The Pixel Farm

It was only a matter of time.  My poor iPhone was mortally wounded back in January at the Lambertville Beer and Chili Festival.  While it continued to function like a trooper, I figured it was about time to let it move on to greener pastures.  Plus I didn’t want to have to continue to deal with all the pitiful (disgusted?) looks that I was getting from people on the subway whenever I had my phone out.

cracked screen = no fun

I decided to switch it up a bit and see what life is like in Android land, and I’ve got to say I’m really enjoying it so far.  I ended up getting the new HTC Incredible which sports a 1ghz Snapdragon processor, 512mb of ram and an amazingly crisp 8 megapixel camera.  The difference between browsing speed on AT&T versus Verizon is unbelievable, especially in NYC.  Pages that would chug on my iPhone load quickly on the Incredible.  In addition, I found an amazingly helpful application (’The Missing Sync‘) that lets me wirelessly sync all of my desktop content – including my music – to my phone whenever the two devices are on the same wireless network.  No more USB syncing with iTunes – yay

The built in camera takes great photos and sports a software based digital zoom as well as a “tap to focus” feature that lets you isolate subjects in your shot easily.  Here’s a scaled down image of my pup, Prue, that I took using the built-in cam the other night.

my pup, prue

One of my favorite features of the phone is that it runs Flash Lite.  ZooBurst even loads on the phone, which really surprised me since I use a ton of external 3D libraries that I thought wouldn’t be compatible.  With that said, let me say that I’m as excited as everyone else to see what HTML 5 will eventually bring to the table, but right now there are things that Flash can do on the web easily that just aren’t possible with other languages (including all of my augmented reality experiments).  I’m really psyched about the full version of Flash mobile that is supposedly coming out this summer.  I wonder how easy it will be to port some of my AR demos to run on Android … I’ll keep you all posted!

Question: If a coin is flipped 100 times, what is the likelihood of 7 heads coming up in a row?

This question perplexed my friend Andy and me at the gym the other day for about an hour.  We couldn’t agree on the math needed to calculate the result, so I decided to whip up a quick “brute force” experiment in Flash.  In this project (embedded below) a simulated coin is rapidly flipped 100 times, and runs of 7 heads are recorded as they happen.  After a few thousand runs the results appear to approach the predicted result of about a 31.8% chance (plus or minus a few points – see the full explanation here).

Of course, the coin flipping in this experiment isn’t truly random.  I’m using Flash’s built in Math.random() function, which utilizes your system’s clock to create pseudo-random numbers.  But all in all things appear to work out.

Yay math.

Today I’ve been playing around with dynamic manipulation of a PV Plane object for two upcoming projects I’m working on. Fun stuff!

Static bitmap:

Dynamically adjusted bitmap based on height: