Welcome, Ruby coders and coderettes… Tonight we bring you the Obfu
Awards,
awards given by committee (i.e. me) to those most deserving for their…
“creative” work.
We’re going to skip the red carpet frivolities, as we have no red
carpet,
and jump right to the awards. Here they are, in no particular order
(except
that of their entry).
Best Non-Working But Terribly Obvious Solution
This award goes to DJ Jazzy L. whose solution – while it
generates
an error – provides output that can be discerned by running the Ruby
interpreter in your mind. Seeing as how Google provides wonderful spam
filtering, thanks to at least fifteen Python hackers, the l
Most Prolific Use of gsub in a Signature
John J. puts forth a straightforward, easy to understand, solution
that
is his email address transformed by simple replacements. Not terribly
obfuscated, but a good first step, and I believe the greatest number of
calls to gsub within a single solution.
Best Unexpected Use of String#Unpack
Harry K. makes interesting use of String#unpack by way of its
directional and positional directives. While his attempts to confuse the
source material were unsuccessful, his use of these uncommon unpack
commands are worthy of notice.
Most Painful Obfuscation
The first entry from Mikael Hoilund is such a dangerous minefield of
string manipulations and punctuation, the committee could not completely
discern its operation. In particular, putting aside the call to
downcase!
(which we managed to discern after much coffee and doses of Ritalin),
this
segment of code was never fully understood:
*a=e=?=,!????,:??,?,,Email
We’d ask Mikael to explain himself to the committee, but we fear the
medical
consequences.
Best Looking Non-Email Output
Rather than provide his email address, Sandro P. chose to
display
his logo, specified in a run-length encoded string, specifying alternate
sections of “on” or “off” characters. A couple reverses and flips here
and
there grows the logo and generates more output than code was input.
Highest Data-to-Code Ratio
Phillip G. receives this honor, for using a simple unpack to
decode his UUEncoded name, email address and web pages.
Special Award: Solving Two Quizzes In One
A very special honor goes to Bill K. for a finely golfed solution
to
two quizzes at the same time. His tiny Turing Machine not only works,
but
fits both the machine and the code required to print his email address
within the space restriction for this quiz. Bravo.
Most Rentable Space (and Use of Non-Standard Number Bases)
Marcelo Magallon’s use of a base-36 number, simply converted to ASCII
(base-256) did not fool the committee, but it was quite elegant.
The “I Like Π” Award
A cute and curious technique, Steven Hahn used the digits of π to
offset the characters of his email address. Sadly, we were hoping for
lemon
meringue.
Best Abuse of a Random Number Generator
Random numbers are supposed to be random… except when they’re not.
Chris
Shea puts this to use to ensure the scrambled letters of his email
address
are shuffled into the correct place. The need to vary this per-platform
is a
sad consequence, due to variations in the generators.
The “Thank Goodness He Provided An Explanation” Award
Once again, Mikael Hoilund taunts us… or should I say, haunts us.
We
tried, we really tried, to understand his code before giving up and
reading
the (thankfully) provided explanation. After that, we were able to
follow
along and understand the code, and have come to two conclusions. First,
Mikael has taught us how to abuse those we don’t like. Second, Mikael
should
not be allowed near the % character ever again.
Best Gratuitous Use of the Web
For his second entry, Harry K. places a portion of his email
address
on the web, and another portion in the code, a simple GET and gsub
completes the address.
Most Obfuscated Code (Well, Except for that Mikael Guy… You Know
Who
We’re Talking About…)
Sergey V. presents a markedly obfuscated bit of code that is
characterized by his self-inverting transform. The use of $& made
available by the regular expression, instead of a parameter for the
gsub
block, was tricky. Using %$$ as an empty string for converting ASCII
values to single-character strings was a clever ruse. We wonder if we
shouldn’t take away the % character from Sergey as well.
Best Attempt to Scare the Committee
Seeing Mikael Hoilund’s third submission, we fretted. At first, no one
dared to look. But as we are gluttons for punishment, we relented, only
to
see this silly attempt to print “42”. Still, we worry what might happen
if
we ask Mikael to write a spreadsheet or calculator.
Longest Binary Sequence Seen In A Submission to this Quiz
Congratulations to Jesus Gabriel. It’s the longest binary sequence.
We’re
fairly certain of that.
Most Obvious Need for an ASCII Table
The solution provided by Andrew Nelson was simple, quaint, obvious.
And we
all know 65, but can never remember 110 or 114. Google, I’m feeling
lucky
about “ASCII table”.
Best XOR Decryption of a Base-64 String to an ASCII String in a
Ruby
Quiz
The award goes to Come Milan for… well… doing what I just said.
Next!
The “Is It Unstable? I Forget How Floating-Point Works” Award
Our final award goes to Adam S. who does some things to
floating-point
numbers, then a few more things, then makes them integers and gets a
remainder… or something… but anyway it works, but will it work
everywhere? Who knows?
Overall, a lot of great submissions. I most definitely learned some
things
here.
There will not be any quiz provided tomorrow. Family is coming into
town.
See you again in a week!
I can’t
