Every so often I run into some simple (or not-so-simple) cipher and I'm curious what it means. And every time I end up writing the same PHP scripts to shift all the letters and try various vigenere keys. I figured I might as well just write them well once and be done with it. ("Well", is of course, relative.) They're not all that sophisticated, and they're not designed to be "fire-and-forget", they require you to do some analysis yourself and find what fits. But maybe they'll help you with the newspaper cryptogram.

The code is available on github.

Also, to my 12 rss readers, who were inundated by a complete push of all my old articles - I apologize. I redid the guids for the posts, when I rewrote my site this weekend (yes, again), so they were pushed to you as duplicatess.

if 1 * 2 < 3:
    print "hello, world!"