Code, Strings, and Keys

Author: ThomasPowell

  • How safe is an MD5 hash of a plain password?

    First of all, I hope that you’ve moved beyond MD5 hashes and hashing passwords by themselves, adding salts, etc., but I do recall systems in which an MD5 hash of a password by itself was “good enough”. You can look up some md5 hashes on this md5 cracker page. I found many two word combinations…

  • Ruby Keyword Argument Implementation Differences Between 2.1 and 2.2

    I’m currently reading through Ruby Under a Microscope: An Illustrated Guide to Ruby Internals, and when I tried to test the “hidden hash” in ruby 2.2, I got different results from the book. In Ruby 2.2, it appears that the default arguments are used as one expects, without regard to the Hash monkey patch: ###…

  • Rails AntiPatterns Review/Summary

    I’ve had the Rails AntiPatterns: Best Practice Ruby on Rails Refactoring (Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby Series) book on my Safari Books Online bookshelf for almost a year now, and finally started reading through it. It was “updated for Rails 3”, and there doesn’t appear to be a newer version, so I was a bit skeptical about…