#cracking solution

[floodgoblin]

This was done with water color other mixed media and aging and cracking solution.

[getchester-blog]

JRYPBZR! Solution

Congratulations to those of you who were capable of deciphering the challenge from JRYPBZR! If you didn't immediate notice the fact that the first post was a rotational shift of the characters, specifically thirteen spaces, then you most likely started off the challenge by utilizing a combination of frequency analysis and an amalgamation of double-letter recognition and short word identification, specifically those words that contained apostrophes signifying possession or contraction.   

So obviously for you diehards who have no issues with codes and ciphers, you immediately recognize this as ROT13.  I stole the definition below for you from rot13.com just in case you didn't know or recognize it.  

ROT13 /rot ther'teen/ [Usenet: from "rotate alphabet 13 places"], v. The simple Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each English letter with the one 13 places forward or back along the alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes "Gur ohgyre qvq vg!" Most Usenet news reading and posting programs include a rot13 feature. It is used to enclose the text in a sealed wrapper that the reader must choose to open - e.g. for posting things that might offend some readers, or spoilers. A major advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is that it is self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding and decoding. 

I realize that the puzzle presented by JRYPBZR! was not so significant that it presented any real challenge.  I also realize that the solution could have easily been deciphered with nothing but pen and paper.  However, I know that most of you just went right ahead utilized some kind of programmatic solution like the one given at rot13.com.  Now, that's fine and dandy as the "Googling" method, as I call it, will achieve some sort of expected result for you.  However, let's try to understand the programmatic solution for that day when your Internet connection is down and you can't just let me "Google" that for you!

Here's an example for you written in Python.

import string rot13 = string.maketrans( \ "ABCDEFGHIJKLMabcdefghijklmNOPQRSTUVWXYZnopqrstuvwxyz", \ "NOPQRSTUVWXYZnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMabcdefghijklm") string.translate("Welcome!", rot13)

I'm utilizing Alex Gorbatchev's SyntaxHighlighter for all my code implementation.  This means that if you're interested in copying and pasting the code that I include in these postings, then all you have to do is double-click anywhere in the code sections to highlight all code for copying.  

If we dissect the source code, we can see that all that's really being done is establishing what the exact rotational shift key is for every index in the alphabet and utilizing the translation to make a literal interpretation of the passed string parameter. While this may be a good programmatic example to solve this specific solution, there is no chance to reutilize this code for any other type of numeric character shifts.  What about ROT3, ROT7, and ROT11?  I guess that'll be something for us to examine later as it's nearing the witching hour and the sweet softness of my bedtime pillow is beckoning me!