Andrew Stevens wrote: >> 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.
Doesn't work: JB (Jean-Baptiste), Vincent and I were all registered from the same PC. > Along the same lines, perhaps it's determined by the language used to > go through the paypal pages when registering? Ditto. > 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? Uh! That means Stefano is behind this system, with a crawler that spits RDF out of all the electronic datasources ;-) > 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? 168000 hits! Wow! But Carsten has 202000! > 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 ;-) It can also be a combination of the information input in the registration screen (checkboxes checked, number of projects, etc). > The more important question, however, is why didn't Matthias want to > sit next to Judith? What did she do to offend him? Hmm... Or the other way around: is there a special attraction between here and JB? Hmm... we'll have to sort that out in Amsterdam!!! Sylvain -- Sylvain Wallez - http://bluxte.net
