[nikos1121]

Solution to our last puzzle:

BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO CAN LAUGH AT THEMSELVES, FOR THEY SHALL NEVER CEASE TO BE AMUSED. SOURCE UNKNOWN 

[ComputerGuy]

I took a desperate guess at the author. Turns out I was right.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

The second time as farce.

Based on the book I referenced yesterday I wrote an octave script to identify vowels. It was somewhat useful today. Here are the plaintext candidate vowels, and their “vowel score”:

E 22
A 18
S 15
I 14
O 12

There can be more or less than five “vowels” based on this algorithm. These are all the letters with positive scores. I am not sure that this script was particularly useful in this instance, but it was fun to apply it. It did bolster my confidence.

I got it by guessing JFFE JTD MF, with the vowel score adding a little confidence, and later when substituting for I, though the misidentification of S as a vowel was a red herring. Testing with longer texts (whether the data is encrypted or not does not affect the statistics) shows reasonably good results, but R and W can score as vowels as well. With long texts E A I O U generally stand out, though U may score lower than R or W.

[grey_whiskers]

2 min. Most common letter, then the word after the 2nd comma, then the word after that...

[cartan]

Common letter, then the ninth word opened up the rest.