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Date: 1992-06-17
From: AOL Chatroom
Subject: Third Online Summit

JohnCartan: Howdy!! I was delayed by the season finale of Star Trek!
P King Duk: Hmmm. Well I was delayed by a hike up a mountain. So... Where's my smoothing algorithm?
JohnCartan: Uh... Smoothing algorithm?? I HAVE done a WEE bit of work though.
P King Duk: Do tell.
JohnCartan: I just now wrote a five minute stack to convert your ones and zeroes into a pretty map. It seems to work, but since it takes my SE five minutes to draw it, I decided to log on instead.
P King Duk: Good choice! I was about to log off.
JohnCartan: The northern hemisphere looked quite promising. I'll send you a copy as soon as I brush away a few cobwebs from the stack.
P King Duk: About the size problem:
JohnCartan: Yes?
P King Duk: The dialog box gives *World* size, not window size. I thought DA's worked; I'll look at this. Also, I'll make the default window size smaller.
JohnCartan: But it still generates the same number of ones and zeroes (and takes the same amount of time). It's always 100 by 75 no matter what.
P King Duk: OK, I'll check that.
JohnCartan: 100 by, uh, 67 is about right for my little screen.
P King Duk: 100 columns?
JohnCartan: 100 columns by 67 rows, yes.
P King Duk: OK, I'll size it down for the next release (this is easy).
JohnCartan: Great!
P King Duk: And 45 seconds seems much faster than the old version, right?
JohnCartan: I guess so. I forgot how long the old version took.
P King Duk: What else should I make a priority?
JohnCartan: Hmmm... Can you think of any other interesting parameters?
P King Duk: I had a few ideas... I'm not sure if I remember them now...
JohnCartan: How about cities?
P King Duk: Need an algorithm for that ;-}
JohnCartan: True...
P King Duk: One thing I'd love for you to help on: make the dialog box "pretty". (This is in a resource fork.)
JohnCartan: For that matter, we need to figure out how to turn all those 1s and 0s into continent boundaries.
P King Duk: ? You're talking about smoothing, right?
JohnCartan: Not just smoothing...
P King Duk: The actual picture?
JohnCartan: You and I can glance at a map and imediately divide it into 4 or 5 continents. But how does the computer know that the land at, say, 40,56 is part of continent 4?
P King Duk: Oh. You want the computer to see this as well?
JohnCartan: It would be nice...
P King Duk: Hmmm. Should be a *simple* algoritm, right?
JohnCartan: Not really. It's another intersting challenge for the, ahem, algorithmist :)
P King Duk: Might even be done at the same time as the smoothing.
JohnCartan: Maybe. Have you ruled out putting mountains or forests on our continents?
P King Duk: No, I guess not. OK. Your priorities: 1) smoothing, 2) cities, 3) boundaries. Agreed?
JohnCartan: Not that I need extra work, but what about the pretty dialog?
P King Duk: My priorities: 1) sizing, 2) DA's, 3) misc. bugs.
JohnCartan: Will your window have a resizing box in the corner?
P King Duk: It's there now; sometimes it works, too. I don't understand quite enough about it to guess how tough it'll be to completely fix.
JohnCartan: I suppose if you were clever you could sense the size of the monitor and default the size accordingly.
P King Duk: Right. This is actually pretty easy, too.
JohnCartan: Good!
P King Duk: ScreenBits.bounds.something global. The second monitor is much tougher.
JohnCartan: No need to worry about second monitor for now.
P King Duk: Easy for *you* to say.
JohnCartan: Time to sign off?
P King Duk: Yup - I have an early morning tomorrow.
JohnCartan: I'll send you my mapping stack SOON. And if I get a chance I'll see if I can pretty up the dialog box.
P King Duk: OK; I may send a new program before next Wed.
JohnCartan: Excellent! Good night.
P King Duk: Over and out.


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