At CodeMash StoutSystems offered up a fast programming contest during the vendor sessions slot.
First team to upload a correct output file won.  We won. :-)

This repository holds our winning solution (~7 minutes) hacked together in Ruby on Josh's MBP in TextMate 
along with the given input file (input.txt) and a sample output file that we won with (output.txt).

All other solutions are other attempts done by myself or others to practice and compare approaches and languages.

Rules
* read file (header row + lines, tab delimited)
* output data to a new file in same format preserving the header row
* remove any non alpha characters from the last name column and reverse the text
* remove any lines where the last name column is blank
* sort in ascending order by last name column then by the magic number column (as a number, not a string)