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Comment by chickenbane | Hacker News Reader

Not only is this a great read, but the follow up for citations is replied with "I am the reference".

If this were reddit I'd post the hot fire gif. Eh, here it's anyway: http://i.imgur.com/VQLGJOL.gif

Neat how involved he still is this long after the initial work.

When brotli came out he implemented his own decoder (https://github.com/madler/brotli/) to check the spec, and got some things clarified in RFC. Brotli is pretty DEFLATE-y in spirit, with changes that take advantage of today's hardware (larger history window, contexts in the entropy encoding) and a bunch of tweaks (different match encoding, static dictionary, etc.).

Also, as others mention, NASA mission engineer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Adler#Mars_exploration

On the other hand he isn't making new zlib versions. There are a lot of patches posted on the mailing list going nowhere. Also there's a valgrind issue I reported that he ignored.

Reminds me of the time I took my friend to play D&D up in Lake Geneva with the Gygax family whom I had been gaming with for a bit.

He ended up getting into an argument with Gary about why dwarven women would have beards (of all things). I remember having to kick him under the table and quickly whisper "This is Gary Gygax, he made the game. If he says they have beards they have beards!"

I'd imagine the simplest answer would be "because Tolkien said so".

Citation?

The Jackson films don't count.

http://tolkien.cro.net/dwarves/women.html has some references. Some of this is also apparently expanded on in the various things Christopher Tolkien has published.

I thought he was joking.

Then I read the name: Adler: as in Adler-32 (the checksum function that zlib uses).

Then I knew it was real. The darn author of zlib answered the question. That's as close as you're gonna get to "primary source" folks!

And then someone helpfully posted his wikipedia bio in a comment:

FYI: Mark Adler is an American software engineer, and has been heavily involved in space exploration. He is best known for his work in the field of data compression as the author of the Adler-32 checksum function, and a co-author of the zlib compression library and gzip. He has contributed to Info-ZIP, and has participated in developing the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format. Adler was also the Spirit Cruise Mission Manager for the Mars Exploration Rover mission. (wikipedia)

That's quite a résumé.

Plus his profile lists http://zlib.net as his personal page

Mark Adler is such a boss. Check out his answers to space questions on http://space.stackexchange.com/users/265/mark-adler

My personal favorite Adler SE post is in code golf: http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/a/78901 - Compute the Adler-32 checksum

>> That's as close as you're gonna get to "primary source" folks!

Yes it is. Whenever I think of PKzip I am reminded of the sad tale of Phil Katz death - partly because I share his first and last initials, and now reading his Wikipedia page I see we had more in common. Fortunately alcoholism is not my thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

I remember reading that the creators of the ARC format sued Phil Katz for essentially taking their original source code and rebranding it PKARC (with assembly optimizations). They claim [1] that Katz did essentially the same thing with PKZIP.

Can anyone verify these claims? I always thought it was an injustice that the original authors were treated poorly by the BBS community and treated like a big company despite just being run from home.

[1] http://www.esva.net/~thom/philkatz.html

This is covered in the BBS Documentary[1]. A comparison of Phil Katz work showed he just renamed variables and moved things around. Phil rallied the BBS community to character assassinate Thom. The documentary is shot years later and Thom still breaks down and cries when talking about what happened. It is very sad.

[1] http://bbsdocumentary.com/

Crazy how that documentary appears to be not for sale in any form and DVDs on Amazon go for $3xx. Am I missing something?

The page says: "Enhanced Digital Downloads of the BBS Documentary series are planned. Please sign up here: sales@bbsdocumentary.com if you wish to be notified."

But it appears to be on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2B9EF89CE228ED0A

The list of methods looks exactly like this

https://users.cs.jmu.edu/buchhofp/forensics/formats/pkzip.ht...

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