Google driving...

This apparently won't work by September 2016--so I'm migrating my files to dropbox... Well, I think I finally worked out how to easily get my files in my blog. It was a bit hairy to find the magic link googledrive.com/host/0BwD1YaggiIIAY1gxNEJEa2JKNlU. I should have guessed, right? My problem was playing with drive.google.com, fileview, #folder, file/d and many other combinations. But probably most of my issues were related to picassa web not storing my svg files... Now I can get to what I actually want to do...talk about polygons!!!

For simple patterns like these, I'll start including the PolygonR&D programs along side. This quilt like pattern has only one chunk of code. I used a few colours so that it would be easier to unravel how it works. Although it is constructed with hexagons, squares, and triangles, the white spaces are probably the more interesting features. The Xs and the compass-like (called compass rose or windroses) gaps probably offer more interest than the polygons. Tracing the code chunks means follow the "a" in clock-wise motion around the Xs and counter clock-wise motion around the windroses. The branching nature of the codes makes up for it's simplicity.

I'm always enjoy playing with the odd-sided polygons. This pattern requires a branching factor of 3. The reason is that each of the olive triangles has more 6 paths going through it rather than only 3--so there is a bit of duplication required. Sometimes the evolution of a pattern comes from different ideas: here I started with combining 3 heptagons to make a sequence of edges to make a 180 rotation and undoing that rotation with 3 triangles to produce straight line. These "straight lines" are essentially the code chunk seen on the side. Although, you see the PolygonR&D code on the side, most of my play with local patterns come occurs in Tileland...I guess this means I may have to eventually either provide a bridge from Tileland to PolygonR&D or simply make PolygonR&D's interface a bit better at the intermediate...

I call this last pattern Bugs. I figure that even though it's a fairly simple pattern it has an interesting twist: it's has what I call a zig-zag. Imagine you have grid of squares that are separated by "spacers. These spacers have 2 hexagons and a square which have a slight twist--call is a zig. So to make the grid fit together, you need to undo that twist with a zag (the mirror action). This can be seen in the code by alternating from "a" to "b" and from "b" to "a".

Now that I know how to easily insert my SVG files into my blog entries, I will be making a few more entries. The SVG files look so much better than my screen captures of the past...I may have to revisit a few of my favourite patterns from before... As well, I should make a better index so that I can find my patterns more easily. Perhaps this is just a matter of updating my style preferences...