strange happenings on computer

[Guest yogagirl]

Hi I wonder if anyone can help we are planning a trip to oxfordshire to visit my grandfathers place of passing (he died during an accident in the war), I saved the areas I need to check for a hotel room in a notepad file entitled remebrance, when I went back to the file there was this text

敢獮湯瘠汩慬敧搠摩潣瑴漠晸牯獤楨敲眠污楬杮潦摲

I apologise for my ignorance but i have no idea what language this is or what it says, could anyone help me identify the language and what it says.

Many Thanks

Sam

[Quest]

what language did you input it in when you saved it? it doesn't appear to be valid with any of the language encodings i tried. ChineseBig5/GB, Japanese, Korean, Unicode.

[Guest yogagirl]

Hi i typed it in in English, it was just a list of villages around oxfordshirre

[Quest]

þÿebsnnov lialegd dioctto fxrosdiherw lailgnofdr < - your text

------------------------------oxfordshire[w]-------- < - decoded

I recovered some letters from your text, but they are all scrambled. Perhaps time for a word scramble game? I dont know those places, so I only spotted the oxfordshire. The rest might turn out to be garbage, but since I dont know, I am not sure.

[Guest yogagirl]

that sounds about right the list was benson, didcott and oxfordshire i typed it in as i was on the phone to my mum as reminders off areas to look for a b & b. Very bizare though what were they converted to? have you any idea how it happened?

Many thanks for your help x

[Yun Feng]

þÿebsnnov lialegd dioctto fxrosdiherw lailgnofdr < - your text

beson village didcott wallingford

Looks like an 'endianness' problem. Swap each two consecutive character (including spaces) and you get your origianl text. Eg:

eb sn no v

be ns on v

Have fun on your trip :-).

[Guest yogagirl]

erm ok i will take youre word for it on the "endianness" problem am afraid im not quite bright enough to grasp the explaination . I have never be very blessed at languages and scrape by with english and a touch of geordie !. Many thanks for your help

Sam x

[Guest yogagirl]

oh actually i see what you mean! but what was it translated into in the first place and why??? could i have a haunted computer

[Quest]

there are different options of encoding when you save a file in notepad, you probably saved it under an invalid encoding. What I did was, I pasted your text in notepad, then saved it in Unicode Big Endian, then opened it with another text editor called UltraEdit, which doesn't convert big endian text to chinese characters. Since it's been "Big Endianned" the letter orders were scrambled. Big Endian means the memory is read from the bigger byte end of a FullWord, a Fullword on a 32-bit machine looks something like 0xFF12F8C7, small endian would read/write from C7 to FF, big endian would start with FF to C7. FF and C7 are 8-bit bytes. In the binary/hexadecimal world, just as in the decimal world, number digits are smaller on the right side, a decimal number 12307, 7 is considered small, 1 is considered big. a Big Endian on this number would make it 70321. The endian term comes from gulliver's travel, the big endians and small endians argue about which side of an egg to break when they eat it, the big end or the small end.

I am afraid I've made it more complicated than an explanation. I hope it gave you some idea of what happened, not a haunted computer.

[Guest yogagirl]

erm ok i am now both confused and humbled by your knowledge so im going to take the easy option and go for the simple invalid encoding. Having a haunted computer sounded so fun as well i was hoping to go to bed and get my ghost to write my pgce assignments !!!!

Sam

[smithsgj]

Quest, is this why when I transferred an application from a Sun workstation to a Linux cluster running on PCs I had to recompile the source and write a byte swapping program to convert the data? Someone told me roughly what I had to do and I just wrote the program without understanding what I was doing, but I think I get it now.

But text didn't need changing.

You'd think there'd be a Unix tool for doing this conversion. I spent ages looking in man and on the web but in the end it was quicker to do it myself (as is often the case with these things!)

[Quest]

I think so. You can test it by running a MIPS assembly with SPIM on Sun Workstation, and the same code with PCSpim on a PC. The PC is small endian.