/dev/null/kevin

There was a recent story about Google's CAPTCHA being broken.  CAPTCHAs are the little tests that websites use to prove the user is a human and not an automated system (spammer).  This very blog uses the simple, and easily broken, "add these numbers" test to leave a comment.

Here are my (not serious) suggestions for improved CAPTCHAs:

Use Pop Culture References:

Which character ruined Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace?

A. B. C. D. All of the Above

Answer: D

What internet meme died on April 1, 2008?

1. Dramatic Hampster
   
2. Rick Rolling
3. LOL Cats
4. Scientology
   

 

Answer: B

 Use Song Lyrics: 

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
The answer is: --> blowin' in the wind

Who ya gonna call?
--> Ghostbusters!

Who's the black private dick that's a sex machine to all the chicks?
--> Shaft!
You're damn right

Who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man?
--> Shaft!
Can ya dig it?

Who's the cat that won't cop out when there's danger all about?
--> Shaft!
Right on!

You see this cat Shaft is a bad mother--
--> Shut your mouth
But I'm talkin' about Shaft
--> Then we can dig it

 Use Trivia: 

How Many Licks Does It Take To Get To The Tootsie Roll Center Of A Tootsie Pop?

--> 3

What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?

--> African or European?

 Use Jeopardy Questions: 

 Catagory: POTPOURRI

The most undeserving popular blog at blogs.sun.com.

--> /dev/null/kevin

Please phrase your response in the form of a question

--> What the hell is /dev/null/kevin?

Comment approved.

Tags: lolcat lolcaterpillar lolcatrpilr lolcats
May 02, 2008 07:18 AM PDT Permalink | Comments [0] |

I'm questionable.  Got a huge freaking spider bite on my big toe, and I can barely get a shoe on and hobble around at work.

--Chris W.

Thanks to Chris K. for the laugh.

 Code Orange!  Code Orange!  Hazmat teams to Playground One!

When you have a kid in school you learn all about other kids with food allergies.  The most common allergies seem to be wheat, dairy and peanuts.  Schools are careful that no one is served food they shouldn't eat but some schools actually ban all kids from bring food with peanuts in it.

I have to wonder what the extra zealous schools would think of the following snack: Keebler Cheese and Peanut Butter Crackers.  Motto: It's the trifecta of allergens!

And, yes, I'm pretty sure that this isn't so healthy for kids without allergies to be eating, either.

For Earth Day, I am retiring my old (and dangerous) Sun Blade 2000.  I'm replacing it with a new Ultra 24.  Granted, it's not up the drool-worth specs of Rama's system, but it will do for now.  I expect my office to be much cooler now (and quieter).

This will also allow me to use the latest xVM Server hypervisor technology, which is good because I'm on the xVM Ops Center team and I need to get some of this stuff to work. 

Dilbert.com was relaunched last week and it's terrible.  The pointy-haired boss has won.  They tried for Web 2.0 but ended up with Web 2.Oh No!

Now that I've gotten the one-liners out of the way, here are the specifics.  With a plethora of new features that might have sounded good on paper, the new site looks like a MySpace page with hemorrhoids.  It's loud, obnoxious, filled with Flash 9, and causes an itching sensation.  Tim Bray said it best:

Tim's not the only one who doesn't like the new site.   Venky also doesn't like the new site, but the most negative comments come from Dilbert's own readers: 

Today's Sunday strip was particularly bad as the Flash application didn't even display the entire strip all at once.  I needed to page through the Sunday strip to see it all.  Whatever humor there was in the strip was lost as I had to deal with the navigation.  I'm lucky that the Flash even worked for me since many of the comments show that Flash 9 doesn't work on many platforms, including Solaris and some PDAs.

Perhaps Scott Adams needs to buy his own copy of How To Make Webcomics from the guys at halfpixel.com [1 2 3 4] who really know how to make a web site for comics.

Update [04/25/2008]: Scott Adams has revealed the "secret" back door page with just the comic.

It's currently 84 degrees F here in Silicon Valley (29 C) and the shorts are coming out, and so are the white legs.  This seems to be a popular trend on twitter, and I am no exception.

Here is a screen capture, as that search will probably change over time.  It's amazing how self-deprecating the twitter community is. 

Long, long, ago, I used to play roller hockey with Joe, Rama and Will.  We played in the parking lots between Sun's Mountain View buildings (now all Google buildings).  Eventually I moved to ice hockey and hadn't touched the roller gear in years.  This week my wife's cousin needed a sub on his roller hockey team.  Not wanting to break my ankle trying to do an ice stop, I laced up the old pair and headed down the street with my dog running along side.  I took a few test turns, and then *snap* - I was on my butt.  Fortunately, it was not my ankle, but the skate itself.  The entire bottom half of the skate just broke off.  It was a cheap, plastic boot, not leather, and I guess we now know the lifespan of a cheap roller hockey skate.

The good news is I had two pairs of skates (outdoors and indoors) so I was still able to play since the game was indoors.

Flickr launched its new video service today (Tuesday 08 April).  For me this is awesome because I already use flickr for my photos.  Like most people, my digital camera also takes decent quality videos and it is very nice to have them in the same stream as my photos.

There are two features that really make flickr better for personal video clips over YouTube.

1. Better image quality - See below.
   


2. Can download the original - I liked Google Video for this same reason.  It's very valuable to have off-site backups of your photos and videos so now I have both in one place.
   

Of course, with only a 90 second limit, YouTube, and other services, are still better for longer and professional vids.

Compare the quality of the same video uploaded to both YouTube and Flickr.

YouTube:

Flickr Video:

Update: Found one strike against Flickr: The embedded video doesn't appear/play in Google Reader. If you don't see the Flickr video window try here.

Update 2: According to Kellan of Flickr, this is a known problem.  You can work around the Google Reader problem by subscribing using the RSS feed and not the Atom feed. 

Minute Maid Light Orange Juice has less than 50% of the calories of regular Minute Maid Orange Juice.  Have you ever wondered how they accomplish this amazing feat?  (ok, just play along)

I have here the super secret formula for creating Light Orange Juice Drink:

+ =

That's 42% OJ to 58% water.

But remember to charge the same price as regular orange juice.  That's the real secret.

I lost a good friend yesterday.  He lost his battle with cancer.  It was surprisingly swift.  I didn't want to post anything yesterday since it was April Fool's Day, which is a really bad day to deliver bad news.

John and I have played drums together for over 20 years now.  We both went to the same college (UC Davis) and were in the marching band.  I was still in college when he recruited me into an offshoot band called the California Repercussions.  We have been playing together, year round, ever since.  He became my mentor of drumming.  The band has taken multiple trips outside of the US, as well as a trip to Hawaii just last year, and the whole band is like an extended family.  The percussion section is even closer.

In addition to the Reapers, John and I also played percussion in various musical theater productions.  John has a massive collection of drums and percussion which he would lend to me at any time.  Where else can you borrow a set of timpani or a bell tree?  We would sub for each other and discuss the best way to play a song (much of the drum/percussion parts are improvised).  One of my favorite show memories is the two of us covering the entire West Side Story part, written for four percussionists.

John's last show (just weeks ago) was playing High School Musical with his 11 13 year old son, Eric.  I'm really glad that he got to do that.  I may be called up to take up John's part in the band.  I hope it's only temporary.  It would be nice if Eric could take his father's place in the future.

Here are some pictures from our trip to the 2007 Pro Bowl in Hawaii:

John and I with Hula Cheerleaders

Playing outside the Pro Bowl

Java + Twitter = JavaOne2008

Tag your tweets with #JavaOne2008

Tag everything else with JavaOne2008

If you're old school Web 1.0: JavaOne

Why am I the #1 Sun blog today?  Go read Jonathan's blog!  He made an attempt to be funny, complete with legalese and dolphins, or something.  You're putting me on his radar!

Move along.  Nothing to see here.  If you're looking for an April Fool's Day prank, try the Do It Yourself Rick Roll.

Is there any real value in flickr collections?  Please tell me what I'm missing.

A flickr set is a group of pictures.  I can view a set together, make a slide show, and edit the set together.  It's a very useful feature.

A flickr collection is a group of sets and it provides some organizational structure for sets that are related.  I can add or remove sets from a collection, as well as add a description.  The collection also gets a special mosaic badge made up of images from the various sets. 

However, other than those very basic features (which I admit, have some value), it seems that collections should allow me to  do so much more:

• No collection tools - With a set I can perform multiple actions on the whole set, but there are no actions for a collection.
• I can't view the whole collection as a slide show.
• I can't edit the whole collection.
• I can't add tags to a collection.
• I can't view the whole collection as a stream.
• I can't load a collection into the flickr organizer.
• Collection mosaic icon is useless.
• The mosaic's URL changes if I edit the mosaic (select different images) - This means I can't use the mosaic for anything like a thumbnail for a link to the collection's page.  If something exists, but I can't use it, does it have any value?
  
• The mosaic icon doesn't even appear on the collection's own page!

Sometimes less is more.  It's a cliche, but an accurate one.  Such is twirl, an AIR-based twitter client.  Twhirl (a really hard word to type, btw) has lots of features, most of which I don't need.  Its also missing some basic features that I need.

The irony is that, like twitter, a product with few features that still dominates, twitterific is still a better client than twirl.  i.e.

twitter : pownce :: twitterific : twhirl

Twitter, with its small feature set is still better, and more popular, than pownce or jaiku (two technologies that have more features, but are still inferior and much less popular).  Twitterific, with its elegant feel, is still better than feature-packed twhirl.

Twhirl Pros

1. Multiple twitter accounts - I tweet as myself, but also as my daughter.  I put cute things she says in there, mainly just for myself and wife.  It's a bit of a pain to switch back and forth, so it's nice to have multiple twhirl windows open for each account.  I also know a certain someone who occasionally tweets as his wife by mistake.
2. Lots of display options - You can customize the color pallet and font easily.  You can apply filters, and you can select from several different view panels such as timeline, replies, friends, followers, direct messages, and archive.
3. Search - twhirl leverages existing services TweetScan and Terraminds for searches.
4. Retweeting - If you're into forwarding tweets, it's easy with twhirl.  Just one click.

Other than Pro #1, I don't use or need those extra features.  #2 is nice, but I just selected the one that looked like twitterific.    Search would be nice, but those two services don't work that well.  Terraminds was not even up as of this writing.

Twhirl Cons

1. Unread vs read messages not easy to distinguish - A tiny white dot in the corner is the only way to detect an unread tweet in twhirl, while the whole message is bold in twitterific.  It's much easier to visually scan with twitterific.
2. No real keyboard shortcuts - Yes, it has *some* keyboard shortcuts, but for things that don't need shortcuts.  The shortcuts that I miss are "Reply" and "Mark all as read."  If I used retweet, I'd probably want that, too.  Also, while I can scroll up and down using the arrow keys, that action doesn't cause the tweets to be marked as read.  I either have to click on them or click on the mark as read button.  In general, there is just too much clicking required.
   
3. Cluttered display - This might just be personal preference, but twitterific will display either the twitter id or the "real" name of a person in the header.  twhirl's display is more like the web display.  It puts the twitter id in with the tweet and appends the date stamp along with the "real" name.  See the attached image.
4. AIR is clunky - Maybe it's AIR and maybe it's twhirl, but the application has a slow and unsteady feel to it.  It's not horrible, but it's not as crisp as twitterific.
5. Breaks MacOS click behavior - In Mac OS X, if you click on a window that doesn't have focus, that click is not passed to the application.  The idea is that you don't accidentally click on something that you didn't intend to when you switch focus to another window.  This differers from Windows behavior which does pass the click to the application.  I expect that this behavior is a by-product of using AIR, since AIR also runs on Windows.  Still, it's annoying to have an application behave differently that every other Mac app.  Also, this problem is magnified when you consider that your clicks might lead to the next problem...
   
6. Web links open new windows, not tabs - Even though Firefox is set to open new links in a new tab, URLs launched through twhirl open a whole new Firefox window.  Not only is this not what I want, but it's also slower.  Is this another AIR-ism?
   
7. Does not pop down - Twitterific will pop up when there are new tweets but then pop back down if you don't click on the window.  Twhirl just stays up until you manually make it go away.  Anyone who actually gets work done knows that sometimes you just have to ignore twitter.  Not only does the window not go away, but all of the twhirl windows open up for all of the accounts you have open.  So even if my daughter's account doesn't receive a tweet, it still opens up when my account does.
8. Does not pop up - Depending on how you minimize twhirl it may never pop up.  If you close it with Command-H (Hide) then it will pop up with new tweets.  However, if you use Command-M (minimize), or the _ icon on the bar, then it won't pop up.  Twitterific disables minimize, I believe.
   
9. No spellcheck - Twitterific leverages the auto-spellcheck feature that applications using text windows get.  Perhaps it's an AIR limitation, but twhirl doesn't do this.  I need this feature.  I suck at spelling and typing (count the errors in this blog!) so I really need a spell checker.

Speaking of poor writing, read this part of the twhirl documentation.  Scroll down to the "connection settings" section.

So, the verdict is that twhirl is not for me.  Yes, they could fix some of these problems, but the one's linked to AIR might take longer to resolve as Adobe works to get AIR more widely adopted.  For now, it's back to twitterific for me.

Here's the screen shot comparing the two twitter clients.  Note that there are two twhirl windows for my two twitter accounts.  The top window has the message area hidden.