The effectiveness of CAPTCHAs

Over at Coding Horror, there’s a nice article about CAPTCHA’s, the distorted, colored letters that you must input before submitting a form in order to prove that you are human and not a spambot.

Jeff Atwood, the author, suggests that CAPTCHAs are a very effective way to prevent spam, and I must agree with him. For my (very low traffic) blog, I have a field where people must enter “uncentered” before they can comment. That word never changes, it’s not a distorted image, yet with this simple protection, I haven’t had spam.

I don’t think it is likely that a software that cracks CAPTCHAs will be released any time soon, so you may as well continue using them to protect yourself from unwanted spam comments.

Incredible MK2 TAS speedrun

Here is an amazing speedrun of Mortal Kombat 2 on the SNES. If you were a fan of the game during your youth, you will most likely appreciate this video. This run is different from other speedruns in that the focus is not so much on speed as it is on style: the player uses Shang Tsung and morphs into a different character for every fight. We see him use them all to to a finisher move on an opponent. Highly recommended!

Pugs 6.2.13 is out!

As announced by Audrey, the latest release of Pugs is out!

akregator

Since my iBook is in a completely unreliable state, I decided to back everything up on my old 10 GB iPod and to go back to using my Ubuntu PC as my main computer until I can resolve the laptop issue. One piece of software that I was missing on Linux was a good RSS aggregator. I tried Google Reader, but it’s weird to use and they don’t have a shortcut key for the single most important command in a news aggregator: go to next unread. So it wasn’t long before I ditched it. I then turned to client-side readers. I tried Eclipse-based RssOwl, but the reading pane had no formatting whatsoever. I didn’t feel like hacking around to find how to make it work, so I moved on. BottomFeeder, which I used before, since has this weird bug on my computer that after I go into the settings, nothing works anymore.

Finally, I found out about akregator, a news reader for KDE (as you can guess from the name). It turns out to be really good, it did everything I wanted, the keys were configurable, so I was able to give it a semi NetNewsWire feel and it displayed HTML beautifully. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitly the best in its category on Linux. Give it a try!

Highly unstable iBook

In the past two weeks, my iBook G4 has become highly unstable; so much so, that I consider it unreliable.

Randomly, the display will shut — it becomes all black — and the only way to bring it back is to close the laptop lid, let it fall into sleep mode and then reopen it. It also happens that the laptop shuts down completely and I need to pop the battery out to boot it again.

Has this happened to anyone else? Are there steps I can take to remedy this problem? I am pretty sure that my AppleCare warranty has expired, so I don’t think I can get a free hardware replacement if that happens to be the problem.

Lost: new tattoos on Jack?

Does Jack in Lost have new tattoos? Check this out:

I never noticed those in previous seasons. Were they there but I just missed them or did they magically appear?

ShortURL and Google Search code

I found out that rbot uses ShortURL. It’s been a while since I worked on that code, but it’s nice to see that it’s useful at least to one person :)

Reddit can’t count

Apparently, the social news site Reddit can’t count:

Can anyone explain that?

Mark Foley – D-FL?!

This is rich, Bill O’Reilly doing what Bill O’Reilly does best: lying. Apparently, on his show republican Mark Foley (no relationship) was labeled as a democrat. The Falafel Master is obviously not concerned with trivial things such as truth and facts.

And while we’re on republicans, here’s a funny quote by Katherine Harris:

In just a few short weeks, millions of Americans will decide the direction of our country. Like many of you, I believe that our communities and our values are in danger from ultra-liberals Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and the rest who value rights over national security.

Emphasis mine. Damn those democrats and their quest to protect the rights of Americans!

Worst MySpace ever

I hate MySpace.com, I think that 99.9999% of the pages over there have design that can make elves go blind. However, this one really wins the pot: http://www.myspace.com/soybuddha