5040

I’ve been using a lot of flexbox in recent web projects, so I figured I would try to streamline it by using html classes.

I had a conversation with my friend Torcado that opened up an idea for a goofy Javascript project. I was thinking about mouse interactivity on webpages, and toyed with the idea of being able to throw around a 3D cube on a flat webpage. The cube would arc through the air and land all according to some typical physics engine, but it would never get closer or farther away from you. That is to say... the cube can fall in any direction, but always be the same distance away from the camera, and always be on screen.

Torcado said this is what an orthographic projection will always do. And it makes sense! But I liked the way he ended up explaining it to me. Imagine the cube, and your camera, sitting in an infinitely long tunnel exactly the height and width of your browser window. A tunnel where the end is technically nonexistent, and infinitesimally small. And now, with your camera aimed straight down the tunnel, present it orthographically. Simply by definition, all four edges of the tunnel have to be exactly parallel to your viewport, so you immediately find your entire screen filled with the nonexistent ending to an infinitely long tunnel. And now the cube always remains exactly the same size no matter where you throw it in the tunnel.

My current summer project has apparently become undertaking my personal portfolio website that has been sitting on the sidelines for nearly a year now. I downloaded Brackets and my workflow actually seems to have taken off for once. It’s pretty great.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this yet, but there was a math problem I was having a long time ago that halted this project completely and all of a suddenly I’ve been feeling inspired to pick it up again.

I might be diving a little too quickly into things trying to learn how to use canvas to draw polygons when my knowledge of HTML and CSS doesn’t have a very good foundation in the first place.

Regardless, coming up with the numbers for all twelve points for a penrose triangle centered around the origin took too much time overall, but is pretty satisfying to look at.

Results from what I ultimately decided to use for the percentages. “xcv” continues to come out as the most frequent sequence by about three times as much as the second most frequent.

This is a paper I’ve had with me for a while, apologies for the poor phone picture, scanning just isn’t feasible.

Important note, if you check the chart there towards the corners, you’ll notice what is basically a percentage of how difficult the quarter of that chart is in comparison to everything else. (Higher percent = more difficult sequences involved)

FREQUENCY OF CHARACTER to QUARTER OF CHART PERCENTAGE

Z : 16.99% to 28.14%

C : 20.93% to 26.94%

X : 30.87% to 22.51%

V : 31.21% to 22.14%

The relationship between the percentages are inverses and they are distanced from each other similarly both ways. Even though this is totally expected considering how I split up the numbers, it’s good to have some concrete comparisons to make to prove everything still makes sense.

Nevermind,

As a start I think I’ll just lay down a little bit of work I was doing in Java towards information input and analyzation. A recent computer science class I’ve been taking has us using an IDE called BlueJ, so it’s out of this that you’ll see all these pictures.

I was told once about, within any particular game, the control scheme of using ZXCV on the keyboard with your left hand or actions, and pairing it with your right hand on the arrow keys. It sounded familiar and I wasn’t a fan at first, but I got to thinking about it so much I started writing out some ideas for how ZXCV + Arrow Keys could be set to cover a very wide majority of video game genres. So, inspired, I wanted to build a game based on making very quick three character sequences out of the keys ZXCV. I wanted to find out what were the easiest three letter sequences to type. So I made this.

It’s just a single class, I didn’t feel like any more were needed at the time though now I can think of a few alternatives that would have greatly sped up the process. This was written and basically completed on 2015.05.17.

I asked some people to just take their left hand, place it on the ZXCV keys, and press buttons without thinking about how they pressed it. I developed the class to accept a single, massive string of characters (like this 1504 character long one here) to receive the letters, remove everything that wasn’t a z, x, c, or v, and register all the possible forwards-reading 3 character sequences out of the string. Then it displays a bunch of information:

Copying the massive string into the object’s constructor.

METHOD A through C just checks the string three different ways to get all possible sequences. It sees how often each letter was pressed, and then, most importantly, gets the most often typed sequence. As it turns out, I got eight people including myself to type a fairly large string, and the top sequences was “xcv” in six of them. “zxc” in the other two.

This is another function written in the same class, which was really the most necessary. This is the same 1504 characters string but provides a look at all the sequences stored within a cubic matrix in the class. With this, and especially with much larger strings, I should be very easily able to get a list top to bottom of the easier to harder to press sequences. Though, this doesn’t account for left-handed people. I’m not really sure how that would affect it.