Movie 2016.02.18 - The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Read the book, now watched the movie. As usual, I prefer the book over the movie, as it has more content. As the story is being narrated by an introvert through letters to an anonymous friend, I feel the book's the better medium. Nothing wrong with the movie version though. It's a faithful adaptation of the book, given it was written and directed by the author (Stephen Chbosky). A few portions were removed here and there, but that didn't alter the main story much. For readers of the book, like me, the feeling is that Chbosky merely translated the book to the big screen, and left it at that, which is a bit of a letdown. Not sure what I was expecting, but I was hoping for more.

Story is about an introverted loner with mental issues going through his freshman year. He made a few good senior friends who helped him come out of his shell. First high, first girlfriend, first theatre performance, first dance, first kiss from a girl, first kiss from a guy, first breakup. Ended the year with an epiphany of what's the likely cause of his mental problems, so hopefully it's all smooth sailing from then on.

Some choice quotes from the book/movie:

• We accept the love we think we deserve.
• You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand. You're a wallflower.
• But because things change. And friends leave. And life doesn't stop for anybody.
• You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think it counts as love.
• And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.
• So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them.
• Try to be a filter, not a sponge.
• Nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.
• It's nice to have things to look forward to.
• I don't know the significance of this, but I find it very interesting.
• And I closed my eyes because I wanted to know nothing but her arms.
• And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn't matter.

Passwordless SSH Login

There comes a time when you're managing so many servers and you're typing in the passwords every time you log on, and the passwords keep on changing, and you think, wouldn't it be nice if you can log on to all your hosts securely without typing in passwords?

With SSH keys you can. Basically you use a key generator to generate a key pair - a public key and a private key. The public key is copied/installed on the remote host. The private key you keep on your local client. You then configure your SSH client to use public-key authentication, based on your private key, instead of passwords. As passwords are never sent across the network, this method is more secure (and convenient).

On Linux systems, you'd be generating the keypair using ssh-keygen. On Windows, I used PuTTYgen. By default, PuTTYgen will save the private key using its native format. There is an option to export the private key in OpenSSH and ssh.com formats though, so they can be used with other applications. I tried the OpenSSH private key generated by PuTTYgen, and it does work with another SSH client like SecureCRT. On SecureCRT, go to Options --> Global Options. Click on SSH2, then under "Public key", select "Use identity or certificate file", and enter the file location of your private key. To start using public-key authentication, go to session properties. Under SSH2, escalate PublicKey to be the first authentication method. (Interestingly, the PuTTY private key works with SecureCRT v7.x, but not with v6.x. Go figure.)

For PuTTY, load your saved session, then go to Connection --> SSH --> Auth. Configure "Private key file for authentication", then save your session. Obviously, you have to do this for all your saved sessions.

SecureCRT also has the capability to generate SSH keypairs (under Tools). The key generation wizard gives you the option of two private-key formats: VanDyke Private Key format or OpenSSH Key format. If you plan to use the OpenSSH private key generated by SecureCRT with PuTTY, you'll have to convert this first to the proprietary PPK format using PuTTYgen.