IT notes
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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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.
Friday, May 30, 2008
The oldest vaporware in the Macintosh world?
The PC world has Duke Nukem, but at least they’re not taking money for something that’s never coming. Strider Software’s TypeStyler is taking orders and never delivering…
You know TypeStyler, right? If you read MacSurfer, it’s one of the first ads you see:
It didn’t work under 10.3 (ahh, those were the days) but it was under development and coming soon, and their email implored us to just buy it and run it in Classic OS 9 mode and when the new version would be ready, we’d be the first to know.
Now - that was then. We’ve broken up over 3 years ago and still I see the ad, unchanged, imploring gullible Mac newbies to invest in TypeStyler and wait for the never-coming OS X version. I’ve written recently asking where it is… “coming soon” is the reply, a virtual carbon copy of a mail I received 3 years ago.
Do they realize you can’t run it any longer since there’s no Classic OS 9 mode in OS 10.5? It’s been nearly a two years with Intel Macs and a year from 10.5’s launch… I’m sure they do, being developers and all, but when you check their website for information on compatibility:
“TypeStyler X is feature complete and we continue to do internal beta testing in Tiger for both the PowerPC and the new Intel Macs making sure all the pieces integrated so it won’t be much longer before our beta testers start seeing something”
...
“TypeStyler for Mac OS X is not just a port of TypeStyler 3 to OS X but an updated OS X application that takes advantage of the latest Mac OS X (for both PowerPC and Intel) operating systems. Until the TypeStyler for OS X is released most users have found the current TypeStyler 3.7.2 (one known issue) runs fine under the Classic environment of OS X of all past and currently shipping PowerPC Macs. The new Intel Macs do not support Classic.”
Ah, Tiger. That was fun too - many years ago. And small note to all PowerPC 10.5 users - don’t bother buying it, because we’re no longer using Classic either.
What galls me is that MacSurfer still allows the ad to run! How many people will waste their money, waiting for a working application that will—to all visible signs—never, ever come? If you were running an ad for a vaporware application that is, in effect, a bait-and-switch gimmick. And last I saw in the US, bait-and-switch was illegal.
There needs to be some pressure on MacSurfer to remove ads that are inherently fraudulent and deceitful. After 4+ years of waiting for an OS X app that’s “coming soon”, I think Strider Software is perhaps the most unreliable, vaporous and possibly dishonest software developer out there on the Mac.
Beware.
(I’ve posted a follow-up to this, but without any further response from the developer)
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Coda from Panic. Meh.
Coda is a new integrated web development application from the fine folks at Panic. I love their previous product, Transmit—so why don’t I give a whit for Coda?
First - I don’t like reviews on developer apps. Every developer works differently, as is evident in the code they write. It’s a personal experience that is hard to funnel into prescribed procedures, so it may well be that Coda just doesn’t work for me. Or maybe I need to consider applying some change to my existing style (yeah, right) but if you develop web sites, you do need to download it and give it a try.
I’ve been a user of Dreamweaver since version 1.0 was shown to a group of us at the Denver (D)TC. I don’t use it much except on the PC at work because on the Mac at home I can do better work with BBEdit and CSSedit. (Discolsure: I’ve been a betatester for CSSEdit from MacRabbit).
I want to like Coda, at least half as much as I liked Transmit. If that were true, this would have been a rave review, but Coda suffers from v1.0-itis in it’s current form. You can read everywhere reviews on Coda and what it’s like.
Let me touch on what I dislike:
Speed: It’s a bit pokey on a 1.67Mhz Powerbook, so I await the 1.1 version for tweaks.
Keyboard commands: Why, oh why do people think I want to use the mouse? Some developers prefer keyboard equivs. When beta testing version 2 of CSSEdit, I worked with the developer to implement OPT-TAB vertically through the editors and CMD-OPT up and down through the editor palette.
The CSS environment is oversized (compared to CSSEdit), the fonts are too large, lots of dead area in the CSS view - just not an efficient use of space on a powerbook.
No site-wide serch? Sorry?? BBedit or Jedit rules here…
Splitting the views is a cool idea, but only horizontally or vertically - not a combination of the two, which would allow a great deal more flexibility when it comes to displays of different sizes.
CSS3 elements are mixed-in with the CSS2 elements - if you were new to CSS, you might beat your head against a wall when your shadows don’t work on Firefox but do in Safari. There should be some marking - even an asterisk.
The lack of keyboard launch for other browsers. OPT-B for preview in Safari? Isn’t that already internal? What about Firefox? (What I would REALLY like would be some means to target IE in Parallels. But first I’ll need a Intel powerbook…sigh.)
What do I like? Glad you asked:
Transmit integration. Schnappy!
CSS3 support
Integrated manuals (although I’d like it more if they were available offline - doesn’t anyone commute and code?)
Bonjour-enabled cooperative environment. It’s good to see someone other than SubEthaEdit take advantage of this.
It’s a good 1.0 release (read: it hasn’t crashed and taken my work with it) but I’m not writing checks quite yet. I don’t see how reaching for a mouse and clicking is faster than CMD-tabbing to another application, so any benefits just seem negated. If I could keep my fingers on the keyboard and alt/cmd-tab everywhere, I’d be happy with Coda indeed.
