Even though I have been using computers all my life there are still many aspects of computing that are mysterious to me, and I am sure many others…
One of my favorite quotes is “A leads to B leads to C” (“Future’sEnd” – StarTrek:Voyager, Season 3, episodes 50 & 51) and so my last post being on “binder” I started to explore the pandas cookbook binder… but I found myself on the Twitter account of the author, Julia Evans, and she had a very fascinating short video to help understand the compression scheme used for making files smaller. Her entry was part of a long list of what she learned at her “hacker school” titled “Day 16: gzip + poetry = awesome.” But in fact she has 3 entries on Gzip:
| Oct 24 2013 | ★ | Day 16: gzip + poetry = awesome |
| Oct 21 2013 | Day 13: Off by one errors | |
| Oct 16 2013 | Day 11: How does gzip work? |
For me the “gem” was the short youtube video that was embedded that she made based on a small program (written in the Julia language) to be applied to a text-based gzipped file. (See “gzip + poetry = awesome” below.)
So A (binder) lead to B (the “awesome” video.)
But then B lead to C, another very nice YouTube video explaining the compression, in more historical terms, the “LZ 77” method.
I am so glad that now I can understand, and visualize what happens in a compressed text file… thanks to pointers!
See “Elegant Compression” video below.