author: Joe

Mandelbrot Zoomer

Back in college I wrote a handful of applets that drew fractals. The last one I did was the mandelbrot set, but it didn’t have the performance I wanted and I didn’t work on it much.

A few days ago I got to thinking about it again, and figured I’d try optimizing it since I’ve been doing a lot of concurrent and parallel programming at work and I figured at worst I could just make it multi-threaded. There’s still room for improvement, but I got a basic interface down and a level based drawing pattern that does remarkably well with only two threads (one refreshing the image at ~60 fps and running the interface, the other doing the calculation):

Holding the left mouse button on a point in the applet zooms in, the right button zooms out, and the ‘r’ key resets the view.

Daylight savings

I forgot how miserable Colorado can be in the winter. I don’t know what time it got dark, but I stood up at 6 (was still at work) and it was pitch black outside. It was also cold and windy (but not snowing/raining like was predicted) as I discovered when I went out to my car. I barely had a long enough drive for my car to heat up to the point that the heater started doing anything.

At least I still have good hot chocolate mix (the home-made stuff). I may have burnt myself on the cup, but my hands are warm now.

Overcrowding

A few nights ago I turned around and both cats were asleep in the cat bed, though Dash woke up when stood up to take a picture:

This was Saturday:

Talore was sleeping and Dash jumped up and stretched out on half of the bed. Talore didn’t much appreciate it.

Last night Dash kept pulling the cat bed off the shelf. I have no idea what he was trying to do, but he got it down to the floor upside down and lay down across it. He also chewed a couple holes in the tag.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only mischief he got up to. When I got up this morning I discovered that one of the nose pieces from my glasses was missing. I know that Dash gets on that table at night and I’ve heard my glasses rattling a bit, but I didn’t know he was doing anything besides moving them. I found the nose piece in my dirty clothes basket, but I spent all day adjusting my glasses because they’re lopsided.