On Sep 25, 2004, at 6:27 PM, Bill Guindon wrote:

> On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 22:54:07 +0900, Ruby Quiz 
> <james / grayproductions.net> wrote:
>
>> 1.  Please do not post any solutions or spoiler discussion for this 
>> quiz until
>> 48 hours have passed from the time on this message.
>
> Maybe a fixed cutoff would be best... nothing before Sunday at **pm
> (GMT or UTC) no matter when it's posted.

One of the early quizzes for the Perl Quiz of the Week was to take an 
e-mail on STDIN and determine if it was okay to send spoilers yet.  Do 
we need to do that one too?  ;)

I believe the assumption is that eventually I'll be a day or two late.  
When that happens the No-Spoiler Period will still function as intended 
the way I have it now.

I actually changed the period to 48 hours to make it super easy to 
calculate at a glance.  Just read the Date: field and add two days.

Also, discussion is not a problem.  Just hold off on the spoilers, 
hints and solutions until the 48 hours pass.  Everything I've seen so 
far has been fine.

>> 5.  Convert the numbers from step 4 back to letters:
>>
>>         CODEI NRUBY LIVEL ONGER
>
>> Solutions to this quiz should accept a message as a command line 
>> argument and
>> encrypt or decrypt is as needed.  It should be easy to tell which is 
>> needed by
>> the pattern of the message, but you can use a switch if you prefer.
>
> What if you fed it the output from above, exactly as is?  Either
> you're assuming that "normal" text is fed into it, or you have
> seriously overestimated my regex abilities ;)

I'm a reasonable interface kind of guy.

When I'm typing in a message to be encoded, I don't want to think in 
all caps and five character increments, so I won't.  When I'm decoding 
a message, I know nothing about that string of letters and thus will 
enter it as is (probably with copy and paste).

Knowing that, my program has the perfect clue to tell what I want, 
without me prompting it.  I like my software to read my mind like this. 
  It makes me feel loved.  :)  If this bothers you, or you already feel 
loved enough, feel free to use a switch.  I won't mind.

This was just a tidbit I threw in for fun.  It's not the heart of the 
quiz, obviously.

> An amusing little puzzle.  You're off to a great start :)

Thank you.  I really appreciate that.  I enjoy little code challenges 
and I hope others are enjoying them too.

Tune in next week...  :D

James Edward Gray II