A nice trick, but it is still not very obfuscated. Or rather, it's one of those "obfuscation through encoding" scripts that basically hides the real code away from those reading by some sort of encoding scheme. The backticks are a nice touch, but they are really the only obfuscated part. *Some* encoding is okay, but it should be limited to dead giveaway parts, such as text messages, and not the code itself. (See my Perl Racer code for an example that encodes the text messages but not the code itself)

My quick test of a good obfuscation is: can I read through this and figure out what it does? In this case, the answer was "yes." I did think it was a usual map-chr sort of letter munging until I got to the end, however, so you get points for that. Making me decode the inside to get to the actual code, however, is not good. Just my $0.02. Everyone has individual styles and opinions about obfuscations.