The elementary code break

..... continued from here

Twenty20
Two2
You are to see an ass
To2

Shekhar saw something different in the words. Each word had sound of a character.

You are to see an ass
Ur2cns

It was a password !!! Shekhar knew that since You began with a capital letter, it was U and not u.
So he had a password now, but of what? Instinct said it was of an e-mail account. No body was going to spend even a penny on such a game. So it HAD to be a free account. And the account server HAD to be a popular one since there was no clue about the account. So, the most popular e-mail accounts were.... G-mail, Yahoo and Hotmail. Since Shekhar had made a g-mail account for his father few months back, he knew a g-mail pasword should have minimum 8 characters. So g-mail was ruled out. He opened the Yahoo homepage and then paused. He had a password but only a password. "What's the username?", he asked himself. "Mr. Code had given the password, he MUST have given the username. Think."
By now Shekhar's brain was all charged up and working overtime. One look at the Yahoo homepage and another at the note he had received and he got it. Username is always above the password.

for shekhar
Y r s n o e e a u t e s a o a s

The most probable usernames based on the note were "for_shekhar" and"for.shekhar".
As he was about to enter them in the Yahoo homepage, his instincts took over him and he decided to try hotmail.com first.

e-mail address: for_shekhar ; password:Ur2cns ...... username and passwords don't match.

e-mail address: for.shekhar ; password: Ur2cns ....... Welcome Guest.

Shekhar was in. No messages except one in drafts.
Everything was blank except the body and it read:

claudus sanctus
39-6-23-7-51-26-81-87-85-51-71-11-14-59-105-47-12-51-90-36-27-105-68-104-17
Let light and truth prevail

Mr. Code had laid the path for Shekhar and all Shekhar had to do was follow the path. And he was walking fast now. In this code, the only thing known to him was the last line.

Let light and truth prevail. It is the official motto of Patel Hall of Residence,IIT Kharagpur, the place where Shekhar spent his most memorable days as an undergraduate. The actual motto is Lux et Veritas Vincent, which is in Latin.
"I am getting closer Mr. Code". Shekhar now knew what claudus sanctus meant. He just had to translate it from Latin to English. He used the first translator Google offered him and the result was "lame holy". Shekhar knew he broke this code but just to make sure, he translated "sanctus" and got "holy, sacred, saint". He got what he was looking for... "saint".

So he was now left with

lame saint
39-6-23-7-51-26-81-87-85-51-71-11-14-59-105-47-12-51-90-36-27-105-68-104-17

To Robert Langdon, O lame saint would mean The Monalisa, but for Shekhar and everyone who had read it, it would simply mean The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. And anyone who have read Dan Brown would instantly know what these numbers meant. Each number had to be replaced by the 1st letter of the corresponding chapter in 'The Da Vinci Code'.
Shekhar did the same and got:

a h s t e d t t y e a u w t n r r e h o s n n r w

It didn't make sense but then he counted the no. of characters. It was 25, a perfect square. The Transposition Cipher was immediately applied and the message appeared.
Shekhar was now smiling.

The elementary code

It was yet another morning in his new world for Shekhar. About a month ago he had landed in this country for his PhD. And though his resume suggests that he intended to do a high quality research, his friends in IIT Kharagpur knew that the sole reason for him doing PhD was that he could go to USA. What started as a possiblity in 2003, became an obsession by 2006, especially after he failed to get a Foreign Training during the summer of 2006. Perhaps only GOD knew how he would have reacted had he not got through. But that is no one's worry now as Shekhar somehow made it to the US and is very content, to say the least.
He had just finished the first class of the day in Vivian Hall of Engineering, the 7-storeyed building which hosts his department. The Downtown LA looks very beautiful from the top of VHE with the extension of Hollywood Hills forming the backdrop behind the high-rises and the not-so-high rises. After the class he used to sit in his desk in Seaver Science Centre-300. The SSC -300 was an extension of his reearch group. In general, SSC hosts many laboratories and offices. As he settled down in his chair, he saw a note stuck on the board. The content of the note clearly meant it was for him. It read:

for shekhar
Y r s n o e e a u t e s a o a s

"Ok", Shekhar said to himself, "what the hell is this !!"
No one was around to answer. His office-mates had not arrived yet. But even if they did, it was no point asking or doubting them as he was still a newbie in the office and the occasional 'Hi's were all they exchanged. Shekhar himself was a big time introvert which kept on postponing any meaningful communication what-so-ever. He did have some meaningless communications with the girl whose desk was beside his, owing to her talkative nature. But still it was too early for her to play such prank on him. He did doubt her for few moments given that she was a Computer Science Major, specializing in Process Optimization , but that was it. She couldn't have done that. This note was left for him by someone who knew him very well.
Though Shekhar did not pay much attention to studies when he was in IIT, he liked things that were out of norm. And this little note really excited him. He set down to decode it.

for shekhar
Y r s n o e e a u t e s a o a s

the first line clearly was an address to him. All he had to do was to decode the next line. He was not into books much, the total number of books he had read being in single digits. But he had read Dan Brown, all of them, and loved them. And by the nature of the code, he knew that the person behind the code was also a Dan Brown fan. Shekhar never knew that he had to actually apply Dan Brown some day. But nevertheless, he started. He counted the no. of letters in the code which turned out to be 16.
"That's it. You are not so smart, Mr. Code."
Few of the earliest methods of encryption were invented by Julius Caesar. There was Caesar Cipher, which decoded the message by a lateral shift in the alphabets. But Shekhar knew this code is a problem of Caesar Square, now known as The Transposition Cipher. Since 16 is a perfect square, it can be written in a 4X4 matrix. The Code is written across in a square matrix and is then read downwards. When the code was written in a matrix form, it appeared like:

Y r s n
o e e a
u t e s
a o a s

And reading it downwards, Shekhar got

Y o u a r e t o s e e a n a s s

Which, after adding the spaces, became :

You are to see an ass

"What the ****. What the hell does that mean?", Shekhar was not at all pleased. Apparently Mr. Code was not that stupid either. Succumbing to instincts, Shekhar actually looked down the window to see.... well ... if there actually an ass was around. But it was not to be.
"Ok, Mr. Code. You want to play it. Let's play." Shekhar loved such challenges. Not that he was very good at overcoming them, but he loved to try and give it his best shot.

You are to see an ass

"I will see an ass. There can't be an actual ass inside the campus or, for that matter, outside the campus unless someone had a pet ass." If not actual ass, then comes the more widely used meaning of ass. Shekhar now found a different kind of humor in the latter part of his previous statement. "But there are so many of them. What's so special", he thought, coming back to the problem in hand.
It HAS to be something different.
He thought his brains out but no use. He couldn't get anything out of the sentence. "Did I decipher it right?", he doubted his method. "No, it can't be a mere co-incidence that the code contained 16 characters. The words were chosen to make it a perfect square. The method is correct.", he reassured himself.

You are to see an ass

He had by now repeated this phrase umpteenth times in his mind. Still no result. He decided to give himself himself a break. And during the 'break', while his subconscious was still trying to figure out the code, his conscious surfed the net. He opened his favorite sites and after going through his mails, orkut and facebook accounts , he moved on to indiatimes.com for the latest news. India had defeated Pakistan 3-0 in the Twenty20 World Cup Tournament. Now the margin of victory sounded more like a soccer or hockey result, except that it was a cricket match result. The match had ended in a tie and the winner was decided with a bowl-out. As amusing as this may sound, some signals were exchanged between his conscious and subconscious and BANG !!! It wasn't the tournament, but its name and the way it was written that gave him the clue. The code was broken.

...... to be continued

Accently challenged !!!

US is a multi-ethnic country, and my university totally seconds this fact. One can find students from all over the world, of course some forming the majority and the rest minority.
As the class began today, the Teaching Assistant said, " While studying Quantum Mechanics, most students sink..."

O Dear GOD ... where did you send me !!! Why on this earth did I take this course?? Help me.... please give me enough strength so that I don't sink !!!

GOD responded pretty early, some 3 seconds later.
The TA had actually said, "............ most students think.... "
This was the severest accentation of a word that I could comprehend till now.
More 'words' followed...

• Unnergy [Energy]
• Sun [Some]
• Planket [Bracket] ( though I am not sure about this one as she might have said Planck's constant really really fast.)
• Puthential [Potential]

The TA is not an American, by the way. One student asked the question, "Was zero there?"
Nothing wrong with the question except that the question actually asked was, " Why is zero there?"
All this after the now regular

• Khalkhiulate [calculate]
• khool [cool]
• thoo [two]
• zerow [zero]
• fo [four]
• etc.
  

Everytime I have to tell my phone no. , I try to accentise it the American way to help them comprehend it faster and since my no. contains 22, I have to say it like " .... thoo thoo ...." , which, in India, would directly infer that I hate my no.

And then comes my name. The following are some of the ways I am called here:

• A ... what ? [answer] ...O .... ok.... A... Adaaaaaarsh [close but fine]
• Shikhaaaaaaaar [not your fault buddy]
• A.. ok I'll spell out the first name ... A...d...a....r....s...h [ya... tht's me :)]

I am on my way to become Adaaaaaaarsh Shikhaaaaaar.
The study train is gaining speed. I hope I match up to it.

c ya