What’s the password…haddock?
, Chicago
Haddock worked for Groucho, and it can work for you. It’s not the password, but it can help get you there.
What’s haddock? Haddock is a gem:
% sudo gem install haddock Password: Successfully installed haddock-0.2.0 1 gem installed Installing ri documentation for haddock-0.2.0... Installing RDoc documentation for haddock-0.2.0...
Haddock is based on one of Apple’s own hidden gems: Password Assistant’s memorable password generator. It uses something most password generators don’t use:
Actual words. And so does haddock.
So now that you have a haddock, what are you going to do? Let’s make some passwords with ha-gen.1
% ha-gen
habit57/love
% ha-gen
hawk47{uncle
% ha-gen
Bim52`bummer
Ripe for mnemonic stories, every one of them! And secure! But we can be even more secure:
% ha-gen --length=16
knab7[bitterhead
% ha-gen -l 24
picklelike63%captainship
% ha-gen -l30
craniology3430{incompetentness
Beautiful! Work on your diction as you go! Security and self-improvement! I’m not sure about you, but I could make these all day long. Be warned, though. When you use haddock a lot, another Haddock may come to mind:
This utility has an even more colorful vocabulary than the Captain’s. It uses your UNIX word list (at /usr/share/dict/words or /usr/share/words), so anything therein is fair game. The occasional anatomical term may put off sensitive users, but you can always make haddock eat your own words, easily enough:
% ha-gen -f ~/Documents/awesome_words.txt gnarly8;cool
In fact, if you’re on Windows, you’ll have to. But don’t worry, Kevin has you covered.
In the end, though, haddock is a library for your Ruby applications. Want to add some flair to your web app’s password reset codes? This will probably look familiar enough:
That’s all it takes to get up and running. Your users will appreciate the friendlier alternative to a cryptographic digest. I don’t care how cool your code golf is.
All right, all right, I care. That stuff is just too cool.