Scott Draves
This guy is really quite amazing. I'm jealous of his life path. I've decided I want to know more about what goes on inside electric sheep. I'm worried that I don't have near enough math background to follow the actual engine behind fractal flames, but the shit is fully open source so I'm allowed to _try_. The first order of business, I guess, is to convert my home desktop to a linux box. I'm debating the wisdom of that plan, for obvious reasons (windows actually _works_, and I can play _games_ on it) but I think my life will be markedly improved if the fun thing I do when I get home from work is hack on code, and I have two projects, one minor and one major, that would be totally worthwhile to play with, and neither is particuarly work related.
One is rewriting my color scheme randomizer in a more general way using Ruby instead of Python. This will a) teach me ruby b) give me more control over random color schemes, and c) let me finally contribute my favorite (yes, it's trivial, but I love it every single day) coding accomplishment of the last five years to the general public. Hell, if I do it correctly it probably won't even that hard to work it into emacs, but I'll leave that to somebody who cares, because the second project will be:
Learning more about electric sheep and understanding how the system ticks both in terms of the distributed system and in terms of the fractal rendering. I'm better equipped than most people on earth to understand the former, and I figure I can work my way through the latter. Worst case maybe I'll pick up a book or class or three on chaos and fractals. I mean how hard can it be really, right? ::whimper::
Meantime, I'm going to try to talk Draves into coming and giving a talk. Failing that maybe I can stand him a pint some time.
Edit: ::grimace:: Well, plan A was somewhat stymied by Ubuntu's inability to handle displaying X on my hardware configuration. I suppose I'll have to hack at that some time when...well, when I have some time. Not really what I wanted that path to look like, but I'm not exactly shocked. ::sigh::
One is rewriting my color scheme randomizer in a more general way using Ruby instead of Python. This will a) teach me ruby b) give me more control over random color schemes, and c) let me finally contribute my favorite (yes, it's trivial, but I love it every single day) coding accomplishment of the last five years to the general public. Hell, if I do it correctly it probably won't even that hard to work it into emacs, but I'll leave that to somebody who cares, because the second project will be:
Learning more about electric sheep and understanding how the system ticks both in terms of the distributed system and in terms of the fractal rendering. I'm better equipped than most people on earth to understand the former, and I figure I can work my way through the latter. Worst case maybe I'll pick up a book or class or three on chaos and fractals. I mean how hard can it be really, right? ::whimper::
Meantime, I'm going to try to talk Draves into coming and giving a talk. Failing that maybe I can stand him a pint some time.
Edit: ::grimace:: Well, plan A was somewhat stymied by Ubuntu's inability to handle displaying X on my hardware configuration. I suppose I'll have to hack at that some time when...well, when I have some time. Not really what I wanted that path to look like, but I'm not exactly shocked. ::sigh::