i was very, very close.  if i had used in my own cracker the basic notion of checking shift-casing the different chars i would have found it myself eventually.  i gave him a lot of info; but actually  most of it was "wrong" in the sense what i told him it most likely looked like was not what it actually was.

i did provide him everything though, an essay on my thought process as well as the source code to the cracker i wrote; not sure if he used the ruby scripts at all though