We know we have been quite erratic posting questions of late. Both of us have been a little tied up with various other things going on in life.

The current flurry of questions came up because

We have a ton of questions that we haven’t answered yet. We will put up the answers as soon as possible.

Update 1 - We’ve gotten questions about whether old questions will stay open or not.

Ladies and Gents,

Boiledbeans turned 4 years old today!

Most people would expect us to be stereotypical and say that it feels like yesterday when we posted our first question. But, it actually does not. Srikanth and I have gone through so much of landscape change in the past four years that it feels like we posted our first question ages ago!

What has not changed though, is the most awesome user-base Boiledbeans enjoys. I mean, How often do we bump into a quiz blog with multiple users clocking over 1000 points on the board? How often do you see a blog with users answering hundreds of questions correctly in a row? How often do you visit a blog that has users super excited about points and medals? How often do you read a blog with users pouring in awesome guest questions?

Not too often, I am sure!

Srikanth and I would like to thank all of our users, for keeping us running for all these years.

We have not missed posting a question till date and we do not plan on missing one either!

Thank you!

To celebrate, many things

1. We will have a special multi-question puzzle round coming this week
2. We will be giving out some Boiledbeans goodies.
   Not t-shirts this time, but something cool (you will see when you get it :) )
   To receive the goodies, please fill out this form.
   We are going to keep it open for the whole of this week and start sending out stuff starting next week.
3. We are promoting AutoRaja to start posting questions on our behalf!
   He still cannot find questions for us, but we have been sending him to Skynet for training and that day is not too far

Starting next week, AutoRaja will post questions at a fixed time everyday.
The way it works is simple, we will make a buffer of questions from which AutoRaja will pick one and post.We are currently filling up the buffer, so, we request you send in some fully framed guest questions.

*The Einstein in the pic is 1 year old. It was gift we received for marking 3 years of Boiledbeans!

At Boiledbeans, we believe that “new age” web-designs have insulted their rich heritage by ignoring the path they have taken to reach the jing-bang era of Web 2.0 or 3.0 whatever. The web is nothing without animated gifs, bright backgrounds and Comic Sans. So, we have today decided to go back to our web-design roots by launching this new design.

Hit Ctrl + F5. Multiple times.

You like it or not, we are keeping it!

Damn these “new-age” browsers, they stopped supporting the blink tag! Traitors!

Thanks

Edit: Happy fools day, folks.

We are noticing some back-end issues and commenting features are not functioning properly.
We are working to get it fixed.

We will keep questions open longer.

Thanks for your patience.

P.S: Thanks to Shwetha for letting us know about this!

Yes, Srikanth successfully completed another trip around the sun. Lets all join hands and congratulate him on this joyous occasion!

Blast! No Iframe support! What are you in? 1960?

Just a note, the list of winners of the linked-list series is up. Please let me know if there’s anything amiss :)

Lots of people tried the treasure hunt, but only 6 people finished it! It was a fairly difficult puzzle, and if you finished it, please to put a pat on your back!

The Winners:

**Dha **finished the treasure hunt first! Congrats Dha! You have won a Boiledbeans t-shirt!

Logik finished very closely behind Dha. Both Dha and Logik get 5 points!

The following people also finished the hunt and get 3 points each.
udupendra
shrik
AnthraX101
Rogi
Dha, Rogi and AnthraX101, please leave a comment here so we can give you points.

**
**
Answers:Stage 1: The message was a rot 13 cipher. Decrypting it read

Step 1: Do what the Oracle said second
Step 2: Do what the owl says
Step 3: Go to Step 2
What the Oracle asked Neo in the second movie was to “go to the Source”. So, if you saw the source of Boiledbeans, you could see an ASCII art owl which looked like this

/ ___ ___
/ / @ / @ \
\ _/_/ /
_//||
/ /\\//
| |\\\
\ \\\
______/\\
||||

Roman Ramanujan run javascript for fun?
Stage 2: Do what the owl says.
Roman Ramanujan = Ramanujan Number in Roman numerals, which is 1729 in Roman Numerals is MDCCXXIX.
Javascript being the next hint, owl asked you to look for a Javascript file with that name.

So, there was a javascript file named MDCCXXIX.js included in Boiledbeans source.

Stage 3: The Javascript file had the following contents
/*

The year just passed, pass the new year
Mod it by 1e3 before so its near
Fruit goes in the bar, oh dear!
Leave the extension and have no fear

*/

function takeIt(n){
return n
So, if you look at the poem, it asked you to pass 2011 % 1000 into the function and put the result in the bar.
So, you had to go to http://boiledbeans.net/89/

Stage 4:
There, you say a blowfish + a alphanumeric string and an equation.
The equation has roots -sqrt(3) and 3.

You cannot do much with the first root. But, if you add the 2nd root, i.e. 3 to the alphanumeric string, you will get
fWE3v7

Now, the blowfish is actually the logo of bit.ly
So, when you concatenate bit.ly with the string, you get

http://bit.ly/fWE3v7

Which is the final answer!

Congrats to those who made it here!

Happy New Year folks!

We wish you a very bright and awesome 2011! 2010 was a lot of fun for us and hope you had fun too.

We had planned a lot of special events for 2010, but we were never able to get those things up to release quality. So, to change things for 2011, lets start the new year with a small treasure hunt!

Decipher the message below to get started with the hunt!

1. The first person to solve the puzzle will get 5 points and a surprise award!
2. The puzzle will be kept open for 2 days after the first person solves it
3. Anyone else who solves the puzzle(while its open) gets 3 points
4. Your runlength will NOT be affected if you do not answer this puzzle.

IMPORTANT: When you reach the treasure (end of the puzzle), follow instructions which you can find there.

So get cracking!

First clue:
=========== Start Message ==============

Fgrc 1: Qb jung gur Benpyr fnvq frpbaq
Fgrc 2: Qb jung gur bjy fnlf
Fgrc 3: Tb gb Fgrc 2

=========== End Message ==============

Update (2nd Jan)
Hints:
Stage 1: Gur Benpyr nfxrq Arb gb tb gb gur fbhepr va gur frpbaq zbir.
Stage 2: 1e3 is 1000

Logik(5), udupendra(3), shrik(3) and Rogi(3)

Good news everyone,

In the spirit of “Holiday Cheer” and all that, we are shutting down AutoRaja until Jan 5th. There will be a question everyday but it will not be moderated and comments will not be closed until Jan 5th. You can come back from your vacation(s) and still post answers on questions you might have missed.

Happy Holidays!

Gremlins ate your comments.

We’re working to get them back. Stay tuned…

Update: In the meantime, all comments are disabled till further notice. We’ll give you more time to post answers later. Thanks for your patience…

Update 2: Alright, comments are back. Answers are open again, as most of you noticed. We will now return to our regularly scheduled programming…