Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…
> Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? I certainly have. Interestingly, one was the same "sanity check" program for my internet connection, because of the same ISP you mention. Amazing coincidence...I don't think. :-)
Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
371–380 of 671 posts
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#372A text editor, data manipulation and display programs, front ends for various things, an interface to play podcasts and search them using podcastindex.org from within Emacs, all sorts.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#373Huh, I've never been asked that. Yes, for over 30 years. I could never list them all. Nearly every thought I have becomes a program. I've written x86 asm game hacks (DOS era), 2D tile games (80's), Windows MIDI composers, game frame languages, ray-tracing renderers, OpenGL visualization, PID controllers, camera controllers, video controllers, circuit simulators, flight controllers, so so so many games, scripts for an…
I wish I could shift my thinking to do this. I've been a web developer for 17 years and love programming. But any time I've tried to build my own projects or products, it's usually a revamp of an existing product or game, and I quickly lose interest. I lack the ability to see everyday "issues" that could be resolved with programming. But if someone asks me to solve an issue with a program, I could probably come up wi…
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#374Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm confident that http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/bitwords.... produces passwords with precisely the expected entropy, and it's secure under Kerckhoffs's principle, so I don't mind sharing it. For the ones that consist of words, the wordlist I use is http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/netbook-misc-devel/wordlist , the frequencies of the words that occur 5 times or more in the British National Corpus.…
Wouldn't a generator like this significantly increase risk of succumbing to dictionary attacks? I probably just don't understand part of what it's doing, but I'm curious.
By contrast, trying every phrase of 20 words or less in every book that has ever been published would only take something like 129 million × 19 × 500,000 = 1.225 quadrillion tries. At a billion tries a second, that's only two weeks. (And if the password hash is inadequately salted, the attacker can use a rainbow table and put in that effort ahead of time and distribute it across all the victims.)
An attacker with more resources might devote a million CPUs to the problem, which would cut the time to success from 300 million years down to only 300 years (assuming a billion tries a second). In the next few decades it will become practical to devote much larger amounts of computation to problems like this, so such an attack might succeed, but currently it is beyond the capabilities of all but a few adversaries. And, as I understand it, Grover's algorithm will enable a large enough quantum computer to solve your password in only 2⁴² tries, which is only about four trillion tries, under an hour at the billion-tries-per-second speed I suggested above. I'm not sure, but I think it would need to prevent qubit decoherence for that period of time.
You can get equivalent security with a shorter password that looks like random gibberish, such as b7fc d750 9a52 ad6a e48c a, eedgckeimbjdefhcjclmghh, mgujdlrgdfmadtlidu, 1qvrx21zego0scvyi, 17uUPBKnfX7fSNY, >4h)&crV,+E{O, or 宜潨阰揫難侌, but those are a lot harder to memorize. They're shorter to type, though, and they're less vulnerable to side-channel attacks.
Looking random isn't good enough, though. They need to actually be random.
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#376Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? I certainly have. Interestingly, one was the same "sanity check" program for my internet connection, because of the same ISP you mention. Amazing coincidence...I don't think. :-)
I ginned up a "wait for the internet to come back up" script that repeatedly pinged something with one packet, and used the Mac 'open' command to play an mp3 file once the ping succeeded. Unsexy, but when you can't google up a better solution...
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#378Huh, I've never been asked that. Yes, for over 30 years. I could never list them all. Nearly every thought I have becomes a program. I've written x86 asm game hacks (DOS era), 2D tile games (80's), Windows MIDI composers, game frame languages, ray-tracing renderers, OpenGL visualization, PID controllers, camera controllers, video controllers, circuit simulators, flight controllers, so so so many games, scripts for an…
Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#379Re: Ask HN: Have you created programs for only your personal use?
#380Hundreds! Doesn't everyone? Most of them are just bash scripts, many of which have now reached a complexity so high that I wish I'd started writing them in a different language but it's too late now. The majority of the rest are Python. Off the top of my head, the most used ones are: * A replacement front-end for "tar" and various compressors * A script to synchronize my music library to a compressed version for play…
It's cool that you do that, but "Doesn't everyone?" implies to me that you might be a bit out of touch. This is common among a certain type of person and unheard of for everybody else.
I suspect the venn diagram of that is very close to the venn diagram of hn readers and everybody else.
I think "doesn't everyone here" is implied there.