tomasino's Accidental Artwork
2019-09-28
Sometime last week, I was browsing around the homepages for various
[tilde.club](http://tilde.club) users. I've taken to picking users as I find
them on IRC and plugging their username into the address bar to see what comes
up. Most users haven't made any major changes to the default site, which is
fine, but every once in a while I find something interesting (at least, to me).
On one such occasion, I plugged in
[tilde.club/~tomasino](http://tilde.club/~tomasino/), and I came across
something strange. The page was empty, except for a large, black circle with
words extending radially from the perimeter. There were so many words that they
were all squished together and weren't decipherable. Towards the center, there
were odd white curves carved out of the blackness, and there were some more
words in a central white area. Two were readable: `/bin/sh` and `/bin/bash`.
These were clues, and I had an idea of what I was looking at. `tomasino`
confirmed it; this was an attempt at visualizing which users used which shell
on tilde.club, which they found by parsing `/etc/passwd`. The script that
generated the visualization hadn't expected so many entries, hence the squished
lines and words.
For the high-resolution version, go [here]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}{{
site.image_dir }}/tomasino.png). (Caution: 6 MB) For the original SVG, go
[here]({{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}{{ site.image_dir }}/tomasino.svg) or to
`tomasino`'s [page](http://tilde.club/~tomasino/), if the image is still there.
I thought this was a delightful little accident of scale, and I quite liked the
look of the resulting shape. I decided I'd pull the SVG down into Inkscape,
render it out as a PNG, and maybe get it printed and hang it on my wall. The
white curves against the harsh blackness remind me of the curve of the Earth as
seen from space, and the jumbled usernames and shell paths add a Unix dimension
that I enjoy.