Re: bar code bit encoding

Chris Schaefer wrote:
|Now Jans encoding scheme is to move the 72 bits representation as a
|single _VERY_ large binary number to decimal... let me
|just say as a programmer that dealing with weird bit-aligned fields
|in data is very difficult and error prone.

I agree very much with Chris here. Making things easy for (us)
programmers is a VERY important goal in development. Straightforward,
one-to-one alignment of votes with codes makes it much easier for us to
figure out what happened when something goes wrong.

|If we go the nibble route we can represent the sample data in 22
|nibbles or 11 bytes. (88 bits for those of you who are counting
|bits ).
|2) How long a barcode can we tolerate?

While I'm not sure about the EXACT answer to this question, I am
confident that the answer is "significantly more than 11 bytes."

Maybe Jan can give a more precise answer about common scanner
technology, but I would guess we have room for three or four times that
much without real difficulty. The decision about encoding should be
made out of a desire to save $20 by finding the cheapest -possible-
scanner, btw (especially since that $20 might cost us 50 hours of
programmers' time).

I think it's pretty much agreed that actual write-in votes won't be on
the barcode (for the demo), just the fact the vote *is* a write-in. To
actually count it, tabulators will have to look at the ballot face.

Yours, David...

--
mertz@  | The specter of free information is haunting the `Net!  All the
gnosis  | powers of IP- and crypto-tyranny have entered into an unholy
.cx     | alliance...ideas have nothing to lose but their chains.  Unite
        | against "intellectual property" and anti-privacy regimes!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
==================================================================
= The content of this message, with the exception of any external 
= quotations under fair use, are released to the Public Domain    
==================================================================