People are bashing this for being 'pointless', but hey, so is the next great to-do list app you made in 48 hours. This is a fun little experiment.
I can see an actual use for this. Look for example at Identicons, Wavatars, and MonsterIDs[1]. They all use browser variables to generate random avatars for use around the web, e.g. on blog comments. I imagine this could do something similar, and a nice colour palette is a little more classy than a monster.
Is generating a 4 color palette based of a random seed all it takes to be art? Not to say it wasn't worth executing from a personal standpoint, it was probably fun to build if nothing else, but really what possible use can anyone else get out of this?
The work’s irreverent message appears discreet due to its small size and almost apologetic lower-case lettering; the blank expanse of the rest of the page, however, gives the words disproportionate weight and presence. This simultaneously self-effacing and assertive quality is typical of Creed’s work.
I don't know where to begin. If I didn't know any better I'd think this was a parody.
Being depressed by this is a bit like being depressed by pop because you think only classical music is music.
He's not stopping anyone from doing better art.
I wouldn't be into his art particularly but neither am I into the sort of paintings you see in national galleries either.
Really it wouldn't surprise me if he turned around one day and said the whole thing was a big joke.
He practically does just that here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6syZr_me_Bg
We put this together one afternoon because it was fun and quick to do. We were looking into generating colours for our site and logo that would somehow be different for every visitor. We thought about this but then realised it wouldn't be that practical. If it can inspire someone to do something similar but more useful then that's enough for me :-)
Art is a means of expression, whether you can see meaning in it or whether it had any meaning at all or even if you think it wasn't particularly creative. Art serves no other purpose other than to be art. In that regard, yes, this can be considered art. I thought it was quite creative in a relatively unexplored medium, your IP, instead of oil paint.
I don't think that I can agree enough with this comment. Pointless are only comments point it out. How many people ask what they could do to learn programming? A lot, and I don't like all the "read books & watch videos", working on a little project like this is a great thing to learn many good things while doing something more fun than the common notepad or to-do-list
I was considering something related for my own software -- giving some level of differentiation to "Anonymous" users in a discussion, to reduce samefagging; users on the same subnet would get similar colours, etc. The main downside with that is that it's then plausible to look at somebody's colour and work out their IP address :P
Just hash the actual IP address. For example, take the IP and apply MD5; then take three bytes each to make, say, 3-colored "flags". That would totally work and yet be reasonably anonymous. This would also take care of the fact that colors come as three byte values and not four.
That would not work, as stated. The search space is way too small. Simply exhaustively building a table mapping hash to IP address is tractable.
This could be ameliorated by including a site-specific secret in the hashed value; I'm not comfortable calling that "secure" but it does address this particular flaw.
If a site specific secret is present you would not be able to do that - unless the site will act as an oracle for you and doesn't care about you making several billion requests.
I agree! Useless things can be some of the most fun things to do with your time. I do recreational motorcycle riding, and admittedly from a practical point of view it's pointless, it's my favorite activity!
This seems to run as a script in your browser, and then calls out to some helper to get your IP address. The original server (the one which hands you the script in the first place) should have your IP address already, and in theory, could create the page on the fly. That would make it work even with NoScript or similar in force.
I guess client-side is the way most people do things these days.
This way the server can serve a static cached page, and distribute the work to derive the colour palette to the clients.
I agree that the server could do this, and for a small app like it is this wouldn't even be a big problem, however there is almost no impact on the end user and this way scaling is handled by 'better caching' and serving static pages faster.
Offloading to the client is a good thing in general, and I think there are few cases where it is possible but not the better option.
Cute little thing :) - but: A pallet is a flat transport structure that supports goods in a stable fashion while being lifted by a forklift, pallet jack, front loader or other jacking device. A palette is a given, finite set of colors for the management of digital images.
Neat. This kind of reminds me of something I did a while back: I had a permissions manager that let you drag and drop groups to various actions, but the color of each group was determined by hashing their the group ID into a color.
The resulting colors had no special significance, but the important point is they never changed and it let you easily visualize what was going on. I'm sure this had been done many, many times before. The difference here is that the straightforward conversion from IPs to colors means similar IPs will look very similar, whereas hashing some value to a color results in similar values looking vastly different.
[and for all the silly color names out there, it's actually pretty amazing how right most of the names that pop out of this tool seem... most really do capture the essence of the color.]
FWIW, due to the way that the IPv4 address space is allocated, you could achieve far fewer "collisions" (i.e. different IPs producing the same palette) by throwing away the first byte instead.
It would be nice if there were a less trivial mapping of IP address to color -- something where ASN boundaries mattered, and maybe where netmask got taken into account. (so a bunch of users on /29s and /30s within the same IP block got related but different (and ideally distinguishable) colors.
It would still be a canonical IP to color mapping, but it wouldn't be as literal a mapping of 32-bit address into 32-bit color.
Different cameras and software will do different kinds of automatic white balance correction but nobody will screw it up so bad that you can't differentiate black from white.
You need to do something with the text over the color pallette. It took me a while to see that there's actually something there and not a black background http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2311018/temp/ipcol.png (I don't care that you can see my ip, it's not private).
Neat! My place of work has a surprisingly attractive IP address palette.
It would be cool if you could specify an IP address; I'd like to see what the IP for my hosted VM looks like. (I suppose I could set up an SSH tunnel if I am really curious...)
I think this is very cool. A very creative way of showing off skills. Does it help me with anything right now? I'm not sure. But it does show outside the box thinking. I would definitely hire someone with such thought process.
This would be a great bash addition for anyone that sshs into servers all day. Just as some people color their console red in production or green for staging, this would be a nice indicator of where you were.
Hmm would be neat if the site saved the color scheme the user's IP created and showed a list of them sans the actual address. But then again, the users IP could be easier figured out by the colors as well :)
Hey guys. Sorry its not working, its on a shared hosting, hosting it somewhere else right now. Its just a bit of fun really, grabs the first 3 numbers of your ip, turns that into an rgb color then generates a color pallet.
Might I recommend a VPS? Don't worry, I'm not getting comission, but Digital Ocean has pretty reasonable prices for fun side projects like this. BTW, this works flawlessly for me on FF, but I wish my colors were prettier though ;)
I can see an actual use for this. Look for example at Identicons, Wavatars, and MonsterIDs[1]. They all use browser variables to generate random avatars for use around the web, e.g. on blog comments. I imagine this could do something similar, and a nice colour palette is a little more classy than a monster.
[1] http://blog.gravatar.com/2008/04/22/identicons-monsterids-an...