ICFP Contest
Haven’t decided yet whether to join this year’s ICFP contest – will have to see the task. And even so – which language? Ah well… Erlang would be cool, even if I am not yet up to speed on it. RB could work – after all this is one language I am most comfortable in. But Functional it is not 
Weird, innit? This is from the codex posted yesterday, I think.
There’s a lot of gobbledygook in there, including a Gif89a header. Waiddaminit! This I know from my fPic efforts. RB sure came in handy, to extract the gif file. Never mind the jpeg above, what I did was remove the 0×1a73 first bytes, and save that as a Gif. Since you can stuff anything and everything after a valid gif without breaking it – it will just be ignored, which is, among others, a crude way to perform steganography… – the file displayed alright, but was still 2.2MB heavy… Screenshot, conversion from PDF to JPG – with an RB app, of course! – and here we go.
The theme is supposed to be computational archaeolinguistics. Read at face value – I am alas very good at that – it is right down my field of [supposed] expertise. Reading between the lines, as some #erlang fellows mentioned, it could be that the computational is not the means – doing linguistic research with ‘puters – but rather digging an old computer language, or else:
<marc_vw> it is probably about data mining <marc_vw> maybe looking at computation results <marc_vw> and trying to figure out what language the hardware used was programmed in <marc_vw> my guess is reengineering a dead computer language <noss> mine too, evaluating some kind of program specification.
Which makes more sense… Other tidbits include Latin ignoti et quasi occulti ie “unknown and almost hidden”, English, including written from right to left: welldonedaedsi luap “Well done, Paul is dead”, several appearances of the word apply, which could be a computer command, a magical word – abracadabra – and other meaningless stuff.
Four more hours to go.