Countdown to PDC2008: Poems, Pre-Conferences, Prosise and Petzold!

The Discussion

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  If you figure out the solution to the Hard Hat Challenge, post the question that you discovered and its answer on this forum. First correct post will win a very limited edition PDC2008 t-shirt (it's the one we use internally at Microsoft). If you want to see it, check out last week's show: http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/Countdown-to-PDC2008-Early-Bird-Discount-Ends-August-15/

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  Which PDC2008 contest ends on October 17th, 2008?
  http://microsoftpdc.com/Social/Contest/ShowOff.aspx
  
  Ha!
  
  Phil@liebsoft.com
  http://www.liebsoft.com
  

• 

  Congratulations, Liebsoft! You're the winner of our second ever PDC2008 Hard Hat Challenge. And you answered 6 hours and 1 minute after we posted the show...that's 11 minutes faster than the first Hard Hat Challenge, by the way. I can tell that I'm going to have to up the difficulty level on the next Challenge. Drop us some e-mail at pdccount (at) microsoft.com when you have a chance, and we'll coordinate your t-shirt.
  
  Feel free to explain how you solved the puzzle, or if you want to let others figure it out themselves, that's fine too.

• 

  DON'T READ IF YOU WANT TO FIGURE IT OUT YOURSELF...
  
  I first started thinking that the codes were some sort of UUENCODE (i.e. base64), but these didn't produce much (not enough characters).  Then I started thinking about the URL comment and the short length of the codes and the fact that they had no capitalization (a requirement of the encoding process).  Then I heard the "tiny" phrase and then realized that your were referring to TINYURL URLs.  Next, looks at what the URLS were and put them on two different tabs of IE 7 and flipped between them.  I saw there was a difference and thought this might be an XOR.  Starting looking for graphic code to do the subtraction and found: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/xordemo.htm and was able to "kind of" see the text, but not enough to read it (ARGGHHH!).  Then found a C# program: http://www.codersource.net/csharp_image_processing_xor.aspx But, the EXE embedded in the project was broken (double ARGGGHHH!).  Then decided to load the project in VS2008, compile it and try it out.  So far, so good, got the program to run in the debugger, but the XOR image did not fit in the window.  Fortunately, I have a VERY large monitor and after maximizing got the message.  Next, went to Google, searched the PDC site for the date ("17") and...the answer.
  
  It was a LOT of fun, even with the ARGHHH's