I’ve been getting too many spam comments slipping past Akismet lately, so I’m trying out reCAPTCHA to see if it’s useful.
I didn’t really want to add a CAPTCHA-based system in case it makes it harder to comment (and therefore might perhaps discourage people from posting comments, not that many do anyway) but I thought I’d give it a try. Also of course it’s hard on blind people.
I decided that, if I’m going to use any CAPTCHA system, I may as well use reCAPTCHA, since the effort used to decipher the image isn’t wasted, it’s helping to digitize books and annotate images.
What do you think? Does a CAPTCHA put you off commenting? Are the reCAPTCHA images too hard to decipher? (That’s something I’m particularly worried about, some of the ones I’ve seen so far looked hard to read).
According to this report, Camelot have had to withdraw a scratch card because the general public are too thick to understand negative numbers.
From the article:
Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.
The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.
“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.
Another Friday fun post. Thankfully I’ve got today booked off work for a long weekend :)
A woman is standing, naked, in front of a mirror. She says to her husband, “I’m horrible, fat, and ugly,could you pay me a compliment and cheer me up?”
If you use Arch Linux I’d strongly suggest using the snippet of code below to use rankmirrors to sort your pacman repository mirrors into an optimal order, to use the fastest servers first.
cd /etc/pacman.d
for repo in *; do
echo "Processing $repo..."
mv $repo $repo.b4.rankmirrors
rankmirrors -v $repo.b4.rankmirrors > $repo
done
I was getting an average of about 300-400K/sec; after doing this, I was reaching 10M/sec!
Yesterday a business contact of mine spoke of badgering someone (meaning to pester them). I remarked that it’s a great word, and he raised the interesting observation: “what’s it called when a badger does it?”.
I’ve just added the Gravatarplugin to my WordPress install, allowing Gravatars to be displayed for comments.
Gravatars are “globally gecognized avatars” associated with an email address. The idea is that you can upload a small avatar (picture), and any site on which you post which supports them will be able to show that picture.
Now of course I have sympathy for the loss of their son, but I do think campaigning to ban pen lids is ridiculous. What next, shall we start a campaign to ban kitchen knives, because sometimes people cut themselves on them?
I’ve been meaning to whack up a post about this – I launched a new song lyrics search website the other day called LyricsBadger.
It uses my Lyrics::Fetcher Perl module to fetch song lyrics from a variety of sites, and remembers what it’s been asked for before so that it can present lists of artists/songs which it’s already been asked for.
I built it as a testbed for Lyrics::Fetcher and to get some experience with Template Toolkit for Perl (which absolutely rocks!). The entire site is powered by one Perl script and a handful of templates, and uses a ScriptAlias directive to pass all requests to the one script so that it can provide nice clean URLs like /lyrics/Artist/Title.
