Its now been a week since Team IE was in Las Vegas for MIX11. Hopefully you read our previous recaps during the event. And if you missed MIX this year, or attended and wanted to watch again, all of the sessions are now online ? just go to http://channel9.msdn.com/events/mix/mix11 to view and even download any of the session content. There?s a handy tag box on the right hand side of the page where you can select topics like CSS3, HTML5, JavaScript, and more.
Whether it was dropping MIXtery boxes, or hitting In-N-Out Burger, we had a great time with everyone we met last week at MIX. And we finished out the week a little challenge for the attendees. As promised last week, it?s your turn to crack our MIXtery MEGA box puzzle!
The Puzzles
The idea behind the puzzles was simple: focus on 3 core technologies in IE10 (HTML5, CSS3 and ES5), one for each day of MIX11, and give our attendees an excuse to break-out their laptops for something other than note taking during sessions. We also wanted to give them a reason (beyond playing with the awesome demos) to download and use IE10 PP1 at MIX. We put each puzzle up on our dry erase board for one day, and on the third day people were lined-up outside of the exhibition hall doors hoping to get a jump on the last puzzle and be one of the first two people to post the correct answer and win a HP netbook! If you?d like to play along, here are the 3 puzzles below. See how fast you can crack them!
Day #1 ? CSS3
Day #2 ? HTML5
Day #3 ? ECMAScript 5
The Winners
The fun thing about putting together a set of brainteasers is the unpredictability of how people will tackle the problems, what they will consider to be the hardest parts and what they will end up learning along the way. All three winners got stuck in different places and it was a mad dash to the finish as additional clues were doled out and the light bulbs started to go off. After the first MIXtery Mega Box was claimed, there was one more still up for grabs. At the exact same moment in time, two separate teams announced "I GOT IT!" and all of a sudden we were looking around for a 3rd laptop to award. Let?s hear from the winners themselves!
Team #1: Ben Selland (Edmonton, Canada) & Matthew Lee (Cambridge, UK)
Winner #2 ? Auri Rahimzadeh (Indianapolis, USA)
Team #3 ? David Mankarious & friend (Paris, France)
The Solution
Ok, so you?ve heard bits and pieces of how these people solved the puzzle, here are the final solutions and how they all plug together.
This one was simple once you rendered the code in a browser that understands CSS3 FlexBox and discovered the diagonal clue.
Every time you rendered this page you got a different jumble of characters being rendered to an HTML5 canvas element. If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, this was pretty easy to eyeball.
We saved the hardest puzzle for last. The puzzle includes a single line of code with the following string: ?Something, Something, Something Dark Side?. Which, of course, is reference to a fantastic Family Guy movie. People familiar with ES5 strict mode realized that a standalone string looked oddly familiar. Swapping out the pop culture reference for the ?use strict? directive provided the final clue!
ANSWER = www.bit.ly + 4945313 + 30505031 = http://bit.ly/49453130505031
And if you haven?t had enough fun with hex: 49453130505031 in hex = IE10PP1 in ASCII. Thanks for playing!
Jamie Chung Alicia Witt Radha Mitchell Melissa Rycroft Chloë Sevigny
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