A long time ago in a land far, far away, Adriana and I caught up with family and friends. And then I fell into some sort of Internet coma. I showed some signs of consciousness with Frex (still working on it), and now here I am with another post.

So, Australia.

We went to Oz back in May. I’d never been to Uluru before, even though I’d been to Alice Springs for a wedding (it’s not really that close to Uluru, but while you’re in the general area…), but at the time I was a university student with no money, and getting a day trip to the rock was well out of my price range. This time around I wasn’t going to miss it, so decided that a 3-day camping tour out of Alice Springs would be the ticket. We had a couple of days in Alice Springs to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in yonks, acclimate (that is, let all the Florida humidity I’d acquired over the years evaporate), and try and sync up with the timezone. We also accumulated enough red dust to last us till we returned to Florida.

My friend’s two older kids were a hoot and we had a lot of fun with them.

The Alice Springs Desert Park was large, open, and relaxing. We got to see some pretty cool bird shows:

As you walked around the park, there were many Crested pigeons (I love these guys) basking in the sun:

The park provided awesome views of the huge open skies above the Macdonnell ranges:

And a go-anywhere four wheel drive out in the car park:

We then went to see the Alice Springs Reptile Centre, a quaint little place that allowed us to get up really close with some reptiles. It was pretty cool, and Adriana does what she always seems to do when holding a snake: making out she’s going to eat it.

That’s a pretty quick summary of Alice Springs before we went on the camping tour, which turned out to be awesome and bloody cold at night. But, that’s for another blog post, standing up too fast can make one feel light-headed.  The flickr set for all of this is here.

After a lot of refactoring, Frex now has a code base that I can understand the next day. I took the opportunity to install version control on my laptop to save me from any potential “oh f%*k” moments, or at least make them not as bad. I chose subversion for this, and as the repository is located in my dropbox folder, I’m not worried about having to back it up.

I created a list of features I wanted this thing to have, and along with some speed and user interface improvements, the big feature I added for this version was zoom. This is a screenshot of the app running on my phone, showing a zoomed-in portion of the Mandelbrot set:

Back in high school, a friend gave me his book on fractals (thanks Damo!), and I spent hours and hours generating fractals using the bundled ‘fractint’ software. It didn’t matter that I was using a hand-me-down AT PC (everything was ok though, as this was the 8 MHz version!), watching the fractal generate line-by-line was fine by me.

Today I found the time and ambition to create for the Android platform a program that generates the Mandelbrot fractal. That’s all this program does (for now). It does it very slowly, with absolutely no bells and whistles. Say hi to “Frex” (“FRactal EXplorer”).