I've been tinkering with Python all day today... it's pretty slick. Just for practice, I tried to cobble together a tripcode decoder that would let you have "real" words in your tripcode as !WAHa and Sling and others do, and it actually came out better than I thought it would be. I'm aware there's already a program that does this, but if memory serves me, it's Windows-only and in Japanese besides. My script is kind of dumb in the way it goes about things -- it basically just tears through random strings until it finds one that fits -- but I've tested it repeatedly and it seems to work. If you'd like to check it out, nab it here:
http://www.anre.org/crap/detripper.bz2

Of course, you may need to modify the hashbang line depending on where Python is on your machine, and don't forget those execute bits, people... Use "-h" for help.

First person to ask how to get this to run on Windows gets pointed and laughed at.

If you just want to read the code without downloading and unpacking the file...
http://www.anre.org/crap/detripper

thanks!

What you live or die by when doing this is the speed of your crypt() implementation. The default ones are often horribly slow. If you're only doing 4000 crypts per second, you'll have to wait a long time for those codes. Tripper+ uses the UFC crypt() implementation, and it pushes about 64000 crypts per second per gigahertz on an Athlon processor. I've used some assembly-optimized crypt() code from John the Ripper to get up to 110000 crypts per second per gigahertz.

I don't know how hard it is to interface those from Python, though. I see there's a Perl wrapper for the UFC code, so maybe somebody made one for Python, too.