Wednesday was my first meeting with Dr. Eglash and the other CSDT people. I'm going to be working on the applet for the African Fractals project (one of the hardest things about this job will be keeping myself from spending all my time creating fractals with the tool).
We decided my first goal was to figure out how to keep the applet from crashing firefox. After much crash-testing, I figured out the problem had something to do with the menu and was triggered by a specific interaction among the applet, the menu, and the browser, but beyond that I couldn't say what to do about it. Eddie suggested replacing the flash menu, at least to test it.
The next priority is fixing some problems with version 2 of the applet, which calculates the dimension of the fractal. Fractal seed shapes saved in one version are unloadable from the other, and we'd like to change that; also, on one webpage with version 2 none of the demo shapes are loadable. Since I don't have the code for version 2 yet I can't do anything concrete, but I've been getting familiar with version 1.
Other related things I've been doing include looking at other fractal-drawing code for ideas, exploring NetBeans, and studying some books - a couple about fractal dimensions, and Dr. Eglash's own African Fractals.
