Primer (2004) - Watch 1, impressions and questions

Well. This movie is one hell of a mind-bender.

MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD

This is a great movie that you don’t want spoiled. Watch it yourself and you will have a GREAT experience trying to figure everything out. (Not that I am there yet, but I have a feeling it will be great!)

Of course, I didn’t understand everything. I sort-of have a sketch of what really happened, but I am not sure on the details, and the last 15 minutes of the movie totally went over my head. For this watch, I am just going to list the things that I could make out. This definitely simplifies the plot, but the specifics are... Read More

Auxilliary material for TLS 1.2 - TLS Parameters - Registries

Part of the TLS explanation series: Auxilliary material

After understanding the TLS handshake, there are still many moving parts that have still not been satisfactorily explained. Perhaps the most important in those is the assignment of the byte values for each of the cipher suites, handshake message numbers, etc to the different things that have predefined lists.

These are defined in the TLS Parameters document, maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). If you didn’t already know, the IANA is also responsible for allocating Autonomous Systems on the Internet backbone which is used for routing packets around the network. They are the ones who have cordoned off 10.0.0.0/8 and some other IPs for LAN usage.

Anyway, this... Read More

Understanding and Explaining the TLS Handshake

Yesterday, I open sourced tls-handshake, a web page that tries to provide an over view of the TLS 1.2 handshake at an abstraction level that is appropriate for students who have taken basic cryptography courses either at the college or school level. It has been one hell of a ride!

The idea came from my lack of understanding of the TLS 1.2 handshake, I really had very less of a clue about what was going on. I often checked certificates, especially on banking and merchant websites where I was entering sensitive credentials. This had become more of a habit. But I was only checking the trust chain of certificates, and the fingerprint and if the browser was giving me... Read More

Music update - July 2017

The past month has been pretty good in terms of the amount of new music that I have heard (although the albums are pretty old themselves)

The Suburbs - Arcade Fire - 2010

This album won the Grammy Album of the Year award in 2010. Before this, I had heard only the second track, Ready to Start. That I absolutely loved, but after listening to the whole album, I am thoroughly spoiled now and I don’t know what to pick.

We Used to Wait, Sprawl I, Sprawl II: I am not inseparable from these three now. The two Sprawls tie seamlessly into each other. And We Used to Wait is such a strong throw-back... Read More

The Siege of Trencher's Farm vs. Straw Dogs (2011) - How loose an adaptation is it?

I just completed The Seige of Trencher’s Farm by Gordon Williams. I also just completed watching 2011 remake of the loose adaptation Straw Dogs (2011).

Fair Warning: HUGE Spoilers ahead.

The adaptation is pretty loose, the whole sexual angle that Kate Bosworth brings into the movie is completely non-existent in the book. There’s also a child in the book, and Louise herself (George’s wife) doesn’t seem to have lived in Trencher’s when she was a kid. She’s from England but not exactly from the place that they have come to stay at for a year.

So, in the book, George, Louise and Karen (8) come to stay at Trencher’s Farm for a year.

Same in the movie, only... Read More

Switching to SuperTab; A new Crichton thriller, WHAT?!

Ever since I started using Vim as my primary browser, I have been using YouCompleteMe as the completion plugin. It works fine, it is annoying because it tries to autocomplete everything and sometimes that gets in the way of navigation using the arrow keys. In any case, I was fairly happy with the plugin’s performance because it never really slowed down my editing experience. Until a couple of weeks ago.

That was when I saw that the editor just hung for some amount of time, and it was really trying to find suggestions for the word I was typing. This was really hampering the time it took for me to actually write code. And thus, I set out on... Read More

Generating Git Punchcard plot from the terminal

Around 6 pm today, I found guanqun/git-punchcard-plot.

At 10:45 pm, approximately 4 hours later (of which I spent rather less time writing stuff, I opened PR #7.

Once I cloned the repository, I realised that you need to put the git-punchcard python script in your PATH for it to start working as git punchcard. I didn’t need any of that, I did really want to see a punchcard though. So, I put it there, (Note 1: Take path from the CLI if provided!)

When I generated the punchcard for a repository, it looked like this:

It looked okay. The opacity was a problem. I might have made fewer... Read More

Setting milestones to understand TLS

I downloaded the TLS IETF draft. It’s 104 pages long, That’s as big as Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

This is perhaps my 100th attempt at reallt understanding the internals of how TLS works. My end goal is simple here: I want to know how a secure channel is established between a server and a client. I don’t want an apples-and-oranges-are-fruits level understanding of it, I have that. I know all the digital signature and public key cryptography analogies that are out there. I want to be able to form a general idea of HOW each step works, why it is required, and how that particular step fits in the larger scheme of things.

I started with Wireshark and captured... Read More

Learning React -> Understanding why Redux -> More time spent!

So, I had this idea for an app. It’s a pretty basic app and it takes the current location and prints some distances. It does all of this stuff without an active internet connection because GPS DOES NOT NEED INTERNET. It drives me crazy that Google Maps won’t download the area that I live in (which they might know because I occasionally have to turn on Location Services on my phone) or any location that I tell it to.

From their POV, it’s probably not the best because most of the traffic related data on Google Maps is crowd sourced and you ain’t getting no data from a phone that is offline.

So, I decided to leap frog that and... Read More

Old Habits Die Hard, Criminal show - GET IT

I find myself thinking about what to write every day. This has been happening everyday since the end of the 100 days.

A general update, is what this post is.

I am reading Apt Pupil. The book has gone literally nowhere since I started it. Since this is a book of four stories, I don’t even know how much of it I have read, it must be 20-30 pages and the book is slowly progressing somewhere. This initial period of intrigue that exists right before the explosive event and the chase that happens in the end + climax of the book seems to be a common theme in Stephen King books.

I have also been raving about the Read More