By MARY ANN ALBRIGHT
Gazette-Times reporter | Posted: Saturday, August 19, 2006 12:00 am
Logo created to commemorate 200 millionth download
In M. Night Shyamalan's 2002 thriller "Signs," Graham Hess and his family aren't pleased when they step outside their Bucks County, Pa., farm one morning and see crop circles in the fields surrounding the home.
Terry and Monty Woods, however, welcomed the addition of a 220-foot diameter design pressed into their oat field near Amity, knowing it was the work of Oregon State University students and Mozilla Corp. interns, not aliens or pranksters.
John Carey, film afficionado and intern at Mountain View, Calif.-based Mozilla, has long been fascinated with the crop circle phenomenon.
"I'm obsessed with the movie 'Signs.' It's like my favorite movie, so I'm always thinking about crop circles," said Carey, a sophomore at Missouri State University.
So it's no surprise that not too long ago, while on a cross-country flight, Carey's conversation with the person seated next to him inevitably turned to crop circles.
"It just kind of popped into my head to do a crop circle of the Firefox logo. Everyone thought it was really cool because it's kind of nerdy, which fits in well with the Internet company," he said.
Mozilla produces and provides the free Internet browser Firefox, along with other software. OSU's open source lab stores the servers for Firefox and other programs Mozilla creates and distributes.
To celebrate Firefox's recent 200 millionth download, Carey and fellow Mozilla intern Matt Shichtman, a Temple University junior, looked into the possibility of having a crop circle created replicating the Firefox logo.
Costs of contracting for the project were prohibitive, and the idea was tabled until the interns met OSU student Beth Gordon at an open source convention in Portland earlier this summer.
"They didn't really take it seriously, but I thought we could actually do it," said Gordon, a senior majoring in Spanish and environmental science.
Last weekend Gordon, Shichtman, Carey and nine other OSU students - most of them members of the Oregon State Linux Users Group - teamed up make this dream a reality.
Alex Polvi, an OSU senior, grew up in Hopewell. His family used their rural connection to find farmers willing to lend an acre of land to the crop circle project.
Polvi, who's currently interning with Google in New York City, flew back to Oregon for the big event.
The team started planning Aug. 10.
"We quickly designed and printed large posters that had a two-color version of the logo. With that we bisected the image into 32 sections and overlayed 60 concentric circles with even space between them. In our mock up, the gap between the circles was two feet," according to the campus Linux Users Group Web site.
"On top of the design, we also constructed our stompers. Inspired by the Discovery Channel, our stompers were constructed using two by fours and rope."
They started "stomping" Friday afternoon and finished Saturday morning. Stomping involves flattening particular sections of the field crop to create the contrast that highlights the desired image.
"It was a lot of fun. I was really impressed by our teamwork," said Scott Nichols, a senior computer engineering major.
"Most people seem pretty impressed that the details (of the crop circle) are so sharp. The most we're off by is six inches in some places."
This wasn't the first time OSU students created a homage to Firefox. To commemorate its 50 millionth download, they painted the logo on the paved center of the Memorial Union quad.
For the 100 millionth download, the campus Linux Users Group launched a balloon satellite that carried a Firefox banner 100,000 feet into the air.
Mozilla is set to release Firefox 2.0 in October, and the OSU students and Mozilla interns are already thinking of ways to celebrate with a stunt even more high-profile than the crop circle.
"Stuff happens when you get a bunch of geeks together," Polvi said.
At a glance
For more information about the crop circle - based on Mozilla's Firefox logo - that OSU students created in an Amity oat field, see the Oregon State Linux Users Group's Web site http://lug.oregonstate.edu/index.php/Projects/Firefox/Firefox_Circle. A short documentary on making the crop circle is available online at http://firefoxflicks.com/web-diaries/.
Mary Ann Albright covers higher education. She can be reached at maryann.albright@lee.net or 758-9518.