Idle Chatter
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Come and get me…
Is there an alternative to captchas? I’m hoping so.
It’s not like many people even know about this blog, but I’m going to run a test.
I don’t like Captchas. Don’t like tests of intelligence to respond to a blog. And I really don’t like spam in my post comments. People should be free to respond without having to be known, anonymously, so long as they’re respectful to others and the post in general. You never have to agree, but appreciate that we all live here online cumulatively to the health and future of the internet.
Yet when you see dozens of comment spams like “hey, great post - come here for viagra”, generated principally by rogue robot programs, you can easily see how this pest can paralyse a healthy conversation. Captchas was the first, best line of defence against spambots, but it’s not a natural way to communicate. Comments slowed considerably, to a crawl.
So I’m opening up the site and testing one solution - Askimet, principally for Wordpress, but now an extension for ExpressionEngine. Wordpress’s lack of separation between content and programming and poor caching preclude it from being a serious corporate cms, but the Askimet facility of WP makes sense.
If a member leaves a comment, the comment is sent to the online Akismet service at akismet.com. It’ll quickly be evaluated (microseconds - hardly any delay) and a verdict of either ’spam’ or ‘okay’ is sent back. If a comment is considered ’spam’, its status is set to ‘closed’. If a comment is considered ‘okay’, the comment is posted normally. I can then block IP ranges if I care to or batch delete them, but they never get put online.
In theory - let’s give it a try.
Friday, September 26, 2008
A new toy for my iPhone: iBlogger
Very cool new app for the iPhone, which supports a variety of content systems like ExpressionEngine.
Uses the camera, does geotagging, links, categories and tags, and likely more - In fact, I’m soaking in it.
I’ll give it a full review as we come to understand each other…
Try it here: IBlogger
Posted in: Gadgetry Idle Chatter IT notes Living in Holland
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Sunday, July 27, 2008
Your brain lies to you: How do we know what “we know”?
The phenomenon is know as source amnesia. Repeat something often enough, over and over or with enough emotional impact, and it can lead people to forget whether a statement is true or a lie. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.
“With time, this misremembering gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength. This could explain why, during the 2004 presidential campaign, it took weeks for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Senator John Kerry to have an effect on his standing in the polls.”
Read the International Herald Tribune article…
Perhaps this is why 10% of Americans think Obama is a muslim, even with the noisy row with his christian minister.
Or why 18% percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
iPhone 2.0 - what’s missing…
So far, so good - the iPhone 2.0 will do gos and push, sit in Apple’s new mobileme cloud and be cheaper. And I like it - I have a 1.0 device and I’ll likely upgrade at some point. But did you miss the same things I did?
Shares were down after the announcement - CNBC says it’s because Steve Jobs didn’t actually hold one in his hand, pointing to a presumed lack of supply. Frankly, I think if Steve wanted one, it’d be in his pocket.
The WWDC though is about software - 75% of the show was about programming, services or the new cloud layer, and the people there could have the SDK on the spot. Dangling a new device in front a crowd of geeks - especially one they can’t get for a month - well, that’s just cruel. Steve isn’t that mean.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
(bink! bink! bink!) Hello? Is this thing on?
We had a small server issue with my provider, who has been faultless for years now - this is why the thundering hordes of the Interweb couldn’t find me.
I’d blame Windows, but they don’t use it, so I can’t bitch.
C’est la vie!
Welcome back.
