testjutsu

In the spirit of recent puzzles/challenges, I thought I might throw in one of my own. In high school, my class was given an exercise to come up with a coded message that the rest of the class would have to work out the cipher to.

I didn’t take it that seriously at the time and put in some sort of lame effort at home that afforded me the most time in front of the Commodore-64 instead. Most other kids did the same. Clearly the teacher had been hoping that someone in the class was a secret genius and would put together something brilliant. His disappointment when this did not occur was palpable.

I got thinking afterward that it was a wasted opportunity. I quite like puzzles, I like being creative, but I’d never put the two together. I spent a little bit of time coming up with something that might have been worthy of the assignment. I never did anything with it, or showed it to anyone, but I was reasonably sure that no one in that class at least would be able to figure it out. I should have put my money where my mouth was then. I might have been able to turn a profit betting people they couldn’t solve it in a given time limit. Ah well, hindsight is 20/20 as they say.

Instead, I present my code and the message it contains and invite you to work out the key. If you do figure it out, please don’t post the solution, but  I’d be really interested to hear about how you went about attacking the problem, so by all means leave a comment.

The message: the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

IMPORTANT EDIT: In a moment of paranoia I double-checked my key and noted that there is a small change to the decoded message. In the coded text, ‘jumps’ is actually ‘jumped’. To those of you who have started, I apologise profusely. This means that there is an extra letter to the message than you thought you were dealing with, and rather than an ‘s’, you have a ‘d’ and an ‘e’.

The revised decoded message is:

The message: the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

The coded message:
n g o c w u o y j   r
  f l l l q m v   e k
  o i y k b v   r x a
  k s e a t   d i b o
  v h a v   e u i p l

edit: James Bach has rightly pointed out that I could have worded my challenge a little more clearly.

There are an infinite number of keys that can associate your output with your input. For instance, the key might be simply to look at the first letter in the top left, and “n” means “quick brown fox…”

My intention is that people would attack this problem as though they did not know what the message was in an attempt to resolve the letters presented into the answer provided. I had a particular key in mind when I put it together, so the letters do resolve into the message given.

Enjoy.

Update
Okay, so a few people have asked for hints.
Here’s the deal – I’ll post a few hints, but I’m curious to know what you’ve tried and what you thought. I’ve posted one hint below. I will post more, but I’d like to know – How did you approach the problem? What strategies did you employ? What effect did the hint(s) have?

Hint 1

Hint 2

Hint 3

Congratulations to Rushmila Islam, who has at least worked out the message component, if not the complete cipher (which is trivial once the message is in-hand). Here’s another pangram (one with all the letters this time).

The coded message:
k e i f v a l p q u w
  b m a g n z i e c e

  m g d r w o o t a h
  y j a w u x a g e s

I kinda wish I’d put this one up first now. It looks trickier
Rushmila (or anyone else) – care to post the decoded message?

To borrow from Groucho Marx – QTP, I’ve had a wonderful time, but  this wasn’t it.

So thankfully I’ve been able to step away from QTP for the moment. Given that QTP doesn’t recognise Firefox so well after v3.6, and since we use a firefox plugin for most of our mobile testing (FireMobileSimulator), yours truly gets to switch to Selenium instead. I’m thankful for having had the opportunity to work on QTP, mostly so I have a better understanding of its limitations and shortcomings. I can argue more coherently against what seems to be in most cases, a ridiculous waste of money.

I view QTP a bit like one of those unfortunate bears in a Chinese bile farm. You can see how at birth it had the potential to be something majestic and powerful, but instead it languishes in a cage, irreparably twisted and deformed by years of abuse by the ignorant.

In comparison, Selenium while not without challenges of its own, has been by and large a real joy to use. For starters, having any number of fully fledged languages to work in is almost unbelievable after having toiled in VBScript land for far too long. In fact, the first problem I faced was which language do I go with?

I ended up choosing Java and JUnit, mostly because it’s what the current dev team codes with, and I simply cannot be arsed copping the flak I would get from management for introducing another language into the picture (as wonderful as jruby and jython are, I’m sure).

I didn’t realise quite how much thinking in VBS had stunted my thinking in other languages. I do a bit of coding in my spare time, but as far as automation coding goes, it took me a good few days to get comfortable again remembering the power that a real language gives you. I was all set to start importing test data from excel when a timely tweet (and subsequent blog post) from Adam Goucher reminded me that Java has these nifty things called Properties that you can import. (This is why tools like twitter should be allowed in the workplace btw – okay my RSS reader would have picked it up, but not before I’d wasted a lot of time).

It’s been a bit over 3 years since I last looked at Selenium. It doesn’t ‘feel’ all that different, but it does seem a lot easier to work with than I remember it being. Within a couple of days I’d whipped together a script to cut down some checks that took 4 hours manually to a little under 2 minutes. W00t.

I added loggingSelenium to my test setup and now have some pretty colours that light up for people who are impressed by that sort of thing. I’m now in the process of putting together a few more tests and a framework that will support them and their inevitable expansion.

There are a bunch of setup how-to’s out there, so I won’t be doing that, but I will drag together some of the more useful links that I’ve found. Stay tuned