Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for May 28, 2009
Transcript:
Rita says, "You know how people eliminate vowels from messages to save time? Well I figure there are a lot more consonants, so I can save more time by eliminating them instead." Jay says, "Oh, this can't be good. I just got a message from Rita that says: 'Ay I ee o ee ou o'"
Many moons ago, our boss the Systems Manager set the following task to a new trainee programmer:
If you convert a text string to ASCII and then to binary, it becomes a series of 0s and 1s. That is how the computer stores it in a file. But zero is nothing, and so only the 1s represent the actual data. Since the 0s are only there to separate the 1s, and sometimes there are many 0s is a row, you can shorten the message by eliminating the extra 0s so there is only one 0 between the 1s. Now write me a program that can compress a text file by squashing down the redundant 0s and then another program that will read the compressed file and print out the original text.
He spent three days working on it before someone cracked and explained to him why it can’t be done. A shame, since the purpose of the exercise wasn’t just to get him to teach himself number base conversion and bit handling, but also to learn that solutions provided by the customer aren’t always workable.
But it was funny watching him try.