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26 December 2005

Fun at work.

Some time ago I was given an assignment at work. I didn't know what fun it would turn into.

Some years ago, there was a text index/archive comany that sold a product throughout the midwest. Small newspapers bought it and used it happily in their publishing systems. Since they were marketing towards small newspapers, they must have kept their costs down by not offering much support. The two customers we have dealt with so far haven't known much about the system besides the fact that it was in use.

My job is to reverse engineer the index. I have been given about 2 GB of data in about 6 different files. The text store and term store were easy to find. Data in the term store has to give references in at least on of two other files that I am looking at.

After three hours of work, I have the basics figured out. Fun stuff, this reverse engineering.

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