# Most Useful

Szabolcs Borsanyi
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of Sussex
Brighton
East Sussex BN1 9QH
United Kingdom
s.borsanyi at sussex dot ac dot uk

## Judges' comments:

### To build:

        make borsanyi

### To run:

        ./borsanyi ioccc@example.com > example.gif

This entry uses a very user-friendly representation of the font
it uses (with a few exceptions).   Check out the source and see
yourself!  :-)

The resulting GIF file is likely to puzzle optical character
recognition tools.  The amount ofimagination necessary to
recognise the @ character will certainly challenge a few
anti-CAPTCHA tools.

## Author's comments:

Email address to gif converter
==============================

Introduction:
-------------

Most spam robots collect email addresses from the web sites of
innocent people, like you. Conference organizers cannot disclose
the participant's address to prevent malicious users from
grabbing them. One solution is to write as my_email _at_ address
_dot_ com. But robots are clever enough to sort that out.  A
more sophisticated approach is to create an image file with the
email address and put that on the web page.

This program creates a GIF image file from the address given
in the command line. To avoid complications with patent issues
the LZW compression feature is not used. A typical email address
is stored in less than 1-2 kilobytes.

Usage:
------

        $ gcc email.c -lpthread -o email
        $ ./email my@email.address.com > email.gif
        $ my_favourite_gif_viewer email.gif

The address cannot be longer than 42 characters, and may consist of
the characters: a-z_A-Z0-9@.-
The program is (like email addresses are) case insensitive.

Obfuscation:
------------

Multicore support is a must in present-day applications. This
entry supports up to 25 cores.  The odd names in the bottom
part of the program do have a meaning, they are not there just
for obfuscation. The preprocessor is used to keep the program
small, in fact, everything is a macro. Are you familiar with
the GIF format? Studying this program will give you a (very
little) insight.

Questions:
----------

After analyzing the source code, try to answer these questions:
1. How can you add a further supported symbol?
2. Can you alter the look of the output characters?
3. What limits the number of input characters to 42?

Portability:
------------

The program uses posix threads (using the linker flag -lpthread).
The program accepts email addresses not longer than 42 bytes
composed from letters, digits, and the @._- symbols. An address
not obeying these rules will cause undefined behaviour.  The
program is not expected to depend on endianness.  The standard
output is used for a binary output, which might cause problems.
To avoid most caveats, the program does not output the octet
0x0a.  The program assumes the use of ASCII.