Oh my. Blinkenlights got slashdotted today and our little server had to cope with a lot of load. Oh yes, there it is, the Slashdot Effect. An article on the German Heise Newsticker kicked it off.

It‘s great to see the interest in the sequel of our project is certainly there. I am a bit afraid of the amount of mail we are about to receive in the coming days which already starts to trickle in. Björn‘s new BlinkenPaint program is such a beautiful little app – it grew from a simple simulator to a full-blown low-res animation editor with all the bells and whistles you expect to find and even more. It‘s going to make people even more creative.

So let‘s see how everything will develop. This weekend we are going to install the system and hopefully we are not going to run into too much trouble. When everything works, we‘ll try to hook it up with all the Blinkenlights gear about to show up at the Congress and for New Year‘s Eve we‘ll have the obvious big countdown running on the house. Big fun is it what it is meant to be. For us, for Berlin, for everyone.

If we are lucky, there will be a QuickTime stream of the installation and a web cam. We are also going to put out the real data stream the building is displaying so that you can receive and display it with our little simulator. If we are lucky…

Surprise, surprise!

Starting December 22th, 2003 until January 4th, 2004 there will be a short revival of our interactive light installation known as Blinkenlights: Blinkenlights Reloaded.

The building Haus des Lehrers – currently under reconstruction – will be operated as we did it before. A new version of BlinkenPaint lets you create movies and you can play the interactive game Pong and even activate your personal loveletters with your mobile phone.

Blinkenlights Reloaded uses the technology we have developed for Arcade in Paris last year. That means greyscales. Version 3 of BlinkenPaint supports this as well as our new movie file format BML which is based on XML.

For those unfamiliar with Blinkenlights, the Blinkenlights documentation videos should be the first stop. The videos are available in various formats and sizes and I think they are pretty impressive as well. Check them out.

Meanwhile, the Blinkenlights crew is going to be quite busy during as there is the Chaos Communication Congress taking place at the same time just next to the building. Among other things, the BlinkenArea will show a variety of Blinkenlights clone in all forms and sizes. Check our Blinkenlights Links and the BlinkenArea‘s project overview page to get a glimpse of the growing Blinkenlights universe. That stuff is so encouraging.

Since we have put out the core Blinkenlights source under the Gnu Public License, most projects have adopted our core playlist system, the Blinkenlights file formats and the Blinkenlights Protocol. Among them is MPlayer, which can read Blinkenlights Movies out of the box and send them using the Blinkenlights Protocol to any receiving station.

The whole Blinkenlights toolset can be found on Sven‘s Blinkentools page. The software should compile easily on UNIX systems, including Mac OS X (although you need glib2 installed: use fink). The blinkensim can receive Blinkenlights Protocol streams and display them in a simulator window. We try to provide you with the live data stream of Blinkenlights Reloaded so that you can display the same data at home!

In the coming days, this blog will serve as a daily update on Blinkenlights Reloaded, BlinkenArea developments and the 20C3 as well.

Steve Olechowski has a RSS Feed Reader for the Sony Ericsson P900 phone in development. It is written in Java. There is still some work to do but it looks as if it is already useful. So now you can track weblog changes with your mobile. Well, only if you have a P900 of course (I have none).

Mama has compiled a list of MPEG-7 resources. MPEG-7 is the XML-based meta data system for MPEG streams is one of the really interesting future applications.

4 law.co.il has published the presentation of general Sanchez on the details of the capture of Saddam Hussein. They also have a video stream of the general‘s press conference (Windows Media format).

Quizilla provides a short online form to test which Matrix persona you are.

Confused by GPRS terminology? GSM World has a handy overview over GPRS Class Types explaining which speed can be achieved in which configuration. The list also compares GPRS speed to other data transmission options like HSCSD.

Jogger is a project which uses the Jabber protocol as a posting mechanism for weblogs. Very interesting as the Jabber protocol is completely XML and extensible.

The project is still in its infancy and things are just coming up somehow. Apart from supporting RSS, there is also something on the wish list called „Jogger Syndicated XML“:

Jogger Syndicated XML was created in order to provide users with a way to fully integrate with their stored content. Using this format requires you to write the interface to your stored content by parsing the data that you request in this format. You will have the power to write a complete interface to your stored data in this manner

It will be interesting how this gets together with developments like Atom. I think the whole drive behind Jabber (eventually leading to the XMPP protocol suites) is pretty strong.

The run for candidateship in the USA seems to raise opposition against Mr. You-Know-Who. Candidate Dennis Kucinich has posted an impressive flash movie which is an outcry against the current situation in Iraq.

The is more of this stuff at BushFlash.com.

As promised, GSMK has finally released the full source code of both its PDA-based CryptoPhone and the CryptoPhone for Windows client. The latter is free to use, the PDA-phone is bit more expensive (but worth its price as competitive products like Siemens Topsec and Beaucom Enigma cost a lot more, are closed source and have no free program desktop machines that are compatible with them).