At work I'm doing a little compression project. Our product basically lets you access your MS Exchange email/calendar/contacts from the Motorola Timeport P93x over a two-way pager network. So, it's like RIM's Blackberry only slower. We'd like to compress emails that are sent to the device because customers pay per incoming network message. Less/smaller messages means more efficient delivery.
Embedded text compression would be an interesting project, except that programming for the Timeport sucks so bad. You write your program in something called flexscript which is a language worse than VB, then compile it to bytecode which is interpreted by the device. The language is so bad that it's impossible to implement any "real" compression algorithms, so I put together a scheme where the 128 most common english words are encoded as the high ascii codes. For example, CHR(127) decodes to '~' as usual, but CHR(128) decodes to 'the', CHR(129) decodes to 'and', etc ...
Drawbacks:
- Not everybody gets messages in English.
- Only yields about 25% compression at best. Which is only twice as good as simply stripping off the high ascii bit. (12.5%)
- Even under this simple scheme, the timeport takes several seconds to decode a typical message.
The only advantages are: It's dirt simple, and can never increase the size of a text-only message.
WHY DOESN'T MOTOROLA LET YOU WRITE NATIVE CODE IN A REASONABLE LANGUAGE FOR THIS CRAPPY LITTLE DEVICE!
2:07:44 PM 
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