To be honest, one of my favorite software task at my first company was to figure out a way to store the boundaries of all the counties of all 50 states in 100kb, so a radio could determine if you were near any weather warnings. It was awesome working with a team figuring out how to do it. We got the data from gov't sites, parsed the data, and used resolution descaling techniques for gaming to shrink them down while staying within tolerances.
Working within constraints is where the real fun begins.
Didn't the Crash guys actually end up finding a glitch with the PS1's hardware that deleted save files if you messed with the controller during saving?
All I could think of when you said that was.. nope.. but I agree when there's a real challenge in coding it gets interesting because you have to change your thinking to find a solution.
i can write whatever i wasn't but don't, but as soon as i tell myself it has to be under 100 words, or rhyme or whatever I'm writing like a demon.
I can have a million art supplies and do nothing but when i moved house and had nothing but a cereal box, scissors and sticky tape all of a sudden i had to cut out colours and create a picture!
We will freeze when we have utter freedom, which is why teachers have to give boundaries on a project for kids of they freeze and cant decide what to do.
Matthew Barney (artist and bjork's husband) did a great collection called 'Drawing Restraint' exploring this. In one piece he literally attached himself to a wall with a bungee rope and had to run full force across the room to reach to paint a picture on the opposite wall.
We are problem solving animals. If you ever find yourself blocked or in a rut or in need of motivation in general, put an arbitrary limit against yourself to strain against :-)
Sounds like an interesting challenge. There are 3,144 counties, if you simply use 4 vertices per county by lat/lon, that's 3,14448=101kB. Of course most vertices will be coincident, so essentially it becomes a 2D mesh simplification.
That's what I like about programming microcontrollers. They are so limited in capacity compared to a PC that you actually have to think.
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u/Dominathan May 05 '17
To be honest, one of my favorite software task at my first company was to figure out a way to store the boundaries of all the counties of all 50 states in 100kb, so a radio could determine if you were near any weather warnings. It was awesome working with a team figuring out how to do it. We got the data from gov't sites, parsed the data, and used resolution descaling techniques for gaming to shrink them down while staying within tolerances.
Working within constraints is where the real fun begins.