Java Applets by Terry McConnell

Disclaimer: This is a platform for developing and displaying various Java applets. It is primarily for my own convenience. If you enjoy looking at these, fine, but don't expect to find anything very polished or robust here. At the moment, all of these are JDK 1.01 compatible. I may port them, as appropriate to 1.1 in the future.

• Simulation of Brownian Motion. This isn't actually a simulation of Brownian motion. Properly speaking, it is a simulation of a random walk that moves NE, SE, NW and SW with equal probability at each step. (It doesn't look very exciting in black and white -- all you see is a dark rectangle. Actually, it doesn't look very exciting in any case.) Source
• Life (Implementation) (Source Code) This is an implementation of John Horton Conway's game of life, a popular cellular automaton first introduced to the public by two Scientific American articles: MARTIN GARDNER, Mathematical Games: The Fantastic Combinations of John Conway's new Solitaire Game "Life", Scientific American , Vol 223 , no. 4 (October, 1970),120-123 and MARTIN GARDNER, Mathematical Games: On Cellular Automata, Self-Reproduction, the Garden of Eden, and the Game of "Life," Scientific American Vol 224, no. 2 (February 1971), 112-117. These articles created a sensation, and the game still has a strong following today. In our implementation, one begins with a pattern of occupied sites on a square lattice which the user selects using the pointing device. The pattern then evolves according to the following rules: an occupied site remains occupied in the succeeding generation if exactly 2 or 3 of its 8 nearest neighbors are occupied. An empty site becomes occupied in the next generation if exactly 3 neighboring sites are occupied. There is, of course, a considerable amount of further information available on the web. (Note: there is a well-known bug in Netscape 3.01 involving the C-library malloc function that will cause this applet to crash that browser. Do not run this applet unless you have applied one of the known fixes to Netscape 3.01.)
• Age Now Applet. This applet takes three parameters: a year, a month number in the range 1-12, and a day of the month, which must be passed using the html PARAM tag. The parameters are intended to represent someone's birthday. The applet then computes and prints the exact age of that person today. In the example above, that person is my daughter, Erin. Source
• Seconds remaining until 18 Jan 2038 22:14:07 EST, the end of Unix time: A simple countdown timer that can be set to a given date. Source Code (1.02) For another usage example, consult the html source for this page.