The PDF Purim
By David Shamah, The
Throughout history, Jews around the world have
dedicated special "Purims" to commemorate
their delivery from calamities of all sorts, including anti-Semites, war, evil
kings, etc. Many of these days were celebrated with special ceremonies, scrolls,
and festive meals – just like the original Purim.
I recently came into possession of an ancient (pre-Windows
95, apparently) scroll that purports to tell the story of yet another
miraculous event, that happened in an office,
far away and a long, long time ago. I have heard that the day is still
commemorated in certain startups, on which day programmers get together in the
company conference room, eat sushi in a celebratory luncheon, and read the
scroll. And for those who don't like
Sushi there are bagels and cream cheese.
1. And it came to pass in the days of Shoeshine, a
startup that had 127 people working to produce an application that would make
delivery of voice over IP services faster.
2. In those days as Shoeshine's
staff struggled to meet its quarterly benchmarks upon which the next round of
VC funding was dependent, for otherwise the staff would be on the unemployment
line.
3. That the evil and corrupt Herman, the company's
system administrator, was approached by Shoshine's
rivals, Zeresh Incorporated, and was offered a deal to transfer intellectual
property for the breakthrough product that could make Shoeshine's
workers wealthy.
4. And Herman agreed to do this evil thing, because
he had not received a raise from the company for lo these 10 months.
5. And as the system administrator he had read an
e-mail from the company's CEO, Mr. Aki, addressed to the company's programming
staff promising them raises.
6. And he was not comforted when he approached Mr.
Aki, who told him the programmers were working very hard overtime to meet the
benchmarks and needed the incentive, but if their efforts were successful it
would pay off for everybody.
7. Thus when the opportunity to defect to Zeresh
arose he was glad, because this way he could have his revenge on not only Mr.
Aki but the programmers as well, who were always bossing him around and
bothering him with nonsensical system questions that anybody with basic
knowledge of computers would know the answers to but they were obviously too
lazy to do the work themselves.
8. And so he exchanged a series of e-mails with the
Zeresh people in which they worked out a deal where
Herman would receive 10,000 shares in a silver mine in exchange for the code
for the "killer app" developed by Shoeshine, plus a plane ticket to
9. So he craftily began opening files and saving them
as PDFs, for this was the format the Zeresh system
administrator had requested they be sent over in, because Shoeshine used GNU
license programs like OpenOffice for their
documentation, while Zeresh of course used only Office.
10. But to avoid detection he decided he would save
only small sections – five or ten lines each – into multiple coded files so it
would seem as if someone in the office was just working on a piece of code
instead of raising suspicion with huge files being copied over the network.
11. And to avoid detection he copied files on CDs
with an old CD burner he had in his office instead of sending the files via
e-mail.
12. There was one programmer in the central
processing department whose name was Maury, who had been with the company since
its early days when it was working on producing methods to automate the
manufacture of shoe polish.
13. His office was adjacent to Herman's, from which
every day there would emit loud noises that Herman
said was music but Maury said was just noise.
14. And Maury would knock on the wall between his and
Herman's office each day to signal that Herman should lower the volume on his
streaming Internet radio.
15. But on one particular day when Herman knocked on
the wall there was no response and the music remained as loud as ever.
16. And Maury walked into Herman's office to ask him
to lower the volume, but Herman was out of the office at that moment.
17. So Maury walked around to Herman's desk when he
noticed the e-mail on the screen from Zeresh which outline the deal, which Maury
read in horror.
18. But then he heard Herman speaking in the corridor
and he ran out of the office quickly, and miraculously he remained undetected.
19. And Maury went and told his trusted programming
assistant Ethel all that had happened, and they said they must gather evidence
and confront Mr. Aki to prove their case, for otherwise Herman would claim that
the programmers were ganging up against him and he would destroy the evidence.
20. So Maury said it
would be best if Ethel were to somehow engage Herman and keep him busy while Maury
built a dossier on Herman.
21. So while Ethel kept Herman busy with a system
problem she made up and then invited Herman for coffee in the employee lounge, Maury
quickly searched Herman's e-mail, but saw that the incriminating letter had
already been deleted already.
22. And Herman became exceedingly angry at Ethel's
questions, and he made a mental note to himself to erase her from the company
payroll file at his earliest opportunity.
23. Then Maury copied the contents of the CDs that
were Herman's desk onto his computer over the network in the hope that they
were the correct ones referred to in the e-mail he had read.
24. And when he sat at his own PC to check the files
he saw it was but a hopeless task because there were thousands of PDF files,
and Herman would just claim he was mMr. Aking a routing backup, for he had doctored the file names
to appear as if they had been produced by the company's backup program.
25. But then Maury remembered that he had read about
a program that could take individual PDF files and make them into one big file,
as well as perform all sorts of other tricks with PDFs,
such as encrypting or decrypting them, fill PDF forms, split PDFs into separate files, and all sorts of other tasks that
could usually only be done by expensive PDF programs like Acrobat but in this
case was free.
26. So he quickly downloaded PDFtk
from http://www.accesspdf.com, and using the program's command line function
quickly concatenated all the PDFs in the folder into
one big document, with a key page in the middle that outlined the plan he had
read in the e-mail, which he found by searching the huge document, something
that would have been impossible to do so quickly if the evidence had remained
buried inside all those PDFs.
27. Thus Maury and Ethel walked into the CEO's office
and told company leader Mr. Aki that they had important news about Herman the
system administrator, and Mr. Aki said to call Herman into his office
immediately, because he had said that it was bad for company morale to talk
about other employees behind their back.
28. So Herman walked into the office and felt
honored, because he thought Maury and Ethel were there to shower him with
compliments, because he had heard from Mr. Aki's secretary Vicky that he was
indeed to get his raise.
29. But his joy turned to panic and then anger when Maury
and Ethel laid out the whole plan, and showed Mr. Aki the evidence that they
had discovered, thanks to PDFtk.
30. Whereby Mr. Aki called in the guys from the QA
department who instead of eating lunch worked out in the company gym every day
and were really strong, so they were able to take Herman outside and beat him
to a pulp.
31. And the Shoeshine company was joyful and glad and
Mr. Aki decided that they would declare the day they foiled Herman a company
holiday, and on that day instead of having Coke and pizza they would order beer
and sushi for all the workers, and NIS 250 in bonus coupons to use in the
supermarket, which was less than they got at major holidays like Pesach, but of
course was more than workers in other companies got for minor holidays.
32. And Maury and Ethel received the keys to Herman's
private closet, where they discovered a whole stash of office supplies that the
evil Herman was apparently planning to take with him when he jumped ship.
33. And afterwards the company did indeed meet its
benchmarks and received further VC funding, after which a big American conglomerate
bought them out and gave all the workers huge stock options which they all sold
at the top of the market and retired on.
34. So they lived happily ever after.
Download PDFtk from http://www.accesspdf.com
(click the link on the left). Free, for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and
Solaris.
ds@newzgeek.com