Boing Boing: Wheat field as software

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Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Wheat field as software

A hacker mowed a program into his wheat-field, creating a Semacode app that says "Hello, World."

The German programmer, Bernd Hopfengärtner, wrote in Semacode, a type of visual code that contains "machine readable information" that can be used to graphically encode web-links. Since the code is visual, Ben was able to take a picture of his 160 square meter programming artwork from an airplane and have a machine read the code to output the words "Hello, World!"

Link (Thanks, Rick!)

Update: Nicolas sez, "It's not Semacode, but Data Matrix. All the Semacode company does is offer an SDK that will encode a URL into a data matrix label. Reading Semacode's website, they go out of their way to hide the fact that they use Data Matrix and that they didn't invent it, nor do they own it, nor that anyone can create it."

posted by Cory Doctorow at 06:33:19 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments

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