Here are the latter two of three incarnations of an old project of mine.  Years 
ago, I wrote a simple text-based Mandelbrot Set viewer in C.  Later, while 
learning Python, I discovered it had an excellent curses library, and set about to 
make a fancy version of my Mandelbrot Set viewer, with color "graphics" made possible 
by the extended ASCII shaded block characters.  The original Mandy was born.

Recently, I took up learning Ruby, as well as trying to get into the habit of
test-driven development.  This, combined with the fact that I seemed to have lost
both previous incarnations of this program, prompted me to re-implement Mandy
from the ground up in Ruby.  (After completing the Ruby version, I happily found
the original Python code, and have now added it to this repository as mandy.py)

As I'm relatively new to both Ruby and TDD, I'm sure there is some room for
improvement here.  Particularly in light of the fact that TDD went out the
window once I started working on the actual curses frontend, since console
I/O isn't exactly the sort of thing one can easily unit test.

I am also somewhat dissapointed that I could not figure out a way to display
the shaded block characters consistently.  Linux doesn't seem to be very
consistent about how it displays these characters, and when I attempted to use
them, the X terminal and the console each came out different shades of wrong.
Come to think of it, the last time the Python version worked as I envisioned it
was on a circa 2002 version of Mandrake Linux.  I was going for the aesthetic
of the ANSI art games from an early 1990s Wildcat! BBS, but I guess that's
just a bit too DOS-y for Linux.

The controls are fairly simple:  arrow keys move you around, PgUp zooms in, 
PgDn zooms out.  Press 'q' to quit.  Enjoy!