Month: May 2007

1,000 Posts

It’s amazing the images you can find online…
Pet hats
I’ve reached 1,000 posts in just over 3 full years of blogging. (3 years, and nearly 4 months to be precise). Anyways…I figured a cute dog in a hat would be a fitting celebration, and I happen to find a picture of a freaky cat in a hat to boot!

reCAPTCHA: Fight Spam, Read a Book

reCAPTCHA: the official website
reCAPTCHA: A new way to fight spam

You might notice that reCAPTCHA has two words. Why? reCAPTCHA is more than a CAPTCHA, it also helps to digitize old books. One of the words in reCAPTCHA is a word that the computer knows what it is, much like a normal CAPTCHA. However, the other word is a word that the computer can’t read. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, we not only check that you are a human, but use the result on the other word to help read the book!

A very interesting idea, and I think it might just work. Two problems I see here, 1. someone could just as easily mistype the second word (because that is the one you’re helping the computer “read”). This would lead to the computer related OCR recognition being completely wrong. Correctly me if I am wrong, but I’d like to hope these words that we are helping computers to “read” should be compared with the other responses from so-called humans. In theory if 95% of people say a particular word is “the” and 5% of people say the word is “then” well then the choice of “the” should win out right? 2. CAPTCHA, the original CAPTCHA, still haven’t really taken off all that well. I don’t have any exact numbers, but I’d imagine the proliferation of CAPTCHA is somewhere around 25-35% of web forms. That really isn’t a huge number. Based on that, I can’t imagine web developers are going to promptly leap over to a new (or evolved) technology in any kind of mass migration. This sounds like a great idea, and I may just get around to add this to my blog. That being said, I definitely will not be in any kind of hurry to implement this.

Lost Redux: Damon Lindelof Reveals Why Charlie Died and More

Lost Redux: Damon Lindelof Breaks “Radio Silence” to Reveal Why Charlie Died and More
I try to avoid these kind of postings to hide my obsession with Lost, but I found this one to be particularly interesting for anyone vaguely curious about the show. Of special interest:

The role of Jacob has been cast.
False.
False? Okay, interesting. People were having all sorts of interpretations of what he looked like.
You do see a guy, but…I’m still sticking to my false.
The Others are in danger of extinction.
True.
Alex is actually Ben’s biological daughter.
False.

The bit about Jacob is very interesting considering 1. they showed someone in the episode with Jacob (so who the hell was that guy?), and 2. Rumor has it that Season 4 will focus on Jacob (so it’s interesting they haven’t cast anyone for that role yet).
Ok, I am done making my obsession quite so obvious, I’ll go back into hiding again.

Twitter Posts for 2007-05-26

  • I think keyboard manufacturers should remove the caps lock key. No one really uses it at this point. #
  • too tired to stay awake for the game. goodnight #
  • Doing some serious yard work most of the day. #
  • busy morning/afternoon…time to relax for the evening. #

Top 10 New Features in Windows Server 2008

Top 10 New Features in Windows Server 2008

“So if there’s a corruption detected someplace in the data structure, an NTFS worker thread is spawned,” Russinovich explained, “and that worker thread goes off and performs a localized fix-up of those data structures. The only effect that an application would see is that files would be unavailable for the period of time that it was trying to access, had been corrupted. If it retried later after the corruption was healed, then it would succeed. But the system never has to come down, so there’s no reason to have to reboot the system and perform a low-level CHKDSK offline.”

I usually don’t write about enterprise-related information because, honestly, usually I find it boring. For the heck of it the other day I was reading something at BetaNews when I came across this article. I am a beta tester for Windows Longhorn (AKA Windows Server 2008), but as you might gather I am not exactly the most technical beta tester they have for this.

Anyways, I thought this particular feature was quite useful and hopefully this is one of the features that get rolled into Vista when they release SP1 (including the kernel update) in Q2 2007. Anything Microsoft can do to reduce the number of restarts would be great.

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
An absolutely pathetic, disgusting, depressing, and appalling collection of news items that have been promptly ignored. I honestly hope that some day all of this bullshit that the Bush administration has lied about comes to light. I can’t wait to see the breaking news report some day in the future when they come knocking on Bush’s door to take is lying arrogant ass off to prison.
I will be VERY happy the day this man gets what he deserves (which is a VERY slow, VERY painful death). No, no joke. He has the blood of thousands of innocent people on his hands.

Twitter Posts for 2007-05-25

  • hopefully starting my research… #
  • Who woulda thunk? I procrastinated doing my research some more. Grr… no really, now I am going to start researching. #
  • Tired therefore I am going to bed. I tried to do some research (I really did), but PsychINFO was not functioning this evening. #
  • Tweets from Facebook? wow…that’s weird. #
  • Elzhi – The Growth Mixtape …solid hip hop music. #
  • Browsing: http://tinyurl.com/2e3726 Mobile Google Calendar released #
  • i don’t want to give back my Dash on Tuesday 😦 #
  • http://tinyurl.com/3586pj Facebook Platform is great…it’s not even funny how pathetic MySpace looks now. #
  • busy afternoon of fixing laptops. i think i was victorious. #
  • @vaspers nope, it’s not Microsoft’s fault. It’s just you. I have a separate Office Live account and Popfly registration went perfectly. #
  • Hot days do not aid the going to the gym process. Ugh. #
  • I can’t wait to play Hellgate London …just sucks waiting for the damned thing #

Interesting Links: 5.25.07

  • Google-Dell browser tool ‘spyware,’ charges OpenDNS founder -Calling something spyware or ad ware these days is quite a powerful thing to do if you want to discourage users from trusting something. In my opinion, based on the description of this browser add-on, I’d agree with labeling this pre-installed crap as adware. Luckily we have PC Decrapifier to easily remove this pre-installed garbage.
  • How eclectic is your musical style? – This requires an account at Last.fm, but you should have an account already anyways. I scored a 75/100 which I feel is a little low considering I do in fact have quite a variety in music taste. Oh well, it’s fun to play with anyways.
  • The Pessimist’s Mug – I really need to get one of these mugs. Hilarious…