Crack the code and Win $5

Hello you people! I've just finished writing my fourth encryption tool, called 4CRYPT, the successor to the Enigma, D3N0V0crypt and 3NCRYPT0R. It's written in JAVA and probably the most advanced one of the four. Unlike the first three (Enigma has very limited and basic numeric key support, the first two didn't have any.) 4CRYPT has support for any ASCII based key of arbitrary length. It does encryption on a binary level, I can't tell you more or it will not be fun. (Hint: I didn't use native bit shifts, but I created my own shifting functions.)

Well good luck! Email me at hochanhong at yahoo dot com dot sg with your answer. If it's correct, you get $5 SGD, payable through either cash (if you're from singapore and I know you) or PayPal (this challenge is open globally).

You must get the original message by decrypting this. The key used here is "cheesesticks".

795A351318708679634545A16FBABEEFD0EDEB6320DC2FADC9B17B7BC
F3297A290FA50DFC018F6D3184BB160D4AC60043A302926097A9BCE28
76488473DAF68DC8EBB9383F5F66F2CF6C7B83C3299745963C4E1BD5CE
B74E4A5BA425D4C46E117F152F1B4A749F6B26091CA37FBAA1E7D2E0EB
6027DB7CF9D5B12369862B80A29DE11CC4CE04F1D74A41A4709ABE2E56
52322D224A70D2CE263559CC7EC8AFC9

(Line breaks do not matter, it is a continuous string.)

To help you, here is some text encrypted with the same algorithms.

The plaintext is:

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

and the key used is "apple".
And encrypting will get you the string:

403D68BA0B61C3203887C2D8E924BD083307E26F3A2059D69A25C5A
6289BA2DE72B16F66346013F3253AB7

Good luck! First person will get the prize!

| HCH - 10:18 PM |




Google likes junk food?

I know that this post may not appeal to the people who have no interest in SEO, but I'd like to share a revelation I had. Anyone who is more enlightened, maybe you could shed some light on this situation because I find it rather puzzling, to say the least.

Well here's the deal. I'm still expanding on my niche blogging empire. I have a few white hat blogs (there are links to them scattered on this blog, go find them if you will), and a few black hat blogs (which I will not link to to avoid incriminating evidence). I set up the blogs in batches of threes. Here are the major differences between those blogs.

White Hat Blogs

• Three of them in this batch
  
• Set up between 7th and 9th February
• Good, Meaningful niches
• Adsense implemented very early (around 2 days after creation)
  
• Full of quality original content that I took time to research and write myself
• Content added slowly in a post every few days.
  
• Well optimized for keywords in content, title and URL
• Obtained a few backlinks by answering Yahoo! Answers and friends blogs (related).
  

Black Hat Blogs

• Three of them in this batch
  
• All set up on 15th February
  
• Optimized for keywords in search terms that don't make sense but get traffic
  
• All content dumped in in 10 minutes
• Content is badly written and mostly scraped and rearraged (scrape and rearrage the words), keywords rich content.
• Obtained quite a lot of crappy backlinks through comment spam (on a do-follow site)

Now the weird thing is, up till now (17 Feb 08), only 1 out of 3 of my whitehat blogs (i must have spent over 5 hours on each one) have been indexed by google. That blog took 6 days to get indexed.

My Blackhat blogs, on the other hand, are faring much better. Two out of three are already indexed, and it took less than 2 days. I'm shocked and appalled by this, because it means that google actually likes to eat crap instead of the good food that I'm offering it.

If this goes on in this trend then I guess I'll favor the dark side, because they have money (and cookies too).

| HCH - 11:23 AM |




Burn out Bright

Hello everyone and thanks for stopping by. I'm glad you are here and i've got something exciting to show you. For those of you that have been subscribing to this blog's atom feed, here's a reason to celebrate - repeated monotony now has it's own Burned RSS Feed! Yes, i've decided to burn my feed and you can find the burned feed right here (note that the anchor text isnt even keyword optimized! Now why would i do that?) (p.s. those who have no idea what i'm talking about go google "SEO").

For those that already subscribe to my blog's feed you may consider adding the burned version. For those that don't know what a feed is, think of it as a kind of "detached" blog. Posts are literally "fed" to feedreaders (there can be many types of them) who process it and display it. Okay that explaination wasn't too useful. What the hell. Read this.

Have fun and enjoy!
Feeeeeder :)

| HCH - 7:03 PM |




Sowing seeds and putting eggs in baskets

After reading up on SEO such an irrelevant post title makes me feel uncomfortable but this blog isn't trying for the SERPS so it's okay. Anyway i've spent most of my free time these few days trying to kickstart my online passive income via blogging. I've created three blogs in completely different and unrelated niches. I don't know if putting them here is shooting myself in the foot but I guess this is the only way to get them indexed fast. A risk I'm willing to take.

So what's new? Well the latest coming up are two brand new blogs. The first is a guide on how to get better sleep. Content is, as of yet, 100% original (meaning i put in good time to write it, readers better be happy i'm giving you good stuff). The second is on fun stuff to do on the computer. Both are basically just some tips and tricks and mostly the common sense that some people lack.

I'm aiming to churn out some content (posts), optimize keywords for search engines, get good traffic via social bookmarking and slap on adsense and leave it to rot, hopefully all done by the end of the third week of february, so i can claim passive earnings while i pursue other fun things during the remainder of my holidays.

| HCH - 3:09 PM |




More Green Stuff

So I was reading some articles on the internet about making money online, search engine optimization and such (ive been reading that stuff for days already.) So since I felt I had a good amount of head knowledge already I thought it was time to put that into practice. Thus, for the first time yet, I've decided to put in some effort into making passive online income. James is already making good bucks and I figure I can pocket a few easy dollars if I put in a little effort. But I'm not ready to invest in my own private servers and I don't intend to put in hours on end to create some wonder php project again.

This time, I created a little gardening blog called Gardening For Beginners. I know thats probably one of the nuttiest niches to try to get into but I'll never know if I don't give it a shot. A blogger blog is free and has practically no upkeep cost, takes minutes to setup and lasts indeterminably. Basically I plan to slap the blog with some tips and tricks for noob gardeners and leave it to rot, after optimizing it for keywords and slapping ads on it. No harm checking it out, and if it works then I'm on to making the internet a worse place.

After all, there's only enough space for either money or morals. And sure I want people to get relevant, useful search results. But am I willing to give that up for some of the "green stuff?" (heh heh).

So just check it out and feel free to give me a few relevant backlinks too, if you wish.

P.S. this post is also to help those nice search engines find this site, and a stepping stone to greater success.

| HCH - 3:34 PM |




Insert relevant search keyword here

Chinese new year has been pretty busy. The usual visitations and such. In perspective, the money from the ang baos and such become pretty irrelevant. I think I'm eating too much heaty food, I hope I don't fall sick. Anyway it's day 2 of the chinese new year and we're relaxing at home because we've done all the bai nian yesterday.

A little peek on what i've been up to:



Switchfoot concert! One night of insane fun! Doubt they would be coming back to singapore in a good while but it was fun while it lasted.



Oil lamp! I made an oil lamp out of an old chicken essence bottle which runs on a mixture of used and unused cooking oil. With mop hair as a wick, it burns extremely well, it is resistant to slight winds and does not extinguish easily. It is also very efficient, being able to burn for well over 8 hours on a full bottle. It smells like oily food too. The flame size can be adjusted by the wick length. The only disadvantage is that oil flames are very, very sooty.



Random.



My chili plant! Got it from a YA service (everyone got one). It's now about a week old already and growing at a good rate. For the first few days it didn't germinate and I thought it had died. But I kept watering it and about three days ago it sprouted. It's now roughly 4cm and I'm going to transplant it soon. Got a bag of topsoil already.



ARROWS! I've not stopped playing with them. As I experimented, my arrows grew in complexity. These two are my latest arrows. As you can see, I've switched back to my 2 fletches instead of 3 fletches because it seemed that they were actually more stable and gave less drag too. To compensate for the loss of 1 fin, I made the remaining ones thicker and slightly wider. I bought a new pack of 12 inch skewers, longer and thicker than the old 8 inch ones. I'm now using 5 rubber bands to launch my new arrows, most of them can punch clean through shoeboxes and tissue boxes, penetrating up to 4 tissue boxes in a row. It's getting increasing difficult to draw back on so many rubber bands but it's worth it. Metal tips allow my new arrows to last longer (since they don't blunt as much as wooden tips) and penetrate harder material, up to 1/4 inch into wood boards and can shatter glass. One problem was that if the arrow impacted a hard surface or hit at an angle, it was prone to warp or even snap. Often the arrowheads would break off with a portion of the shaft. To strengthen my arrows, I duct taped to tip just like people used to use hardwood. The grooves allow the arrow to be properly attached.

I also made signal flares - arrows that have sparkler heads. Since sparklers do not extinguish easily under strong winds, these were perfect for lighting up the night sky. As of now I've only fired one flare since firing it would mean losing the entire arrow as well. The main problem is getting the sparkler to ignite, this was partially solved by strapping on a few match heads to provide ignition heat. Once the sparkler was alight, the arrow could be fired normally or vertically and would create a fiery trail as it traversed across the sky. The short bit of sparkler meant that the arrow would usually be extinguished by the time it hit the ground.

I want to make some passive online income. A few months ago I used google adsense on this blog, however I didnt optimize it and since this is a personal blog I didn't really earn much, in fact, slightly over three dollars to be exact. Disheartened, I removed the ads. Well the ads are not coming back here. Instead, I'm going to create some niche sites, optimize them for keywords and get a few backlinks, hopefully get into page 1 of the SERPs, then monetize them with ads.

Well long post. Goodbye!

| HCH - 11:55 PM |




Uncle Sam Says...


Hahahaha.... Switchfoot concert was fun!

| HCH - 1:24 AM |