alanc @ sun.com

Alan Coopersmith’s blog

Random thoughts of a disorganized mind...
(and though it should be obvious, while Sun pays me to think about things, they disclaim any responsibility for these thoughts, nor do I claim what I say matches in any way what Sun thinks)

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http://blogs.sun.com/alanc/date/20040820 Friday August 20, 2004

Damn spammers

sigh Just had to waste ten minutes going through all the comments on here to delete about 20 from the $#^@*!ing blog spammers. The people who run blogs.sun.com have been looking into ways to stop it, unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a good solution that works for everyone - if you use a "captcha" (one of those images of text that's easy for people to read but hard for computers to recognize), then you block people with visual impairments - but just registration means they just program another step into their spambots. Unfortunately it's so cheap for them, even if they only get one sucker for millions of blog posts, they've made a profit.

Posted at 09:23AM Aug 20, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in Solaris  |  Comments[1]

Toogle

This looks cool - enter a term into this search engine and not only does it find a picture, it converts on the fly to ascii art, such as these: [Accessibility warning - you don't want to follow these links in a screen reader unless you like hearing meaningless repetitive text for a long time.]

[I had tried copying and pasting the html, but that seemed to be too much to handle for the Roller weblog server on blogs.sun.com]

It works better with images with lots of contrast and big details - for others sometimes you have to go to Google Image Search to figure out what the picture was before transformation (such as this picture found for "Darth Vader" - the text version is hard to figure out until you see the gorgeous original picture).

Posted at 12:08AM Aug 20, 2004 by Alan Coopersmith in General  |  Comments[1]