[cianclarke]

Please tell me this is a troll? I mean, I know the author acknowledges the fact this is completely unnecessary, but still - I'm no environmentalist, but this seems to be an incredibly silly idea..

[DanBC]

Less of a troll and more of a playful look at barcode style systems, including byte encoding, compression, error correction, format limitations,etc.

As the author says it's useful for a small number of very important files.

[vidarh]

The very first line of the page introduces it as a joke

[cantrevealname]

The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so.

I looked at the source code. It's 5,575 lines of original C code. (I excluded the AES encryption, bzip2, Reed-Solomon, and CRC16 source code from my count.)

I imagine that he wrote the words "open source joke" as a defense mechanism against people who would mock his efforts with lines like "please tell me this is a troll", "that is completely unnecessary", and "an incredibly silly idea".

Lots of people make self-effacing remarks when they introduce a work that they know will draw criticism: "It's just a first draft, it needs a lot more work." "I hacked it up during lunch [when it really took two weeks]." Etc.

[geon]

> The author did all that work as a joke? I hardly think so.

Possibly not a joke per se. But have you never written something substantial just for fun?

[wtvanhest]

Good catch, I didn't notice that at all.