davidbau.com

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Bravo for Courier

The new Courier prototype is a terrific direction for Microsoft. It's strange that it takes a skunkworks project to return Microsoft to their roots: building a better personal computer. Go J.

Mandelbrot

In the spirit of drawing fractals using technology that was intended to do something else, here is an interactive Mandelbrot Set webpage implemented in Javascript. It works pretty comfortably in Chrome and okay in Firefox. IE may have some trouble with it.

In the pre-XGA graphics days, you couldn't render a very good-looking Mandelbrot set on a computer screen, so I used to write programs that rendered on laser printers. The cluster of word processing PCs in the basement of my school's English building would chug away through the night, iterating polynomials.

In this Javascript Mandelbrot implementation, click on a spot in any picture to zoom in. It uses table cells to draw pixels. Each iteration is rendered as soon as it is computed, so the pictures get more refined over time. More on this well-known fractal here or here.

Javascript Mandelbrot Explorer