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.

>>405 tripcodes are designed to be a useful tool in establishing an identity, not a secure one. The length of the #hash is, however, a factor in how long it would take to crack.

>>405
anything shorter than about 6 characters is easy to crack.
anything that's all alphanumeric is easy to crack.
by "easy to crack" i mean it'd take less than a week on my crappy slow computer.