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

Been busy and bored in alternate spurts. I keep my idle hands busy with various amusements. The thesis work itself isn’t that interesting; I’m fast losing the will to live in the face of a wordcount to satisfy. The amusements, on the other hand, are worth documenting.

Everyone should know of Desktop TD by now. It’s addictive like crack, might be one of the few non-annoying uses of Flash on the web that I’ve seen (excluding Youtube, of course) and well, it is personally responsible for a lot of time wasted. A while ago, I was sent an email asking me to reserve my username for The Casual Collective; a new venture by the maker of DesktopTD. The Casual Collective offers (among other things, I’m sure) a chance to play a multiplayer version of DesktopTD. What’s not to like? I registered. A couple of days ago (after I had forgotten all about it), I got an email inviting me to login. Today, I played my first multiplayer DesktopTD.

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YSlow is an extension to Firefox. Actually, that’s not quite right. YSlow is actually an extension to Firebug, an awesome extension which runs on Firefox. Its purpose is to find out why your site is slow. YSlow. Geddit? Geddit? Never mind then.

Despite being just a tiny bit suspicious of cookie-cutter recommendation tools, I gave it a whirl. I like it. YSlow gives a useful overview and is certainly a great introductory tool to profile a site. There are some recommendations made that can be safely ignored; but that takes nothing away from the tool itself. As always though, the application/site developer (ie:, you) should know best about what might work and what won’t. In my personal opinion, rules are ok to break so long as you know why you’re breaking them.

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