One of the things that I initially thought when I saw this obfu was that the llama copyright warning in the __DATA__ section was a significant part of the obfu; however, as Grinder's dissection above shows, it's just there.

Not to belittle Erudil's work, but I think an interesting take off of this would be to add just enough words to make the copyright notice into a pangram (a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet), and then modify:

$~ = (('a'..'z'))[rand 26];
[download]

into something that randomly picks a letter from this new __DATA__ section. The end effect would be about the same, except that now the distribution of random letters would closely mimic the english distribution ('eaton...') roughtly.

Of course, that would completely require Erudil to re-plot out the llama, since this change would probably add from 5 to 15 characters, and may not be possible to keep the code shape.

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Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
It's not what you know, but knowing how to find it if you don't know that's important

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