Apologies, once again, for the radio silence. Over the past couple of months there have been some complications in my private life, and a remarkable amount of my attention has been taken up with figuring out where exactly I’m going to be living after my current lease runs out (more on that later, perhaps).

Be that as it may, after almost a year, I did find some time to go wandering around the city I now call home. Whilst I took every opportunity to make a brisk constitutional around Edinburgh, I’d never managed to really do this in London. Part of the reason, I think, is while that you can essentially wander across central Edinburgh in an hour or two, this is really not the case in London. Nipping across town via public transport can take hours.

Recently, though, two excellent excuses presented themselves. Firstly, my father came to visit for a few days and professed an interest to go take a good look at Kew Gardens, the Japanese themed portion in particular.

Fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a programming heavy blog post. It’s also going to be quite Mac specific.

One of the things I wanted to change about the format of this blog was to make it more visual, specifically with pictures. This first part of this was to add pictures to the front page. There were a couple of options for doing so. I could just scan through an article, look for the first image tag and use this. Alternatively I could add a mechanism which allowed me to choose the image, in a similar manner to the way Octopress allows me to choose the except which appears on the front page. I decided to go with option two.

One of the fun things about working for Google is that from time to time interesting people come into the office to give talks. We had Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago, who gave an interesting if… uncompromising talk. Yesterday we had one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi foundation. For those or you who aren’t aware, the Raspberry Pi is an extremely small (exactly credit card sized) and cheap ($25), yet very capable computing platform. The foundation is the charity formed to produce this hardware.

Why is a charity building computer hardware? Because there is a need for it, caused by a problem you’re possibly not even aware of. Let me explain; for I am part of the problem. These days when I play computer games it’s usually on my X-Box or iPhone. They make my life very easy in this regard, since I never have to worry about whether a game will actually run or not. It just works. They are essentially closed systems, though. There is a reasonably high barrier to entry if I actually want to start playing with them as a developer. Specifically: I can’t do it on the device itself. Furthermore, the very simplicity of the device works against me in this regard, because very little action on my part is required to make it work.

It was not always this way. Let me tell you a story.

2011 was an interesting year for me. A lot changed. I turned 30. After 10 years of residency I moved away from Edinburgh, a city I love dearly, and took a job in London. With Google. As a result, I no longer work with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for a living. Instead I build web services. Quite the change, I’m sure you’ll agree. In the early months of the year I finally completed the corrections to my PhD, and then in the summer: I graduated. It took 6 years (all together) but I am now Dr. Nick Johnson. I also lost my grandmother, a fact which still brings me to tears on occasion.

In this light, the fact that I decided, towards the end of the year, to shift my blog away from Wordpress and over to its own domain barely even casts a shadow. I did, though, and as a result you’re now reading these words on a site built using Octopress, which is hosted at harveynick.com. As you may have noticed, all of the old posts from my wordpress site have been ported over, minus the short film reviews, which you’ll find here. I’m not going to go into how I accomplished this, except to say: I did it the same way Matt Gemmel did.

At the end of the last post I wrote about the actual implementation of my Clockwork Aphid project, I said the next step was going to be display simplification. At that point I’d generated a few landscapes which were just starting barely starting to test the limits of my computer, though they were nothing like the size or complexity I had in mind. That said, it was looking at landscapes containing 1579008 polygons and it was obvious that not all of these needed to be put on screen. Moreover, because my landscapes are essentially made up of discrete samples (or nodes): I needed to reduce the number of samples which were displayed to the user, otherwise my performance was really going to tank as the landscapes increased in size.