Mike Salsbury’s Blog

The Indian Tabac Super Fuerte is a box-pressed, aged cigar made of
leaves from Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Honduras.  I’m not sure what
size the cigar I reviewed was. It had a torpedo shape with squared sides
from being box-pressed.

The Super Fuerte lit
easily and gave off an earthy aroma from the start.  The flavor and
aroma were consistently earthy.  There was a mild, even peppery
note throughout the cigar that picked up slightly near the end. 
The age of the cigar was evident in its flavor as well.  These are
aged 4 years from the factory, and mine had been sitting in a humidor
since 2004, so it was at least 5-6 years old.

The ash was firm, papery, and medium gray in color.

The
smoke was a pale gray color and of moderate thickness.

The
burn was even right down to the end.  As you can see below, I
smoked it right up to the point where my fingers had enough of the
heat.  (The bottle cap is there to give some
scale.)

An enjoyable cigar all around, but I
wouldn’t call it spectacular.  It gets a solid 6 out of 10 rating
from me.

admin Cigars Indian Tabac Cigar Review, Indian Tabac Super Fuerte Cigar Review, IT Super Fuerte Cigar Review

The Fonseca 5-50 received an 88 rating from Cigar Aficionado and,
according to Cigars International, a “Superior” rating from
Rudman’s guide.

The 5-50 is a 50 ring gauge cigar with a 5
inch length.  The cigars are hand-rolled in the Dominican
Republic.  They’re made from Dominican long filler, a
Dominican/Mexican binder, and a Connecticut shade wrapper.  

The cigar I reviewed lit easily and
burned extremely evenly, almost a perfectly straight burn.  It gave
off generous amounts of wispy white smoke while lit, even when not being
drawn. 

The flavor was very mild but evoked the taste
of coffee in my mind, with a light touch of leather to it.  There
was a light peppery note that started about half way through the
cigar.

The cigar’s construction was very firm and
sturdy.  The ash was similarly very firm and a light to medium gray
color.

It’s a very pleasant cigar to
smoke.  Nothing spectactular, but I’ve nothing at all bad to say
about it either.  I rate it a 7 out of 10, primarily due to the
lack of unpleasant characteristics.  This would make it a
“safe” cigar to smoke, or a good one when I’m distracted by
something else and can’t fully enjoy a more “excellent” and
expensive one.

admin Cigars Fonseca 5-50 cigar review, fonseca cigar rating, fonseca cigar review

An interesting thing happened today.  I was playing the Da Vinci
Code Quest for Eurostar when I reached a puzzle that was based on
ciphers.  The puzzle itself wasn’t that exciting, but look at the
artwork they used in the background behind the puzzle:

Those seemingly cryptic
symbols at the top of the image above should look familiar to you. 
If they don’t, consider the following image from zodiackiller.com of the
infamous “340 Cipher”:

The topmost visible line in the Eurostar
page is approximately the tenth line down in the 340
cipher.

I found it interesting, if not a bit
grisly, that the Eurostar folks are using a serial killer’s cipher as an
illustration for their contest.  Wonder what the Da Vinci Code
folks would think if they knew?

Read more…

admin Life 340 cipher, contest, Da Vinci Code, eurostar, zodiac killer

A while ago, my wife gave me a Lexar JumpDrive Secure 1.0 512MB USB
Flash Memory Drive.  This drive had been given to her by someone
else, who had apparently configured it so that about half the drive’s
storage was in the “secure” zone.

I didn’t realize this
until the drive had become full.  I noticed that Windows XP saw it
as a 256MB FAT32 drive instead of a 512MB drive.  I had wiped the
drive when I received it, so I lost the original software.  A visit
to Lexar’s site got me the “SafeGuard” software Lexar
originally shipped with the drive.  I tried to use this to reset
the drive but it did not work without the original password used to set
up the drive.

Below are pictures of the front and back of the
JumpDrive Secure 1.0:

The device
in question has a part number of JDS512-04-500C in the 512MB model.
Theoretically other models in the same line should unlock this same
way.

I did some searches online and found articles from 2004
indicating that it was POSSIBLE to read the password in cleartext from
the SafeGuard software while it was running in memory, so I decided to
give it a shot.  I figured I had little to lose.  Unfortunately, all of the articles
online were very vague as to the precise details.  I would need to
discover those myself.  After some
time, I figured out what to do.

First, I found the program WinHex
12.9 SR-12 by Stefan Fleischmann on the web.  This program is a
free download for evaluation purposes.  I installed it.  Then
I went to the Tools menu and selected “Open RAM’.  I then
chose the “SafeGuard” process.  I went back to SafeGuard
and entered a password that was unlikely to appear in the program’s
memory (e.g., “mes123″).  I got an error indicating that
this was the wrong password.

I clicked the “find” icon
(binoculars) on the toolbar.  I asked the program to search
SafeGuard’s memory for the “mes123″ password I’d just typed
in.  It found that password near the phrase “The password
reminder is” in memory.  A few bytes after that, I saw the
word “test” sitting all by itself among a bunch of
blanks. 

I went back to SafeGuard and entered
“test” as the password.  The drive unlocked
immediately.  I had found it.

Read more…

admin General Computer Topics Lexar Jump Drive Secure password recovery, lost JumpDrive Password, recover lost password

Based on some of the questions I received in my email related to the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google, it sounds like some of you might find this article of interest.  When you’re looking for something specific on Google, there are some very simple tips that can greatly increase your chances of finding it.

admin General Computer Topics advanced google searching techniques, advanced web searches, google searches

I was sitting in the den the other night in front of the PC, as I
often am, when I heard what very much sounded like someone drumming
their fingernails on the window.  I looked outside and no one was
there.  I sat back down at my desk and heard the same sound coming
from the living room across the hall. I got up and looked out that
window and again saw nothing.  Soon, I heard it from the dining
room window on the other end of the house.  (These are all
consecutive windows going around the house in order, by the
way.)

I figured someone was screwing around with me, so quietly
crept back to the dining room window where the sound was still being
made. I peaked through the wood blinds in time to see
“something” disappear.  I still wasn’t quite sure what it
was, but I was guessing it was now an insect or bird since it was too
small to be human.

Later on, the sound came from the den again and
this time I saw the source.  It was a small yellow bird that, for
no reason I can figure, flies up to the window, latches on, and pecks at
it with his beak rapidly.  If anyone approaches, he flies
off.  Otherwise he stays and pecks a while.  Here’s the little
prankster’s face:

As you might imagine, this has
caught the attention of our two cats, who would very much like for us to
open the window and let the little fellow inside where they could
“play” with him.  (And given that his pecking woke me up
this morning, I’m REALLY tempted to help him inside for them.  My
stepdaughter is also, as the bird did the same thing to her today,
too.)  Colby, for example, has made a dive at the glass several
times now to get to the bird.  Here he is just before one of those
attempts:

And here he is just after the bird has
flown off:

He REALLY wants to play with that
bird.  If I can get any good cat/bird interaction video I’ll post
it later.

admin Life bird pecking on window, birds and cats, orange cat, yellow bird

In the last installment, I told you something about the shortcuts and general flow of execution of the custom Visual Basic program I’ve written to try to crack The Zodiac Killer’s thus-far-unbroken cipher known colloquially as “The 340 Cipher”.  This time around I’ll tell you a bit more about the program itself.

The program makes all of its “deciphering” decisions based on what I’m calling a “gated scoring algorithm” intended to expend the least possible effort determining that a potential “decode” of the message really does look like a decode.  The algorithm works something like this:

• First, the program looks and counts the frequency of letters in the “decoded” message.  If the letters which appear most commonly in normal English writings appear in approximately the right frequency in the message, it generates a base score.  If that base score is too low (i.e., there are not enough of the most-common letters in the message), scoring stips here before too many processor cycles are used.
• If the program finds “approximately” the right frequency of letters in the message, it then gets more granular about the letters it’s looking for.  It makes sure that in the decoded message it finds the approximately-correct frequency of As, Bs, Cs, etc.  Each letter that is occurring in approximately the right frequency (+ or – 20% of normal English text) gets a higher score than those which don’t.  Any letter appearing “too often” deducts from the total score (e.g., lots of “Zs” would drop the overall score).  If letters appear in the “decoded” message in approximately the right frequency, scoring continues. Otherwise, it stops here before more cycles are wasted.
• If the frequency of individual letters looks good, the program looks at the most common bigraphs in the English language and compares these to the message.  If it finds approximately the right percentage, scoring moves on. Otherwise, it stops.
• If the frequency of bigraphs looks about right, it then looks at a more granular list of bigraphs, trigraphs, and quadgraphs and scores the message based on whether these seem to be appearing in about the right amounts for a normal English text.  If so, the score is increased. If not, it isn’t.  If the score isn’t sufficiently high enough, no more scoring effort is performed.
• Assuming the breakdown of bigraphs, trigraphs, and quadgraphs is within a reasonable tolerance from “normal” English text, the program then pores through a 20,000-word English dictionary, going from the longest to the shortest words. This dictionary provides a score for each word, with added weight given to those words the killer used often that don’t occur normally in English writing (like the killer’s tendency to misspell “having” as “haveing”).  This part of the scoring process can take several seconds of elapsed time to complete, so it is only done by the program when there is a very good chance of finding lots of English words in the text.

I call this a “gated scoring algorithm” because the potential “decode” of the message must achieve a certain predefined score before it can get through the “gate” into a more time-consuming scoring method.  This method allows the program to “fly” past potential decodes that are worthless (like something that generates nothing but “QZCZQ” type text) and spends the most time on “decodes” that statistically look like English text.

Read more…

admin General Computer Topics 340 cipher, break ciphers, breaking ciphers, cipher program, crackciphers, decode ciphers, zodiac killer

I was reading Wired yesterday when they mentioned a Flash-based game called “Johnny Rocketfingers 2” on Newgrounds.com.  It’s a graphic adventure game that’s relatively short and a little bit challenging. I finally beat it late last night and thought I’d share the solution here in case anyone gets stuck trying to finish it.  (By the way, in case you didn’t know already, the game has very graphic depictions of violence and other objectionable content, so I don’t recommend it for anyone under the age of 18 or anyone easily offended.)

Here’s a complete walkthrough for the game:

The “original” Johnny Rocketfingers cartoon is quite a bit more crude, not as well drawn and animated, and even more offensive than the second.

admin Games flash game, johnny rocketfingers, wired magazine

As I mentioned in yesterday’s article, I am working to crack the “340 cipher” sent to police by the Zodiak Killer, who operated in the 1960s and 1970s in California. I also mentioned the assumptions I’ve made about the message (which could well be wrong) and the staggering size of the potential solution space. Clearly I needed to shortcut that 100-year process as much as possible since it’s very unlikely I’ll live to be 140 to see the end of it.

Some of the shortcuts I can take include:

• I know that all of the symbols can’t translate to the exact same letter, though it’s highly likely that several of them do represent specific letters. Thus, I can (probably) discard any potential message key that has “too many” of the same letter. That reduces the size of the solution space a good bit.
• I know that when the message is cracked, it’s highly likely that there will be a pretty standard breakdown of the letters as seen in typical English texts. By spending a minimal amount of time on any key that generates a “possible solution” of the message whose character breakdown is too much “off” from that breakdown, I can speed up my trip through the solution space.
• I know that when the message is cracked, it should contain a certain percentage of the most popular bigrams (2-letter combinations) and trigrams (3-letter combinations) found in English texts. By checking a possible solution against those percentages, I can avoid wasting time on “solutions” which are filled with unlikely bigrams (such as “QZ”) and trigrams (”QZQ”).
• I know that the message is most likely written in English, so I can build a dictionary of the English language from online sources and compare any possible solution which has the right breakdown of characters, bigrams, and trigrams against that dictionary to see how many real words are in the message. The more words we find in the possible solution we’re looking at, the more likely I’ll have found the “right” solution.
• Based on my analysis of the enciphered message, there are some symbols that occur too frequently to be likely to be letters like Z, Q, or X. When trying potential keys, I can discard those which are attempting to replace those symbols with characters they’re unlikely to be.

Not being a mathemetician (I blame the lousy Calculus teachers I had at Syracuse University for squelching my confidence in my ability to do math), I have no idea just how much the above will cut down my solution space. Still, I expect it slices the space down pretty handily overall. To implement the above rules, I developed a scoring system that requires a potential solution to pass through a number of “gates” before going on to an analysis that is more thorough or computer time consuming. The scoring method works something like this:

• I generate a possible message key.
• I attempt to decrypt the message using that key.
• I run the potential solution through a character counter to verify that it has approximately the right number of the “most common” characters. If not, I move on to the next key.
• I compare the number of individual characters found against their typical frequencies in English. If there are too many or too few of a given character than expected, I move on to the next key.
• I compare the message against the most common bigrams and trigrams used in English. If those don’t occur in approximately the right proportions, I move on to the next key.
• I compare the message to a dictionary of 20,000 English words. I weight the scoring in favor of larger words, and heavily in favor of words the killer used most frequently (especially those he liked to misspell). The more words I find and the larger the words are, the higher the “score” I get for the message.
• I analyze the percentage of the characters in the solution that are “swallowed up” by the words I found in the message. The higher the percentage of “words to overall characters” the more likely this key is to have broken the message, so the higher the score will be.

In the next installment, I’ll talk more about the program’s logic to try and accomplish the above.

admin General Computer Topics 340 cipher, cipher breaking, decrypting, zodiac killer

I recently purchased They Might Be Giants’ “Venue Songs”
album and DVD from their web site.  When I saw Apple’s recent ad
campaign with the PC vs. Mac theme, I thought to myself, “This is
no PC! This is a deranged millionaire!”  No wonder the
commercials seem to be filled with half-truths and
misinformation…

admin Cool Web Sites apple ads, deranged millionaire, mac vs. pc, They Might Be Giants, TMBG