Monday, August 20
Breaking code
An Adobe office building in downtown San Jose has been broadcasting a coded message in rotating disks of light as public art for more than a year, and two programmers have used brute force to finally break it. My favorite part? The message of "San Jose Semaphore" (created by New York artist Ben Rubin) is the entire text of the Thomas Pynchon book, "The Crying of Lot 49." Here's a Mercury News story, Rubin's solution and the story of how the code breakers did it.
