… and unnatural obsessions. Yes, I’m still around. Just a bit snowed under with work and kids. And with what little spare time I’ve had recently, I’ve been working on something that takes a little more work than the usual post. Ver’ cool stuff that happened with that natural selection simulation I built quite some time ago. Cool enough I figured maybe it was time to update the code a bit, teach it some new tricks, see what else might pop out.

I’ll update in more detail when I’m finished, and when I’ve got a bit more time, might be a week or so. In the meanwhile, in case anyone’s curious, that link is to the testbed where I’m putting a working copy of the latest and greatest. It may or may not be working exactly as you’d expect if you go in there, but it should do something interesting… if you wait a bit.

Evolution, y’know. Generally takes a while. Even on a fast Pentium.

Note: yes, you’ll need a Java-capable browser to run this thing. But getting this is becoming less and less a big deal; Java is generally available for most major platforms and browsers, now (and several minor ones). Usually, you just gotta download a (free) plug-in from Sun.

Update the first: I just cleaned up some documentation, so finding help should be easier, in case anyone goes in there. Yes, I have to stop this and get back to work. Now.

Update the second: No, this wasn’t done in celebration of today’s announcement that Sun is open-sourcing Java. I actually always got along fine with using Java back when all the tools were commercial black boxes. But yeah, that is sorta cool. And if it means more people who can run my sims, it’s really cool.