Where the world ceases to be the stage for personal hopes and desires, where we, as free beings, behold it in wonder, to question and to contemplate, there we enter the realm of Art and of Science. If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science. If we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not accessible to our conscious thought but are intuitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art. Common to both is the devotion to something beyond the personal, removed from the arbitrary." -- ALBERT EINSTEIN
- I wrote a little Sudoku puzzle solver:
- Click here to Launch the solver
- Current Version: v0.8.5 (2008.2.07)
- Change Notes: Fixed a candidate test that now (properly) uses short circuit evaluation. The result is a nearly three-fold speed improvement.
- Note: This program makes no attempt to be efficient in generating solutions! It began as a simple demonstration of a depth-first recursive backtracking algorithm and grew a bit to accommodate a GUI and load/save capabilities. If you are looking for the fastest solver on the planet, you've come to the wrong place. If you want to see an example of problem solving via recursive backtracking, look at the SudokuSolver.java file in the source.
- Issues: The application now requires local privileges to be able to load an save game data files. Since I don't have an authenticated certificate, you'll get a warning about the certificate being invalid. This will be fixed once I get time to implement the load/save functionality via the JNLP API; where the user will then have the ability to simply grant privileges to read/write only to a designated folder.
- Disclaimer: Every reasonable attempt has been made to ensure the safety of this program, but bugs do happen... all standard disclaimers apply!
- Documents (Due to the vastly superior compression over .ZIP, only 7z Compressed files are available for download.)
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A note about the background of this page: This small little fractal image was actually generated on an Atari 800xl computer in 1990 or so. I received the Atari computer as a gift around 1983 and it remained my only computer (with more hardware/firmware upgrades than I care to think about) up until about 1991. I had gone through a phase where I was fascinated with fractal geometry and wrote a bunch of fractal generators for that old 8-bit machine. The background of this page serves as that special reminder of a machine that turned me into the software geek I am today.
- Here is my old Atari 8-bit fractal generator Fractasia as it appeared in it's last official release (circa 1993), in its original ARC format: disk1, disk2.
- A Google Search will show many results for the term "fractasia" -- but as far as I know -- my old fractal generator is the earliest use of that particular moniker... as this old usenet posting (Sat Jan 23 10:59:12 1993) may indicate. If anyone can site an earlier reference, please let me know!
- An couple clips of original jazzy guitar and bass jams from my friend Judd (guitar) and myself (bass), in RealAudio 5.0 format, from around 1996:
- For a while (late 90's), I was keeping a sort of musical "sketch pad". Since I play bass; if a particular groove popped into my head, I would occasionally sit down at the computer with Cakewalk and record a bass track and maybe then add some keyboard and/or acoustic guitar (I'm not very good at either). I never bothered with much real composition, but here are a couple clips that -- despite extreme sloppiness and excessive cheesiness -- may eventually evolve into something more... if I ever get the time:
- My old band (mostly high school) page. We weren't any good, but we had a lot of fun!
- Atari 8-bit FAQs
- Some great emulators include:
- Atari800win PLus, An enhanced Polish build based upon Atari800win and probably the best Atari 8-bit emulator for Windows. (no ROMs)
- Atari800 Emulator with source and builds for MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, and others. Used as the kernel for many other emulators. (no ROMs)
- Xformer 2000, from Emulators, Inc. Includes Atari ROMs.
- Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator.
- Believe it or not, people are actually still creating new software for the ol' 8-bit
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Phish
- The Phish Net site. Run by fans and includes FAQs, HPB, and such.
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Phish Stats, run by David "ZZYZX" Steinberg. Here you can acquire all the most current and complete Phish stats on the net. Even build you own personal statistical breakdown of your live Phish experiences.
- My Stats as generated by the above site.
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Perpetual Groove
- One of my new favorites..
