If you’ve forgetten your password to your WordPress install it has a nifty email-a-one-time-key-to-retrieve-password flow built in. Which for some reason never works on my box. (probably has to do with how I have Postfix setup doing 2ndary MXing) In the olden days the solution to this problem was to connect your database and UPDATE the user_pass field with an MD5 of your desired new password.

But now we’re living in the future, so things are more complicated. I still connect to my database, and manually UPDATE users set user_pass=$hashed where ID=1, but now I need this handy script to generate the hashed password for me. Hopefully the 3 other people in the world this is useful for will find this blog post.

(And now I might start blogging again)

Photo from sarabbit

Dynamo is certainly the sexiest discussion of distributed hash tables (DHTs), while Programmer’s Toolbox Part 3: Consistent Hashing is the most straightforward. libketama is open and easy to use implementation of the 64-bit space mapped to a circle style consistent hash, discussed above and originally “popularized” by Chord. (and proposed over a decade ago)

And best quote:

“…and if anyone tells you that you shouldn’t use MD5 for this because it isn’t secure, just nod and back away slowly. You have identified someone not worth arguing with.”

http://laughingmeme.org/code/hmacsha1.php.txt