From: Sylvain Wallez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Mon, 11 Sep 2006 17:01:42 +0200
I promise a beer to whom can guess the "smart" algorithm behind head
colors on the "conference chairs picture" that gave me green hairs [1] ;-)
People that wrote or saw the code are not elegible for the beer!
Sylvain
[1] http://bluxte.net/blog/2006-09/11-06-41.html
--
Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
Well, my first guess (without looking at the picture) would have been to XOR
the ascii values of the letters in each person's name, and use the resulting
value as a lookup into a table of web-safe colours. But having seen the
picture I doubt that's the case as it'd give much more variation.
So my next guess, given it makes a point of stating how many countries the
attendees cover, was that the colour depended on the country corresponding
to the domain in the email address they registered with. However, I think I
count 9 or 10 distinct colours and it only says 8 countries. I suppose it
could still be down to the top-level domain, though I'd have thought the
..com/.net/.org split would be enough in that case to not have such a large
proportion of one colour.
Along the same lines, perhaps it's determined by the language used to go
through the paypal pages when registering?
Or, thinking a bit more technically rather than socially, perhaps it's
determined by searching the mailing list archives and/or CVS logs to see how
many posts/commits the person has made over the last year, and the more
active they were the stronger the colour?
Or maybe it's determined by the number of pages returned by a google search
of the person's name plus "cocoon", as an estimation of their
popularity/activity within the community?
It could be done randomly, though, just to give us something to wonder about
- 80% get the default colour, the remaining 20% get the next colour from
some other list.
But probably it's none of these, though at least now you've got a few more
ideas for next year's picture ;-)
The more important question, however, is why didn't Matthias want to sit
next to Judith? What did she do to offend him?
Andrew.
