Captchas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA) are getting impossibly difficult to read. Captchas are those images with words and numbers that are wavy, have lines through them and are skewed. You frequently encounter them at login pages, registration pages, and other pages requiring human user verification. They used to work great, but they’ve been slowly becoming more difficult to read. I assume that “bots” are getting smarter and determining what the Captchas are. The problem now is that the images distort the words/numbers/letters so badly I can’t tell what they are. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
At what point does it become a hiderance and not a security mechanism. At the moment its starting to border on security theater. Ok yes it helps keeps bots out, but surely there are better ways? I mean when I have to reload the page or captcha 3 times before, me, a human, a sentient being with a brain unparalleled by any thing else on the planet, can figure out what it is… its time to call it quits on catpchas and find a new mechanism.
I don’t know what the Thunderbird developers are doing. If they are doing anything at all. But the sheer annoyance of the password bug in Thunderbird is starting to drive me mad. It turns out Thunderbird will not remember some passwords and will prompt for passwords it already has stored when a failure to communicate with the IMAP/POP/SMTP server occurs. Its truly maddening because its a simple bug to fix. Not only that, but being a software developer, shouldn’t that have been caught before release? I mean its not THAT difficult to find that bug. I would go ahead and fix it myself but as I’m terribly busy and I’d rather not dig through hundreds of lines of code to find a problem that should have been fixed; I’m going to complain about it for now. Further, its GTK i believe, and well lets just say GTK isn’t the most elegant toolkit available. So to summarize. FIX THE DAMN BUG. Oh yeah, and release a new version of Thunderbird already. My version is so old its getting mold.
So I decided to take a look at flock, the browser. And well its rather well put together. I must admit it is quite a good UI from a design standpoint. I’ve not found a way to utilize its functionality, but I’ll keep playing with it and see what happens.
I’ll have to check out chrome soon. Very good architecture they employed. Basically what someone should have done from the start.
Wrath of the Lich King. Yes they’ve been working on it and its a lot more new content. Having been lucky enough to have access to a beta test account, I’ve previewed some of this new content. Its a mixed bag. On one hand you have the continuation of Warcraft lore that pretty much everyone enjoys. And you get to play some more content for epic loot, etc. Then you realize. Its the same thing. Again. More grinding, more leveling. more spending countless hours doing quests, trading, skilling up professions etc.
The death knight is by far the most powerful class to date. There is quite a lot of synergy between the talent trees and it shows. I think it will take a lot to bring them in line with the other classes. Death knights have 3 interrupts (2 spell interrupts), an ability which PULLS enemies towards you, health regen abilities, AoE abilities, slow/snare abilities, self buffs, group buffs, and the list goes on and on. My personal problem with WoW is that i feel as it has spiraled out of control since the release of Burning Crusade. Call me old fashioned but it just feels that there’s a lack of balance in the game.
I want to highlight (praise) all the UI improvements that they’ve made. Some of them feel a bit gimmicky (like achievements), but some of them are a welcomed change (too many to list). Anyway, thats enough for now. WotL will surely be a big hit for fans and new players everywhere.
Here’s a pretty awesome view of the history of computing languages. Yay for O’Reilly. Very cool chart indeed. Its kind of scary how old C is now. And its still kicking around doing big jobs.
Keeping in the language vein, here’s a blogger who says you can learn (but not master) any language in the short space of time of an hour. To me his suggestions seem obvious, but maybe its because I’m inherently analytical about things. Still the author poses an interesting argument. As to whether it can be a method repeatable by anyone is yet to be seen.
Since man could first draw on the walls, he’s never stopped marking his territory and telling tales of times gone by. Today, the markings on the wall constitute of, what some consider, art, others, an unsightly menace. Either way, graffiti is here to stay and will always be present as long as man can draw. This site, called Graffiti Archeology, catalogues graffiti from several locations in the US and allows for an interesting view of the changes that occur.
I just wanted to plug a friend’s blog. He does many cooky, and impressive things with virtualization. You can read his adventures here: http://virtuallyfun.blogspot.com/
CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) has a lecture series called the last lecture, where professor are encouraged to give a lecture as though it were their last. A really interesting idea to say the least. Well for one professor, it really is his last. Randy Pausch was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and doctors said he only had a few months left to live. His last lecture was one of the most brilliant, insightful, and inspirational lectures I’ve ever seen. While it is lengthy, clocking in at about 1 hour 30 mins, its definitely worth the while.
So, more and more we are inundated with images that are altered using digital imaging tools. At times, its hard to determine which images have been altered and which have not. Now thanks to a new technique, its going to be even tougher. The technique is so clever because is so relatively simple. Aptly named “seam carving“, this new method produces some very impressive results.
You can now get your hands on a Windows based application for doing this technique. I haven’t tried it out myself, but if you give it a whirl, let me know how it goes.
Stumbled upon this Google talk recently. It is entitled Supersymmetry, Extra Dimensions and the Origins of Mass. However, the subtitle more appropriately describes the talk: Exploring the Nature of the UniverseUsing PetaScale Data Analysis. Its not a physics talk, though it contains some elements of physics. Its more of a talk about handling extremely large amounts of data and performing analyses against that dataset.
