CSAW CTF 2014 Reversing 300 (2) - weissman

For this challenge we were given a file called weissman.csawlz.
When we first looked at it in a hex editor it appeared to have 3 files concatenated together to form this one file.
Each file seemed to have a header that was created, so we were able to separate each file easily.
The first file was called hash.html, the third file was a .txt version of Alice in Wonderland, and the second, and most important, key.jpg.
We also saw that the individual files were broken up into what seemed to be 9 byte chunks separated by 0x13.
At this point we created a small python script to go through and take out the 0x13s.
Once we looked at this new file that we created it was very apparent that the file was not fully decompressed as we had hoped.
This led us to a more in depth search into the Alice in Wonderland file and the hash.html file.
Upon further inspection we found that the files were not merely separated into 9 byte chunks, but that there were only 9 byte chunks after the 0x13.
Should the 10th byte not be a 0x13, we figured out that there were 3 byte "compression points". These looked like 0x0A 0x1E 0xAA.

As we could read what was supposed to be there we found that the first byte was double the length of how many bytes were supposed to be there.
Further we found that the last 2 bytes were some sort of index into a hash table that we didn't have.
Because we did not have this hash table we continually tried to figure out how this hash table was created and totally failed.
Once we got frustrated enough to try and brute force the jpg to be read, we tried to deduce what each hash was for this file. We figured out that one hash was supposed to be 0x41 for however many bytes as was called upon to fill that location. We also found another where it might have been 0x00 for however many bytes were needed. And finally, we just put 0x00 in place of all other bytes.
Now... This SHOULD have worked, but the first time we wrote this program something messed up and we did not succeed.
4 hours later after talking to a mod about where we were going wrong (much to our surprise that we were not wrong) we rewrote the program and it worked. We were given a jpg with colors messed up, but the flag was still distinguishable.

flag{I know how long it'd take, and I can prove it.}

~ Tigger