The Mix10k Lunch Wheel

The MIX conference is hosting (and has for at least the last year) a little competition called Mix10k.  The goal is to make some sort of web application that only takes up 10 kilobytes of space.  Now it’s pretty hard to impress upon someone what 10K really is.  I’ll try to give you a few examples:

• Windows 7 Notepad is 189 K
• Windows 7 Calculator is 897 K
• A typical browser is between 500 and 1000 K
• 10,000 typed characters is 10 K
• It’s not uncommon to see terabyte drives these days.  A terabyte is about 1024 * 1024 * 100 * 10 K.

So suffice to say, 10 KB is not exactly a lot of space to write a program in.  The challenge here is to do something that is at least decent without going over.  It’s not easy to do.  Most of the time by the time you’ve thrown even a simple image into an application, you’ve already gone over that limit.  As I am going to MIX this year, I felt participating in the challenge would be a great way to get revved up for the conference.  The first challenge was figuring out what to create.  A few years ago my friend Scott made a convenient way for us to figure out where to go to lunch, a Lunch Wheel.  It was basically a windows app which you could use to spin a wheel with different eateries on it.  The wheel would randomly spin and you would have your restaurant.  It’s been a while since I saw this Lunch Wheel and didn’t really have any idea where it was, so it was definitely time for a new one.  So, for my Mix10k application, I made a Silverlight LunchWheel which you can see here.  There are obviously some (a lot) improvements that could be made, but I was working with limited space.  Once the wheel was submitted and approved, I put a few different versions up on the site.  A slightly improved (spacing and spelling issues) LunchWheel can be found here.  A very helpful BeerWheel can be found here.  And lastly, a lovely LiquorWheel can be found here.  Sooner or later I’ll post more information on how I made the LunchWheel as well as the source code so you can make your own!