Stephan Beal wrote: [...] > Alternate suggestion: we simply print the SHAs in decimal form ;). > They're not sequential but at least they're human-readable ;).
A while back I did come up with an astoundingly stupid idea for making SHAs more readable; fortunately I never got around to implementing it... The idea is: take the first few bytes of the hash, split it up into 7 or 8 bit chunks, and look each one up in a dictionary. This gives us a codename for the hash. So, instead of referring to a bug as 639ab1, we get to call it 'CORRECT HORSE BATTERY', or 'CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN', or 'LUMINOUS PANDA UKELELE', or whatever. The advantage of this is that the randomly-generated names are vastly more memorable than the hashes. I'd probably want to limit it to three words, maybe four if you push it; depending on the size of the codename dictionary this would probably give about 20 to 30 bits of entropy. Tweaking the algorithm to prevent duplications would probably also be a good idea. Done right this gives a lossless bidirectional mapping from hashes to codenames. The difficult bit, of course, is coming up with the codename dictionary (and being able to use the codenames with a straight face). (I should point out that what3words.com is doing something very similar for locations, although their codenames seem to be database keys generated on demand rather than encoding the location directly.) -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ "USER'S MANUAL VERSION 1.0: The information presented in this │ publication has been carefully for reliability." --- anonymous │ computer hardware manual
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