Lehrblogger

I further expanded on my previous Koch Snowflake Processing sketch to allow for dynamic zooming and moving. This Dynamic Snowflake is also at OpenProcessing.

To deal with memory issues for huge numbers of points, it only draws down to the level of 2px-long edges. Thus, only so many pixels are visible at a given time. Additionally, the zoom factor has an upper limit so that it does not increase indefinitely (but you can still keep zooming).

I rewrote nearly the entire program to implement these changes, and found the previous Edge class and heavy use of recursion not practical for the problems I was trying to solve. This surprised me given the highly recursive and self-similar nature of a fractal, and I think these projects were valuable case studies for me in algorithm choice.

Part 1: http://lehrblogger.com/nyu/classes/fall08/ajax/hw3/part1
Part 2: http://lehrblogger.com/nyu/classes/fall08/ajax/hw3/part2
Part 3: http://lehrblogger.com/nyu/classes/fall08/ajax/hw3/apple_layout.pdf/
    (just a very quick design sketch, I’ll write a dedicated post soon)

Assignment: see Class 3 on the Syllabus

I expanded on my previous Koch Snowflake Processing sketch to allow for simple zooming and moving. This Zoom Snowflake is also at OpenProcessing.

The Snowflake is currently limited to a constant maximum depth (with around 3k edges) – otherwise it will crash my browser. I considered improving the zooming functionality to only keep track of the edges that were visible, and thus allow for more depth at high levels of zoom, but I didn’t have time to implement it this week.

Many complexities arise for the different cases – zooming out from the whole snowflake, zooming out from a corner, zooming out from a view of the snowflake with two discontinuous pieces, zooming out from a view with no edges, zooming in on a corner, etc – and handling them all in my existing framework seemed impractical and inelegant.

I think I would have needed to rework the entire algorithm, possibly using a layering system (for the different levels of zoom) and/or a center-centric system (drawing each edge not from its parent edges but instead calculated (with a lot of trig) from the location of the center).

Part 1: http://lehrblogger.com/nyu/classes/fall08/ajax/hw2/part1
Part 2: http://lehrblogger.com/nyu/classes/fall08/ajax/hw2/part2
Part 3: Presentation at 280Slides (embedded below)
Part 4: http://lehrblogger.com/nyu/classes/fall08/ajax/hw2/part4
Part 5: http://lehrblogger.com/nyu/classes/fall08/ajax/hw2/part5

Assignment: see Class 2 on the Syllabus and info for part 5
(note parts 1,2,4,5 have index.html and index.css files; parts 2,5 also have init.js files)

I am switching over from Blogger to WordPress on my own domain – lehrblogger.com – for a variety of reasons including but not limited to: curiosity about WordPress, annoyances with the Blogger interface, and love for the new domain name (Gabriela deserves credit for the idea).  I hope you and your RSS feeds will follow me to here!

This theme is driving me a little crazy, but designing my own will be a separate project.  All of the old posts and comments have been transferred.