May 13, 2002

11:43 PM

The 2002 contest for The 5k Award has announced a call for entries. The 5k is a contest for, basically, making the coolest thing you can on the web in 5,120 bytes. The first contest was interesting and rewarding, but the second one disappointed, when some truly impressive entries were completely ignored in favor of poor attempts at humor. Here's to hoping the entries will be at least as good as 2001, and the judging will be much better. The deadline for entries is June 16.
posted by endquote (12 comments total)

The second one certainly didn't dissapoint me - I spent several hours browsing through the entries, and the entries were just as inspiring as in the first year. Who gets the prizes is pretty irrelevant in the face of the sheer volume of amazing code that is contributed.
posted by Jimbob at 12:28 AM on May 14, 2002

From the 5k site: If you have ever registered with MetaFilter.com, you can use the username and password you use there, here. See?

erm...mine didn't work. Not that I mind registering there. I'm just sayin'.
posted by gummi at 12:39 AM on May 14, 2002

me neither gummi, but i think i know why...
posted by sawks at 1:24 AM on May 14, 2002

Mine worked. Perhaps it'll only work for people who entered last year?
posted by rory at 3:11 AM on May 14, 2002

Mine works fine. I didn't enter last year. Although I did *cough* spend some time there last August...
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:18 AM on May 14, 2002

...and much as I reckon that The 5k is super-cool and everything, I'd also be interested to see the most amazing thing that someone could show me in 5Mb.

Which is evil and anti-, I know. But. Still. I would.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:51 AM on May 14, 2002

i'm annoyed that they (inexplicably) put off the HTML and CSS version of the contest.
posted by moz at 8:21 AM on May 14, 2002

5k? Ha! Rather, how much can you cram in 256 bytes for a real, ultraminimalistic challenge?
posted by betobeto at 10:25 AM on May 14, 2002

betobeto: Good point, but because HTML/JS is far less economical than x86, 256 bytes can actually get you a lot further than 5K in JS. That is, if you want to do cool graphics stuff like this 256b entry.

I think that's why the pixelporn site won last year, because it was a funny little idea, rather than revolutionary coding. DHTML/JS really suck when it comes to space, so this makes sense.
posted by wackybrit at 11:33 AM on May 14, 2002

dhtml/js sucks when it comes to space? Check the number one entry out at the 256 byte competition... you'll pretty much need Win/IE, but damn that's cool.
posted by mkn at 1:34 PM on May 14, 2002

Yeah, I've seen that one. It's interesting, but just some filters built into IE. By 'sucks when it comes to space', I mean that you can have a fully textured 3d simulation in a 256 byte executable file.. but 256 bytes of JS source code are kinda limited.
posted by wackybrit at 4:21 PM on May 14, 2002

I'd love to do somethings like this compression one, but I'm only just starting out in Javascript and I can't really workout how it works. Does anyone know of any self-extracting Javscript resources?
posted by krisjohn at 7:19 PM on May 14, 2002