Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

md5('this') => 9e925e9341b490bfd3b4c4ca3b0c1ef2
md5('that') =>21582c6c30be1217322cdb9aebaf4a59

So, way back in March of this year, man that feels like three years ago, I created a simple web service that creates MD5, SHA1, and CRC32 hashes/encryptions.

I did it for work.

There was a developer using this web scripting language that I have never heard of called H2O. This has to be about the most useless language I have ever come across. Notably, because it did not have the ability to natively generate an MD5 hash.

Well, Jaduka's APIs use a check value that is computed by generating a MD5 hash from a privateKey (aka secret) and one of the parameters in the method.

i.e. huge FSCKING problem for H2O programmers.

So, after learning a little bit more about what the language could do, I determined that it did have the ability to pull in data from an HTTP-Query-string request, aka REST web service.

I did only a little bit of looking around before I registered www.hashserver.com and created my MD5 hashing web service.

For the longest time there was no real traffic on the site to speak of, except for my own usage of it. I routinely use it to generate hashes when I am working with the API manually (ie http-query-string) for operations that generating a full script seems a bit overkill.

Anyway, I posted a comment on a blog not too long ago that was talking about encryption (MD5s vs Salt). Given the topic, I posted the www.hashserver.com at the end of my comment.

While, I still need to pull all of the data for this from the very simple table I am store some stats in (dateTimeStamp, ipAddress, type of hash (ie MD5, SHA1, CRC32)). I am pretty sure the increase in hash creations spiked after I made that post.

Given that the number of records in the table went from a couple of thousand, to about 260,000+ thousand, I figured I should add a counter to the front page. I just finished that part up. Nothing too fancy, just a simple counter.

I do want to add a Google Map to the main page as well to show the IP addresses that have been using my HashServer. There are just under 400 unique IP Addresses creating hashes.

However, when I ran some queries to see how diversified the hash generation is, I saw that the bulk of the hash generation came from only a handful of IP Addresses. This caused me to investigate who owned the IP Addresses, the heavy user ones are owned by Yahoo!.

I confirmed my suspicion that someone had embedded a call to my HashServer into some Yahoo! Pipes apps that you can build, thanks to some easy searching on Google.

I am really not too sure what the three apps are doing with the hashes that are generated, I will take later some time to investigate later.

In the meantime, it gives me a sense of pride that something I whipped together in about an hour and haven't touched since 3/9/2007 has now handled over 260K requests and is actually useful to some folks.

I mean honestly, I sort of did it all as a joke, the "Question" and "Answer" on the HashServer homepage should be proof enough of that.

Tonight in doing some link searching for this blog post I did find md5oogle, a md5 hash service website. However, not technically a webservice from an API perspective. And it is doing it for a completely different purpose. Oh yeah, I don't store the content being hashed in the database, I mean with just the 260K requests the table is already about to break the 12MB level. If I was storing the hash output and the content that went into making, there is no telling how big that table would be by now.

Oh well,

I need to get back to finishing up a few things so I can head home.

PS: My darling wife, before you freak out. I was home at 5:20pm today and let the dogs out. Love ya!

I spent about an hour tonight reading about Google Gadget stuff.

This means I am going to need to learn more about XML.

I have been working with XML more and more over the last year. This work has usually been related to formatting XML data (usually after it was parsed into an array in PHP).

Now, it appears that to build a Google Gadget, I will need to learn about writing XML. More specifically, it looks like I am going to be learning more about AJAX (Javascript + XML).

Why am I reading more about Google Gadget stuff?

Two reasons really.

1. Jaduka. To further my understanding of a project that we have going on internally and going forward the building of Gadgets and Widgets are going to be more and more prevalent.

2. I want to have a MD5 hashing form in my Google Personalized Homepage, that uses the HashServer.

When testing out new methods, I more often than not have taken to just building up the URL/QueryString. To do this properly, I have to make MD5 hashes of data.

A lot of the time I use Paj's MD5 site. However, I usually have to do a Google search to find his site again. (Nope, I for some reason never bother to bookmark it.)

So, since I have a simple MD5 web service, I now want to have a simple Google Gadget form that I can input some data into and it will return the hash.

I also thought about having it display "Hash of the day".

I know, I know. I'm going a little overboard on the HashServer thing.

But I find this to be a fun little exercise for my current skills and an opportunity to learn some new stuff.

I need to go and get some sleep. I have to go downtown tomorrow to register for SXSW.

Laterz.

An investigation into a new (to me) programming language, H2O, led me to the need for the ability to create a MD5 hash via a web service.

I did some searches on Google, but didn't find anything useful.

So, in chatting about it with Jeremy, he threw out "hashserver.com".

I said, "Why, not."

So now, I am pleased to announce the launch of HashServer (www.hashserver.com)

Honestly, the whole project didn't take long at all. It took longer for me to tweak it and get the code cleaned up and make sure I was printing back some nice error messages, than it did to actually write the "engine".

From everything I have had the chance to research about for H2O, it is an interesting scripting language that has a syntax that is somewhere between HTML and PHP or ASP.

H2O has the ability to POST and GET data from other websites. However, I didn't see any sort of SOAP support. There is the ability to open, use and close sockets. But I have no interest in trying to write a SOAP or XML layer for H2O. I personally would like to just use PHP.

But with the H2O language's support to GET data from another website, that means it is compatible with the Jaduka API.

However, to use the Jaduka API, one must calculate a MD5 Hash. I looked high and low inside of the H2O manual and found no MD5 functions anywhere. Now, I do not claim to be an H2O expert in any capacity. But several searches for various combinations of "md5", "encryption", "h2o" yielded nothing (usable).

That is what led me to seriously think about and ultimately purchase the www.hashserver.com url.

I will go back into the code later and add in a few other encryption functions, but md5 was the only thing I was really worried about.

And because of the fact that it is working as a simple web service, meaning that an H2O application can GET a MD5 hash of data that it submits.

I have no idea if anyone other than H2O users will find this beneficial. But hey, it was a fun little project to do.

But now, I must retire and get some sleep.

Laterz