As I posted on Sunday night, I participated in the BarCamp Boston 2 programming contest.

Mike Walsh has been gracious enough to edit and host a video of the contest presentations. Many thanks to Mike for his work and to everyone else for making BarCamp Boston 2 a great experience!

Matthew claims that I am a superstar, but it’s really less glamorous.

Part of the BarCamp Boston 2 conference was a programming contest.

During the whole first day, people wrote words on a blackboard. At the end of the day, some 11 words were chosen. From these words participants needed to build software which used at least four.

My entry, Pixels to Penguins was one of about seven different entries from different teams of different sizes. All the presentations were very well done, and all quite light-hearted; a great end to the weekend.

Pixels to Penguins took user input, performed a flickr search for related tags, then performed another flicker API call to find images which matched those related tags. The images were mapped onto an ASCII-art rendering of Tux, the Linux penguin; JavaScript made these images appear gradually. To accompany this beautiful scene, all of the data was converted into an integer stream and a 4-track MIDI file was generated. What beautiful music!

The judges named Pixels to Penguins the winning contest entry. The top two teams (three of us in total) won a helicopter ride with Phil Greenspun. I’ve never been in a helicopter!

The (Ruby on Rails) code for Pixels to Penguins is here. I’ve found that it works best under the FireFox browser. My presentation is here.

Update: I’ve had reports that this hack hangs some browsers, so buyer beware. I have been using it successfully on Firefox/MacOSX, but Safari hangs. Firefox/Windows seems to also have problems. If you figure it out, please add a comment to this post!

Update2 I think the browser hangs have been resolved. I was toggling visibility by altering opacity from 0 to 1. A number of browsers were not happy with so much opacity changing so quickly. Now, I’m simply changing the visibility CSS attribute. Please let me know if you still experience troubles with my Pixels to Penguins hack. (Really, it’s nothing more than a cute hack.)

Now, I’ve never considered myself a cat person, but man I find something hilarious about this.

Aron, however, does not think it is funny at all.

If you were amused click on the photo for a whole bunch more.