Today’s Google homepage doodle celebrates the 57th anniversary of the Barcode patent. The barcode contains the tag Googleg, the name of Google’s incoming mail servers. (Via Den of Geek).
Google doodle barcode decoded: Googleg
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I was also interested in the “extra g”. A friend pointed out that it was likely a check digit that helps validate that the rest of the code has been properly read. Using the Code 128 table documented at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_128, you can see that the “extra g” is in fact the check digit 71 calculated as follows:
sum of character products =
104 “Start Code B” +
(39 “G” * 1) + (79 “o” * 2) + (79 “o” * 3) + (71 “g” * 4) + (76 “l” * 5) + (69 “e” * 6) = 1616
1616 modulus 103 = 71
–Eric