Re: [Monotone-devel] Re: user-friendly hash formats, redux

[Nathan Myers]

On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 04:42:24PM -0500, graydon hoare wrote:
> 
> well, I said earlier that I've "been resisting" this, and I meant it.
> ...  people see random strings of intelligible words or phonemes in
> one place: out of the mouths of crazy people.

I'm glad you finally revealed this.  I asked so as not to waste 
(too much) time on something that will go nowhere.

Inserting a "." at the point where a hash achieves uniqueness would 
still help, and writing out shorter hashes by default would still be 
less scary, however they were encoded.  Representing hashes with just 
alpha characters, e.g. drawn from "bcdfgjklmnoprstv", would improve 
matters too.  (No vowels means no words can pop up unexpectedly.)
Grouping would help too: "jmtl-dbnj.lgds-fvpc-gkpb".  (Users should 
be able to omit the punctuation, but when it's entered, checking its 
placement helps prevent mistakes.)  These are all very simple things 
that make hashes less imposing, albeit no more directly informative.

(While we're on the subject of craziness, that reversed-domain-name
naming scheme was whacked when Java adopted it, and it's just as 
whacked here.  Is there any actual use for making users reverse them 
by hand?  Computers are much better at that sort of thing.)

Nathan Myers
address@hidden