This is one of my long term projects and I am not having fun on Usenet with the people there.

Does anyone write data compression programs?

Just thought to give a shout our.

Why you write progamns when you can get it on free at the web?

When you ask about compressing random data, do you mean statistically random truly low-entropy data, or do you just mean "assorted data"? Also, what do you mean by "project"? Are you attempting to learn about data compression algorithms themselves, or just how to write a program to archive files and such?

Good answers will rely on knowing this. For instance, writing an algorithm to compress statistically random data is one of those pathologically difficult problems in computer science, since compression techniques in general rely on taking advantage of temporal or spacial coherence, reducing redundancy, and efficient encoding. On the other hand, if you just want to learn the basics of compression, a couple of good links to tried-and-true source code (LHA, LZ, RLE, etc) in your chosen programming language would probably suffice