Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Dec 15, 2009, 1:08 pm
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Dec 15, 2009, 1:08 pm
I’ve recently submitted an entry to the NYC BigApps contest. My entry is called PlayaroundNYC and it is a visualization of how well supported New Yorkers are by public playgrounds as determined by walking distance and quality. You can read about how the map works on the How It Works page. To sum...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Jul 8, 2009, 1:11 am
One of the nice things about being a parent is getting to revisit movies you haven’t seen since you were a child. We’ve been on a classic Disney movie binge at my home and I’ve been really enjoying the movies from the 50s and early 60s. Figure 1. Tinkerbell in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Pe...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Sep 8, 2008, 4:59 pm
The principles behind flocking behaviors were first demonstrated in a computer simulation in 1986 by Craig Reynolds. Flocking is an example of emergent behavior, which I touched on briefly in an ealier post about Conway’s Game of Life. Flocking behaviors are a lot of fun to play with, but simula...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Sep 4, 2008, 3:40 pm
This experiment is a byproduct of another project I’m working on which involves flocking behaviors. I was trying to maximize performance by eliminating the use of arrays and replacing them with a linked list structure. Generally speaking, direct pointers should be much quicker in Actionscript than...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Aug 13, 2008, 3:53 pm
Nike has launched the “Nike Dunk: Kicks Creator”. The Kicks Creator allows Nike fans to design their own shoes by coloring and painting directly onto a 3D model of a Nike Dunk in Flash. The Kicks Creator goes beyond simply choosing colors, it allows Dunk fans access to an assortment of materials...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Jul 17, 2008, 1:07 am
I recently had need of an arrow drawing function in Flash which I wanted to use to annotate diagrams. I was unable to find one through Google that suited my needs, so I decided to roll my own Actionscript class for drawing arrows. I tried to keep the arrow drawing interface easy to use but flexible....
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Jun 23, 2008, 7:51 pm
There are some challenges in Flash that are addressed with such regularity that it can be surprising that no uniform way of accomplishing these tasks has emerged. One of these challenges is dynamic flash movie resizing through JavaScript. While websites have been doing this for years and the techniq...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Apr 21, 2008, 2:59 pm
This weekend I had some time to work with Adobe AIR and I’ve walked away with a different impression of it than I thought I would. While I wouldn’t say my opinion of it has improved, I would say it’s a different product than I thought it was. When AIR was initially announced I was not particu...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Apr 11, 2008, 11:48 am
When I was working on the current redesign of this site, I toyed with the idea of integrating a robot character into the site’s identity. With a site name like “doesnotcompute”, it seemed like the logical thing to do. I was unhappy with the results I came up with and abandoned the idea. Out o...
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Noel B. posted an article on doesnotcompute - Apr 10, 2008, 10:50 am
Way back in 1999, I went to an exhibit on emergent behaviors at the now defunct Boston Computer Museum. While I had seen Conway’s Game of Life demonstrated before, I enjoyed it a lot more after seeing it in the context of this exhibit. Figure 1. A screenshot of Pestilence. Red is newly created li...
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