Another journal-like entry
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You’re much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession.
People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.
I was reading a paper today, written by MIT’s Esther Duflo, part of a homework assignment on a MOOC on development policy (Foundations of Development Policy: Advanced Development Economics) offered by Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. So I opened the paper and started copying important lines from the PDF to a text editor to make notes. I could copy the text, but when I pasted it onto a text editor, it turned out to be gibberish (you can try it too!).
For instance, instead of pasting
Between 1973 and 1978 the Indonesian Government constructed over 61,000 primary schools throughout the county
I got:
Ehwzhhq 4<:6 dqg 4<:;/ wkh Lqgrqhvldq Jryhuqphqw frqv wuxfwhg ryhu 94/333 sulpdu| vfkrrov wkurxjkrxw wkh frxqwu|
It was a good thing the cipher used for this text wasn’t too complicated. After some perusal, I found that ‘B’ became ‘E’, ‘e’ became ‘h’, ‘t’ became ‘w’ and so on. So I copied the entire content of the PDF to a text file and named the encrypted file estherDuflo.txt. I noticed that the encryption had been implemented only on the first 1475 lines. The remaining was plain English.
So I wrote a Python script to decrypt the gibberish, rather than simply typing out my notes. It took 20 minutes writing the code and 8 ms to execute (of course!). I didn’t want to spend a lot of time ensuring a thorough decryption, so the result wasn’t perfect, but then I’m going to make do. I named the decrypted file estherDufloDecrypted.txt.
Sample from the Encrypted File
My Code
Sample from the Decrypted File
