Mandelbrot fractal viewer

One of the first things I did when I got my computer was to render the Mandelbrot Set fractal. This was centuries ago, and I did it in C using DOS Borland-C++ and its fabulous (for me at that time) graphics library. I played a lot plotting lines and points on the screen those days. I don't know why exactly but this program has been always in my heart, maybe due to the colorful images it gave me:

Google+ deleted all my blogger images, oh my

To be fair, I deleted them, but Google+ helped. I was thinking in updating this blog with some pseudo technical posts when I noticed all my blogger images were gone. Kaput. Done.

https://productforums.google.com/forum/embed/?place=topic/google-plus-discuss/hJHmhE7mcg0/discussion#!topic/google-plus-discuss/hJHmhE7mcg0/discussion

• So basically I signed on this kind of Facebook clone called Google+ just for the kicks and gigs with my Gmail profile.

• I saw a lot of images there that I never uploaded (now that I recall they were from my blogger account! but it was past midnight and I was asleep)

• I deleted these Google+ images without remorse, Who else could have uploaded these images to my Google+ account? hackers are scary... or most likely it was just some glitch in this new Google+ thing.

• Behind the scenes my Blogger images were deleted FOREVER. It seems images were never placed on Blogger itself but in Picasa, I never used Picasa so I didn't know.

• Google+ linked the blog images from Picasa to my Google+ profile, when I deleted these images I was deleting the blog images, the trouble is that they must have anticipated this basic use case, I mean: Where is my gigantic popup blinking in red saying "DELETING THESE IMAGES WILL DELETE FOREVER YOUR BLOG IMAGES?". So there is no recovery I heard.

Kind of troublesome for me because I don't know where are the missing images (many are forever lost, I did them for the post) but catastrophic for many bloggers that had hundreds of images in Blogger. This blog of mine is rarely updated and has very low activity, however I can tell I have invested some time getting everything right, the images were created, edited, re-sized, recreated, etc, etc. Losing that time makes me sad, I can't imagine the amount of time lost for the users that have lost hundreds of images with this.

It's a very ugly blunder, and it makes me wonder where are all the great usability engineers of Google working these days. In the bright side I saw some improvements and work done in the blogger editor and statistics that were missing the last time I used the site, so I hope that everything is not lost.

Now, about this blog, well, I'm not feeling like restoring the lost images, I'll put the ones I can find at hand, but if not and you are really curious about some one that is missing drop me a note, sorry about the inconvenience.

Tetris clone in Unity

I have been working with Unity lately and decided to use it for a a 3D version of my simple-tetris-clone.
Unity great strengths are the easiness to go from concept to implementation and its support for deployment in multiple platforms. It's not that easy, I can tell, after finishing a project with iOS and Android support but once you get it right, it works.

You can play it online if you have the Unity plugin installed.

Solving the Tic-Tac-Toe game, finally...

The simple game that has been always after me laughing at my programming incompetence.

The very first time I tried to make a program that could play perfectly the game was in the university, after taking my very first course in Programming Languages (I learned Pascal). It was holidays and I was visiting my cousin and got the nice surprise of him getting a personal computer. It was a powerful 286 with a monochrome amber monitor. I couldn't find anything similar but for you to get the idea, games were played like this in those computers:

Flasic: a very simple BASIC interpreter for Flash

I just found this very little cute BASIC interpreter: Jasic and I decided to make a port to Flash in order to add basic graphics commands (just "setcolor" and "putpixel" actually) so I could see the little thing drawing a colored Mandelbrot fractal. It was very easy, thanks to the profusely commented code of the original author (Bob Nystrom). You can select the program demos from the drop-down menu and press the [Run] button to start the interpreter. So without further ado, Flasic:

Solving the Princess in a Box Puzzle

We can solve the puzzle of my last post using a Breadth-first search (BFS) algorithm. The key idea is to realize than the problem is just a Shortest Path problem where the graph, even when it is not completely known at the beginning (because we don't have the graph's adjacency list or adjacency matrix), can be built joining the states the board takes after every movement. The image below can help to understand this. It shows some of the states the board cab take after some movements starting from the beginning.