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Update: Now that han has beaten it by one char, here's my cheesy 199-char Perl solution:

It's very similar to D C's solution (and all the other zlib/gzip-based solutions in various languages), except that I used uuencoding instead of base64 for the compressed text and a few other minor golfing tricks.

Update 2: I think it's time to officially accept a winner. The first place goes to konsolenfreddy's PHP code, since, however you count the chars, it is the shortest submitted so far. In fact, combining it with the optimized DEFLATE stream from my 199-char Perl code yields an even shorter 176-char solution:

However, I do think that han deserves a special honorary mention for getting so close without using any pre-written decompression tools. Congratulations to both of you, and a happy new year to everyone!

Update: Now that han has beaten it by one char, here's my cheesy 199-char Perl solution:

It's very similar to D C's solution (and all the other zlib/gzip-based solutions in various languages), except that I used uuencoding instead of base64 for the compressed text and a few other minor golfing tricks.

Update 2: I think it's time to officially accept a winner. The first place goes to konsolenfreddy's PHP code, since, however you count the chars, it is the shortest submitted so far. In fact, combining it with the optimized DEFLATE stream from my 199-char Perl code yields an even shorter 176-char solution:

However, I do think that han deserves a special honorary mention for getting so close without using any pre-written decompression tools. Congratulations to both of you, and a happy new year to everyone!