Recently, a rumor has been circulating [remember, you heard it here first -Ed.] that a remarkable new, 256 character ASCII symbology, based on Channel Code, has been developed to address specific issues within the European Community (EC).
Channel Code is a niche symbology developed by Andy Longacre and Ted Williams that encodes numeric strings in a single bar code character for extremely dense packing of all-numeric data. Current versions are called Channel 1 through Channel 8. [Contrary to rumors in other, less reputable, publications, VHF Channels may not be forthcoming: see below -Ed.] Channel Code is so named because it was developed on a ferry crossing the English Channel.]
The new symbology, dubbed Cable Code, was developed on the same historic trip by not by members of the TSC. Cable Code was conceived by some hangers-on during a harrowing gondola ascent of a mountain at a ski resort in Brusseles. During the ascent, mechanical problems halted the car.
Anne Shortfield, Y. Normland, and Ted Williams (no, no, the ball player -Ed.) were stranded for hours while Belgian rescue workers hurled insults at them about the Electronic Digital Organizers they carried.
"At least, that's what I think they were doing," Normland reported. "There we were, dangling precariously dozens of centimeters above the ground and all these fools could do was shout 'EDO, EDO'." [Oddly enough, that sounds a lot like the French word for "idiot," but we weren't there so who's to say? -Ed.]
While waiting for rescuers to find a stepstool, these individuals developed Cable Code, so named -- you guessed it -- because it was sketched out on the back of a telegram. Cable Code is designed to address specific issues faced by European standards groups.
In addition to multi-lingual capabilities using a single character set, Cable Code's major feature is its bidirectional decodability.
Scanned left-to-right, Cable Code yields English output, right-to-left scanning outputs French. A stacked version of this version, scanned bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom, is designed to tackle the French/Flemish problem. [There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that, when coupled with a voice synthesizer, scanning the symbol upside-down produces data with an Australian accent. According to our sources, it's the other way around -Ed.]
A more highly convoluted stacked version, scanned with significant amounts of skew so that only fragments of a complete line is captured, is intended for encodation government regulations. While the technical issues of providing both bureaucratese and normal text output have been worked out, one hurdle remains: determining what the regulations mean in the first place.
The alleged inventors deny having submitted the symbology to AIM for consideration as an Uninformed Symbology Educational Document (USED) or to CEN as a potential PrAM (Premature Symbology Announcement) [we're told this acronym makes sense in French - Ed.]
Comment: it's a sad day when significant new symbologies are not submitted to these respected symbology standards groups: the world needs more USED/PrAMS.
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