The Lair

Remember that whole fuss about public key cryptography? The premise is really simple. What it means for most of us is – never type in an ssh password again, your public/private keys should seamlessly handle all the nasty security bits. So, today – I found myself wanting to do something like that described here.

Simple right? I had a private key generated which I used for code I write in my spare time. Now I needed another private key. Yes, another one – because a few people reading commit logs at a very serious bzns organization might wonder who the hell drac is – and why his commits are appearing in their top-secret git repository.

Generate another private key. Simple.

ssh-keygen -t rsa


Mail the just-generated public key off to the guy setting up the repository and all is well. Except it wasn’t. Because I find that multiple invocations of ssh-keygen generate the same public/private keypair. Yup, generate a keypair for drac AT this domain. Invoke ssh-keygen again, fully expecting a different pair of keys to be created for [real name]. Umm. No. Same key.

I don’t know yet if this is a bug, or expected behaviour for ssh-keygen. Or if it is merely a quirk/bug of the ssh-keygen bundled with msysgit. In any case, I was surprised.

And if none of that made any sense to you folks, never mind. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how I did some git ninja work. Do turn up, won’t you?

yes, wonkey = one key. I’m feeling particularly creative today

The coffin corner is one of those concepts that I remember reading ages ago but forgot until a recent memory joggle. In this case, the jab to the memory came from a slightly sensationalist analysis of how Air France flight 447 may have been downed.

So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets.

With the slight caveat that going a bit too high can cause the airplane to do all sorts of things it shouldn’t be doing – like stalling. Actually, that is sage advice for pretty much anyone, including that dude called Icarus. But I digress. The point is, those kinds of tradeoffs are everywhere.

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There are people who love being read to – that is, someone else sits down with a book or magazine or newspaper in front of them and reads aloud. I know several people who like this.

I’m not one of them.

I have often wondered if my childhood had anything to do with this (it probably did, we are all influenced by our childhood in some way or the other). My parents never read aloud to me. Not that I feel the lack at all, I was always given a book – or found myself one – and read it. There was never a question of someone else performing the labour intensive activity of actually reading to me, I’d read it myself thank you very much.

Why is this a problem now? Because I am completely unaccustomed to someone reading an entire book to me now. I simply cannot concentrate on the contents of the book, nor does it make it easy for me to visualize what is going on when I have to concentrate on the next words being read. When I am reading text off a page (or a screen), it’s easy. I read at my own pace. When someone else is going the reading for me, it’s pure torture. It’s always either too slow or too fast or just plain “uh. yeah, what did you just say? because I wasn’t listening”.

Which is a pity – because in my seemingly unquenchable thirst for new things to read, I have discovered that an mp3 player and a podcast directory, or an audiobook directory or two can be very useful assets. For most. For me? Well, I don’t have the patience to listen to podcasts. Not even when I’m driving and stuck in traffic. Give me a transcript any day.

Perhaps it’s an acquired ability.