Chasing My Own Tale
I heard that someone got video of Michael at the wrap party for WebVisions at the Greek Cusinia. Please get in contact with me if you do. It will be the highlight of next year’s show!
UPDATE: YES!! Yes yes yes!
So at the bottom of Jeffrey Zeldman’s entry “Comments are the lifeblood of the blogosphere” he has set up a spam blocking question: “Is ice hot or cold?”
I think this is great! I can’t wait for the Spammers to break it.
Now let me be clear that this is not some call for an all out comment spam war on blogs, since that’s already in progress.
This is about getting ‘bots smarter.
Think about it this way: Spambots are getting better and better at decoding the existing CAPTCHA images. They are getting better at pattern recognition and the idea is that if the spambot builders can improve the abillity to decode these images, then we’ve actually taken steps forward in the realm of Optical Character Recognition, a fundemental computer science problem that has never been fully worked out, although great strides have been made.
If the general CS researchers could get their hands on the most advanced CAPTCHA-busters (that aren’t using a sneaky Mechanical Turk system) they would have the opportunity to learn from the ‘bots and improve the state of technology.
That’s why Zeldmans “Is ice cold or hot?” is such a wonderful question! Perhaps we are creating an economic system that actually rewards technical innovation with advertising revenues. Sure, it’s slimy; comment spam is a horrible horrible thing to deal with.
But on the other hand, if we get some sort of leap in artificial intelligence because someone builds a bot that can 1) Identify this as a question, 2) Parse the question into a set of component words, 3) Construct a logical model of the question, 4) Work through an internal or external database of knowledge that can find the answer, 5) Present the answer in a succinct manner, and 6) Successfully bypass not just this question’s challange, but also other simple and not so simple questions, well then we’ve just made a huge leap in artificial intelligence.
I think it would be worth the trade off. Then again, this blog doesn’t get nearly as many comment spams as someone like Z. So I’ll let him do the work. Sorry Jeffrey!
Nick just let me know about a great article at Digital-Web: Ruby on Rails for the Rest of Us:
Rails also includes a technology called scaffolding that will create a skeleton application. The scaffolding contains the models, views, and controllers. Models are the objects you are working with: a user, a real estate listing or a city. Controllers contain all the actions that your application perform. A scaffolded controller creates the basic actions to add, remove, edit, update, and show whatever type of model you are working with. Views are the actual pages that are shown to your users. They are a mix of HTML and Ruby code. It’s similar to mixing HTML with PHP includes. In fact, if you’re a designer who has built web sites using PHP includes, the process should be familiar when developing Rails templates: You are still doing the same sort of work, but with a little difference of syntax.
Great stuff!
Looks like whocalled.us is a great tool for dealing with unwanted phone calls:
The phone is ringing, and I don’t recognize the number,
All Caller ID says is, “NAME UNAVAILABLE”.
Please help me figure out who is calling and what they want
Googling a few phone numbers has brought this up. Nice to see that this is starting up. Again, it’s one of those things that should be pretty obvious once you start watching what people are searching for.
This was fun: PDX Web Innovators, though it was a bit surpriseing who showed up. Most of the people there knew of or attended WebVisions, or in the case of Tom, actually worked on my crew one year.
Ooh, and it looks like WebVisions is going to be in May this year. I hope it doesn’t conflict with other things…
So Thursday and Friday were kinda busy:
Web Strategy by Jeremiah – Webvisions: Day 1, Portland: “I can hear the chatter from Ross, one of the event coordinators on the squak boxes –these guys mean business and are well organized.”
There’s more of that from this post too.
Hey cool, that’s me. Nick did a great job organizing the “webvisions06″ tag for everyone to use. A simple google search comes up with a bunch of stuff.
It was a great conference this year. The crew of volunteers that were helping out really f’ing rocked!
There’s a few pages that walk thru the process:
* Domain Name Registration Article at About.com
* Domain name Tips article at About.com
You need a few things to do this:
1. A credit card
2. A website hosting service (Easystreet, rackspace.com, etc.)
3. The list of 2 “name servers” from the hosting service (ns1.easystreet.com, ns2.easystreet.com, etc.)
4. A domain Registrar: (NetworkSolutions, Doster, GoDaddy, Yahoo, etc.)
The Registrars that we use at work are http://www.NetworkSolutions.com and http://www.Dotster.com. There are hundreds, but I generally like Dotster. Personally I use http://www.000domains.com (but they simply resell Dotster’s services).
Ajax is client side asynch communication. Comet is the Server-side equivalent.
Comet: Low Latency Data for the Browser:
So what makes these apps special? What makes them different from other things that might at first glance appear similar? Fundamentally, they all use long-lived HTTP connections to reduce the latency with which messages are passed to the server. In essence, they do not poll the server occasionally. Instead the server has an open line of communication with which it can push data to the client.
As is illustrated above, Comet applications can deliver data to the client at any time, not only in response to user input. The data is delivered over a single, previously-opened connection. This approach reduces the latency for data delivery significantly.
From the places I’d like to be, conferences I’d like to attend file:
Digital Web Magazine – News – South by Northwest:
South by Northwest sponsored by Blue Flavor, Bryght, Newsvine and Raincity Studios. There will be lots of beer, wine and margaritas to suck down. Be sure to bring your digital cameras because there is nothing more bloggable than drunken web geek celebrities.
Have a great time guys!
For the first post of September, we’ll be covering August and the last few weeks with QuickNotes™…
1) I’ve got a new laptop: 15″ PowerBook. Woo Hoo! It’s teh hot! Seriously, switching from the plastic-cased iBook to the aluminium wraped 15″ PB has given me a new appreciation for thermodynamics. (But still the PB is FAST! So much faster than the iBook.)
2) Tiger is okay, but little to write home about. The UI inconsistencies in OS X from the system and iApps perspective is becoming more obvious. But I could be just railing against the fact that part of iChat crashes on a regular basis, just after I switched back to using it instead of Adium because iChat can now do multiple accounts including Jabber accounts.
3) General instability is the call of the day. Some things are craping out way too easily. I’m letting Steve use my iBook while he’s out in Astoria for school, and I’ll be putting Panther on it.
4) Went and saw part of the Woodburn NEDRA electric drag races. Took some video and put together some movies for John Wwayland over at plasmaboy racing.
5) The new iTunes interface is an unecessary change unless it’s carried out to the rest of the iApps. The name for it seems to be “Polished Metal” as opposed to the older (and reviled) “Brushed Metal”. The iPod Nano looks cool but it took me days to find out it was solid-state flash and not hard drive-based. The ROKR iPhone is for SUKRs. Totally crippled and nothing new hardware-wise. Apple can’t build the whole widget, so the widget is a total compromise.
6) Our living rooom television died. Would like to replace it with a flat LCD, but they’re still more money than I want to invest in Home Entertainment. If anyone’s got a recommendation for a $200 to $300 television with *LOTS* of input and output jacks, let me know.
7) I’ve got a freelance project launching in the next could of days. I’ll point to it once it’s got a bit of burn-in time.
I’ve been seeing a new testing probe-bot that’s crawling around Contact forms. It’s already hit LazerQuick where we’ve patched it and just last nite it hit my feedback form on OrderSomewhereChaos. Nasty little bugger made me dive back into Perl code that I’ve not touched in 6 or 7 years. The mail is being sent to the (probably compromised) AOL account of “jrubin3456@aol.com”. They’re looking to find tons of spamming reflectors. I’m sure they’ll find *LOTS* of them.
9) Amy and I are off to see the final regular-season game for the Timbers! Mighty Mighty Timbers!
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