15 + 18 points
Metal Detector by Kevlar Moonraven
April 15th, 2010 4:05 PM
Yesterday I was conversing with a friend of mine by way of the Internet, and I attempted to use the character 'è' which, he claims, came out on his end as some funky 'A' and an umlaut over nothing. Now, it may have passed by some of you whose senses aren't as refined, so let me say that again:
an umlaut over nothing.
THAT'S PRETTY FLOGGING METAL!
Having detected it, the pursuit began. The pursuit is more interesting if you play "One Love" by The Prodigy and flash a bunch of neon lights around:
So, I'm pretty sure my chat client sends Unicode characters in UTF-8 encoding, and I'm pretty sure his chat client is using either ISO-8859-1 or MacRoman. UTF-8 encodes characters numbered higher than 127 (which includes our squiggly friends) using between two and four bytes numbered between 128 and 244(?), allowing it to encode way more characters than I'm ever going to need. ISO-8859-1 and MacRoman on the other hand, encodes all the characters lower than 128 the same, but only uses one byte to specify characters 128 through 255 (giving them only about 130 to work with). The next step is to look up bytes UTF-8 uses to represent my awesome but not very metal friend 'LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE' (U+00E8), which is luckily easily found on the Internet: 0xC3 followed by 0xA8. (Here they are using the hexadecimal [base 16, numbers 0-9 and letters A-F] representation of the bytes, which is convenient because the numbers 0-255 [comprising a one-to-one-correspondence with the full set of symbols that can be stored with eight binary bits] can be represented by 00 through FF.) ERGO, I should find that 0xC3 represents a funky 'A' in either MacRoman, ISO-8859-1, or both. Once again this information is readily available via The Link, for those with good nerves and a solid deck. 0xC3 turns out to be a funky 'A', so this suggests I'm on the right track. Looking up 0xA8, I find it is defined as Unicode Character 'DIAERESIS' (U+00A8).
Metal: detected, pursued, obtained:
an umlaut over nothing.
THAT'S PRETTY FLOGGING METAL!
Having detected it, the pursuit began. The pursuit is more interesting if you play "One Love" by The Prodigy and flash a bunch of neon lights around:
So, I'm pretty sure my chat client sends Unicode characters in UTF-8 encoding, and I'm pretty sure his chat client is using either ISO-8859-1 or MacRoman. UTF-8 encodes characters numbered higher than 127 (which includes our squiggly friends) using between two and four bytes numbered between 128 and 244(?), allowing it to encode way more characters than I'm ever going to need. ISO-8859-1 and MacRoman on the other hand, encodes all the characters lower than 128 the same, but only uses one byte to specify characters 128 through 255 (giving them only about 130 to work with). The next step is to look up bytes UTF-8 uses to represent my awesome but not very metal friend 'LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE' (U+00E8), which is luckily easily found on the Internet: 0xC3 followed by 0xA8. (Here they are using the hexadecimal [base 16, numbers 0-9 and letters A-F] representation of the bytes, which is convenient because the numbers 0-255 [comprising a one-to-one-correspondence with the full set of symbols that can be stored with eight binary bits] can be represented by 00 through FF.) ERGO, I should find that 0xC3 represents a funky 'A' in either MacRoman, ISO-8859-1, or both. Once again this information is readily available via The Link, for those with good nerves and a solid deck. 0xC3 turns out to be a funky 'A', so this suggests I'm on the right track. Looking up 0xA8, I find it is defined as Unicode Character 'DIAERESIS' (U+00A8).
Metal: detected, pursued, obtained:
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posted by Kevlar Moonraven on April 16th, 2010 2:12 PM
Perhaps!
I picked it because it was on the soundtrack to the movie Hackers, so it was appropriate to the text, if not the quarry.
Certainly you could recommend something a tad more metal for the pursuit theme than The Prodigy? Nonetheless, umlaut over nothing is a grand distillation of metal, congrats on your capture . . .