about

about me

My name is Kyle Woodward. I'm a 25 year-old resident of California, currently loafing following a 32-month stint at Homestead Technologies (now an Intuit company!). I did my undergraduate thing at Stanford University, and came out the other end with degrees in math, economics, and computer science. Through-and-through, I'm a child of the East Coast and its ways, but this California thing is growing on me.

I learned to program in Pascal, and to date retain none of this education. My first real bug came shortly after my graduation to Javascript, and it took several long sixth-grade hours to find a trailing whitespace error in an HTML English-to-Pig Latin translator. I am a child of the good ol' OO/imperative (to conflate the two) schools of thought, but agree that functional languages are mathematically more intriguing.

Contrary to regular internets behaviour, I've decided to post my real, live contact info. On the other hand, to win the grand prize you're going to have to pass the ultimate web2.0 Captcha + AJAX experience to at least three decimal places.


You can find me skulking on reddit as semanticprecision, and occasionally hiding out over on Stack Overflow as kyle (1.618034.com). If you've got a 360, you'll find me under FUEatVegetables.

about the site

Someone recently mentioned to me that, "Things without web pages, they just don't exist." Inasmuch as I live my life by the internets — web development, in particular — that seemed to be inspiration enough to get something up and running. It took many long nights to come up with a suitable (sub)domain, and I'd like to think this is parked at one that more or less tilts toward the site's intent.

The color scheme is cribbed directly from The New St. Martin's Handbook, which for some reason is easily visible on my bookshelf at home. Props to them for picking a simple, enticing palette.

The splash page images represent convergence rates under the Newton-Raphson method for the associated complex functions, using naive differentiation (with a maximum of 24 iterations, and convergence defined as 0±10^-10). I won't swear by the function label, as I've got no real, quick way to check that they are what they say they are — my code formed the functions from sets of zeroes — but I've got no reason to believe my code is bad (source available at another date, I swear). This whole thing entered my head via a thoroughly entertaining and fascinating article by some guy, available at Fractals derived from Newton-Raphson iteration. The animations on the site caught my eye, and I wondered what psuedo-random fractal motion would look like if the zeroes were instead subject to boids-type rules; the splash images are the result of that experiment.

The upper-left corner images are part of a mow-the-lawn simulation. Every time the image is loaded, the mower (red square) advances and mows a new square. The mower's advance is determined by looking for the patch of grass which maximizes the need for mowing; if there are multiple such patches, it minimizes distance according to the Taxicab metric, and if there are still multiple hits it just wanders randomly. Of course, there are some corner cases here, but they're fairly uninteresting. Need for mowing is determined not by impressions, but by time since last mowing, so (theoretically) if you want the entire lawn mowed, you can just keep refreshing the page.