I came across a web site that required job candidates to solve a puzzle to be able to access a job application page. I’m a sucker for puzzles. The original puzzle is at the following site:

http://www.telogis.co.nz/

But in case, they take it down at some point, here is the plain text version nicely formatted:

z = 4254145 * 0x18712495;
b = (z & 1) << 4;
a = b--;
o = [];
c = a - b;
x = b - a;
while (z) {
  x = a & x ? a & b : c + x;
  {
    o[z & b^x] = (x + 6 * a + b / 5 - c).chr;
    z = z / a / a;
  } if (!(z / a & b^x))
}

To apply go to “http://www.telogis.co.nz/” + o + “.html”

I don’t think this will parse correctly in any language, but I decided to solve the puzzle using Ruby since it wasn’t that far from it and Ruby is my main programming language currently. I had a couple false starts due to a subtlety in Ruby compared to other languages.

I’ll come back in a while and post the Ruby solution, but I don’t want to post a spoiler too soon.

• 365.25 days per year
• 12 months per year
• 24 hours per day
• 60 minutes per hour
• 60 seconds per minute
• 1,024 MB per GB
• 1,024 KB per MB
• 8 kilobits (kb) per kilobyte (KB)

Put that all together and you get the following:

3.19 (month kb) / (sec GB)

So when you see a web hosting company stating a bandwidth per month (in GB), you can multiply that by 3.19 to get a kilobits per second figure. In other words, 18 GB/month of bandwidth is the amount of bandwidth that a 56Kb modem would consume at full capacity, and 480 GB/month is roughly the same as a 1.5Mb T1 line.