[geeks] Dropout-correcting codes

[der Mouse]

Thanks to struggling with a machine whose only working channel to the
outside world is a serial line, I find myself caring about encoding
data such that dropouts can be recovered.  However, after some
searching, it appears that most of the existing theory for erasure
codes assumes that you know where the erasures are.  In many cases,
such as Internet packet streams or big RAID arrays, this is valid (you
know you didn't get packet #N; you know you got a read error from drive
M), but in my case it's not.  Can anyone point me at any theory for
constructing codes to detect and deal with dropouts when you *don't*
know the dropouts' locations?

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