Things to do with those extra computer monitors you have lying around... ;)

Impressive Monitor Architecture : Gizmodo

I saw this sig at the bottom of a friend's letter, and identified with it strongly. ;)

I don't so much read my email as I swim upstream against it.

Many years ago (1995, I think), we were brainstorming new game ideas at my office. Under the "no idea is a bad idea" principle, I came up with a suggestion of a massively multiplayer morphing artwork, where each person in the game would be in charge of the color of one pixel, and teams would compete to see who could draw certain images (a bicycle, a house, a face, etc.) the most rapidly. I sort of envisioned it like a cyberspace version of those big sports stadium events where a part of the audience would all hold up cards in sequence, to make a design.

Well, my idea was greeted with near universal derision: "Ha! That sounds totally boring, no one would ever play that," (so much for the spirit of positive-reinforcement brainstorming, heh).

Anyway, my arch-critic from back then recently sent to me this link, of a "pixelfest collaborative artwork". It's not quite the real-time dynamic team-based thing I had in mind, but it's close enough to make me smile. :)

Feel free to add your own pixel!

- Elonka

Update: To see an animation of the 7000-odd pixels that have been placed so far, check here: http://haub.net/pixelfest/ . I found it especially interesting to see how certain people tried to "grief" the image early on with four-letter words, but then the community responded by erasing words as soon as they started recognizing them. Some interesting dynamics there. :)

Experiments - Pixelfest collaborative artwork

] Every year since that initial meeting, Defcon has grown.
] From a few hundred people in 1993, it has expanded by the
] thousands, reaching a record of around 6,000 people this
] year. But Defcon's growth isn't limited to the
] sheer volume of people in attendance; it also includes
] the mushrooming list of topics discussed by the panels.
] Some of the subjects this year included: a session on
] quantum hacking, a presentation about cracking the
] CIA's Kryptos Sculpture (an artwork containing
] encoded messages that resides in a courtyard at CIA
] Headquarters), and another on homebrew mind machines.
] Even electronic voting vulnerabilities were a key topic
] at the conference this year.

I noticed in my weblogs that I got a recent spike (about +25%) of visitors to my Kryptos site. They didn't seem to be *from* anywhere in particular -- just an increase in the number of people searching on the word "Kryptos". My guess is that it's from here: A mention of Kryptos on TechTV/ScreenSavers. :)

G4techTV - The Defcon Briefing

] Friendster, which is known as a dating site that hooks up
] friends of friends, last year pulled in $13 million in
] venture capital -- a significant amount considering the
] tough climate for new venture funding. Business-oriented
] Spoke and LinkedIn picked up $20.5 million and $4.7
] million respectively.

Lots of sites, many millions in venture capital, but no clear business model yet.

Though I'm very much enjoying the business-networking aspect of this, I'm starting to have my own concerns about where things are going. Especially about how the porn market is going to fit in to all of this -- I'm starting to pick up flickers that all this network-building is just going to result in new avenues for a flood of "Hi I'm Jenny Check Out My Webcam" messages.

Social-Networking Site Business Models

What those blurry/anime/cropped photos *really* mean.

Humor: Interpreting Friendster (Orkut) Photos

Magic Eye picture of Dobbs.

3-D Dobbs

] PhreakNIC 7 dates have been set for October 24-26, 2003!

PhreakNIC 7 :: Nashville, TN

A page that lists the dozens of different language interfaces that Google is currently offering. Very pretty to look at, especially if you scroll down and look at all the flags.

They're also looking for volunteer translators, to add pages in any languages that they're *not* covering yet.

They do have French, Italian, Russian, Chinese, etc., but for a laugh, be sure to check out the google pages in such languages as Klingon, Pig Latin, Hacker, and "Elmer Fudd"! (I'm Feewing Wucky!)

Go Google!

Google International

I've been having fun tracking the hits to my steganography (elonka.com/steganography) and Kryptos (elonka.com/kryptos) pages on Sitemeter. And I've especially been getting a kick out of seeing links to my site from search engines in other languages such as French, German, Italian, and Polish. Today, I got a link from a Google search engine which looks like it's in Hebrew. I got a smile out of it for many reasons: The international nature of it, the interesting font, and if you click on the link, you'll see that Google even went to the trouble of right-justifying their listing, so it lines up on the right side instead of the left!

Israeli Google