Paul O'Flaherty

Captcha Gotcha

You’ve got to hand it to spammers. They’re nothing if not imaginative and the latest scam being reported by the BBC is pure genius.

For those of you who don’t know Capthcas are supposed to prevent automatic spamming systems from leaving unwanted adverts for things like viagra on your blog and other places.

Spammers have found a way around these capthcas using sex. Or at least the promise of seeing a hot woman stripping and getting naked.

They’ve created a game with the premises that you, as the user decipher capthcas and the more you decipher the more the images of the woman you see and each progressive image has her in ever increasing states of undress.

So, every time you decipher a capthca you get the gratification of a little more nudity and the warm fuzzy feeling that you’ve allowed spammers to place another comment on yet another blog or set up a free email account on a service such as Yahoo with which to send more spam to your inbox.

It’s true sex sells, but this is a real booby-trap! Sorry for the bad pun!

Snitter – Makes Twitter make sense

Yesterday I couldn’t get Snitter (my new favorite Twitter client by Jonathan Snook) installed and today I’m happily pumping out tweets from Snitter.

It knocks the socks off of handling Twitter through Gtalk or Pidgin and managed to edge out the other desktop clients I’ve tried.

It turned out that uninstalling AIR and reinstalling AIR was not enough. I had to do the uninstall / reinstall 3 times before Snitter would install. The problem appears to be one with AIR rather than with Snitter.

Jonathan has built a ton of cool features into the client and one of my favorite is the the ability to reply to a tweet, send a direct message to a tweets author or mark a tweet as a favorite just by mousing over the authors icon.

Rex Dixon (sorry Rex but my Pownce client is still working) got it right yesterday when he sent this tweet to Scot Duke:

@MrBusinessGolf Get Snitter! You’ll like it, makes more sense

Jonathan has done a great job with Snitter and was very fast replying to me after I sent him an email whining that I couldn’t get Snitter to install.

Now I have one last request with regards to Snitter. When I click on a link I’d love it to open in my default browser as opposed to opening up in Internet Explorer.

Snitter choking on AIR

Scoble and others have been waxing lyrical about the joys of Snitter as a way to interact with Twitter.

This come in light of the announcement of a Pownce API (API Page) and the fact that the Pownce client is, like Snitter, developed to run on Adobe AIR.

The problem is that I can’t get Snitter to work.

Even though I live in Denmark, I run the English/US version of Vista and even with the latest version of AIR installed (Beta 2 from October 1,2007) it refuses to install, insisting that I need a newer version of AIR.

Go figure.

Hopefully Jonathan Snook (the brains behind Snitter) will get this bug fixed as I’m always on the look out for a good Twitter client and have yet to find one that suits my needs perfectly.

Update 31-10-2007: The installation issue has been sorted and Snitter works properly. You can read more in this post : Snitter – Makes Twitter make sense.

Hulu -Not American – No Video for you!

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes about Hulu today and if I was to say that he wasn’t impressed I’m sure I’d be underestimating his feelings on the matter.

For those of you who don’t know Hulu, is an:

Hulu, the online video project from Newscorp and NBC/Universal, with participation by Sony, MGM and others

Marshall included a video snippet from Hulu in his post and it was all I need to see in order to know that Hulu will never amount to much:

Google Reader behind the times?

I’m fairly sure my Google Reader is stuck in a time warp.

I just logged in to check the news and it’s showing me entries from the 15th of October (actually it’s exactly the same entry as the screenshot I used in a post about issues with IE in Outlook on the 17th of this month).

This is the third time or fourth time this has happened in the past week.

I read my feeds, close the window with all feeds marked as read and the next time I come back Google Reader believes October 15th.

Anybody else experiencing the Google Reader equivalent of Groundhog Day?

(Fire) Foxing Outlook

At my main machine I’ve been living more and more within Outlook (2007) as it is still one of the best PIM’s out there. However, I still rely on, and will under no circumstances give up a my web based services such as Gmail and Google Calendar.

Most of the annoyances are easily overcome but some things have been bugging the crap out of me lately.

The first was links within emails opening in IE even after Firefox had been set as the default browser. That was fixed easily enough using this little tip.

Replacing the default RSS feeds with Google Reader and replacing the calendar with Google Calendar were also easily fixed.

But one big pain in the backside still remains.

When I create a personal folder to show a web page such as Google Analytics or to allow me edit the admin area of Bloomer without leaving Outlook, some weird things start happening.

Anytime I browse around Bloomer (and many other sites) within Outlook it keeps throwing up script errors and asking me if I want to continue running scripts on the page.

The strange thing is that these errors’s don’t occur in Internet Explorer outside of Outlook. (Outlook uses Word to render HTML email but uses IE for actual web sites)

As a result of these errors I’ve been thinking that maybe there is a way to make Outlook use a different browser instead of IE to display web pages.

It would be awesome if I could make Outlook use Firefox or any other browser (and maybe have access to my Firefox extensions within Outlook )

I’ve been Googling this for the past half hour and have come up with zip. Is this even possible? Has anybody done it yet?

Or does anybody simply have an explanation as to why these script errors occur within IE in Outlook and not elsewhere?

Upgrade Complete

The upgrade to WordPress 2.3 is complete now.

It appears as if everything has worked and the change from Ultimate Tag Warrior to WordPress’s own tagging system went well.

I did have to replace a few plugins for compatibility reasons and make some code changes to my theme in order to accommodate the new plugins and WP’s tagging system.

If you spot any issues please drop me a line and I’ll get them fixed ASAP.

Upgrading to WP 2.3

WordPress 2.3 came out while I was away and I’m finally going to upgrading this blog to it today.

Hopefully it will all go smooth but if the gremlins do attack you know what’s up…

Free Domain names that aren’t..

Cryptic? I don’t think so. I spotted this article (via Buzztracker) talking about how you can get free top level domain names from Co.nr.

Yep, that’s right. I said free.

There are many good reasons for having your own top level domain name. For one it looks a hell of a lot more professional than “mybrainfart.blogspot.com” or some other long name given out by a free service.

So to solve your problem co.nr is offering you to ability to have “brainfart.co.nr” for free. Or so it seems. Here’s what they say:

Signup for http://www.your-name.co.nr – free domain name!
and use this free domain name to access your website, no matter where it is hosted.
Of course, this service is absolutely free and we don’t place any ads on your website!
Just setup a Free URL redirection with URL cloaking (url masking) and forward it to your real website url. We provide many other features, about which you can learn more here

I popped in the name Bloomer to see if it was available (Bloomer is a beta social network for the Danish market) and it was.

However it the page that load made it readily apparent that the name is not “free”.

The page states that in order to use the name you must:

(1) Link back to CO.NR is Absolutely required

Although, we do not place any forced ads (banners, popups, etc.) on free .co.nr domain name accounts, we require the link back to CO.NR to be placed on the MAIN page (the very first page) of your web site. The link MUST be exactly like this: (*graphic removed*)

So, you see it’s not free after all. Actually it comes at a potentially high cost to the user.

The first is this, you provided the domain co.nr with a link back generating a lot of Google juice for these guys and creating a domain with a high page rank. That alone is worth cash…

Second you only have the name as long as they allow you to.. and under their terms of service you can be shut down at any time without notification:

CO.NR reserves the right to modify or discontinue the Service with or without notice to the Member. CO.NR Free Domain Name / Free Subdomain Services shall not be liable to Member or any third party, should CO.NR exercise its right to modify or discontinue the Service for any reason.

This could mean you loose traffic, readers and revenue while you hunt for a new free domain name.

If I was an evil person and I wanted to artificially boost the value/PR of a domain, offering a service like this would be one sure way to get it done.

Sure the boost would be only temporary and would die off after you discontinue the service but I’m sure, considering how many folks start blogs on free services and abandon them that many of those links would stay in place for a long time.

There are plenty of reasons why you would want to do this.

I’m not saying that’s what’s happing here.. I’m just saying that it’s something I thought of.

Either way, the best way to make your site appear professional (besides being professional) is to buy your own domain name.

Then you’ll never have to worry about being shut off without notice.

Does keyboard bashing cause Carpal Tunnel?

You hear a lot about repetitive motion injury in the workplace these days as employers are eager to ensure that their backside is covered legally if staff (especially those in the IT industry) develop a problem such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (or Median Neuropathy at the Wrist).

It’s commonly held that typing at the keyboard for hours on end and constantly moving the mouse around is the kind of thing that just has to be bad for your joints.

Well, Tech-recipes wrote a post about CTS yesterday in which they quote a pile of studies (see the article for those) and essentially come to this conclusion:

The current research shows that computer use has very little role in causing carpal tunnel syndrome. Common medical diseases that are known to cause carpal tunnel are much more likely to blame than any repetitive use injury.

That begs the question: Why are we all buying/wearing those wrist protectors?

Is it all a scam? Would Penn & Teller be calling “Bullshit” on this one?

I don’t know. What I can say is that after 24 years of keyboard bashing I’ve never suffered from it and haven’t started to show any of the signs of it either.

But I’m just one guy and I certainly can’t judge everybody by what hasn’t happened to me.

Still I can’t help wondering if having these wrist protectors wrapped around your wrist isn’t some sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I remember when I was a kid and had to wear a support on my knee after injuring myself playing football and the doctor warning me not to keep it on longer than necessary, as the additional support being provided would weaken the muscles around the knee over time as they became more reliant on the support to do their job.

I don’t know if there’s any truth in that either but it certainly makes sense to me.

Now I find myself asking who’s right? Is it Tech-recipes and the studies they quote (and my personal experience) or is it the legions of suppliers selling wrist protectors and supports and the studies they quote?

Have I been wrong in not wearing one all along?

Of course, you guys know how I think and I’m inexorably drawn to wondering if the one hand porn surfers of the world suffer from CTS worse than anybody else (that and one unusually large bicep).

What about the console generation? Are they all going to end up in their fifties with huge overdeveloped thumbs, covered in calluses? Will they be doomed to walk around perpetually looking like their trying to hitch a lift because they are unable to return their thumbs to the normal relaxed position due to CTS?

Will we start seeing them wearing thumb supports soon?

Alcohol – a coders inspiration!

I just twittered this a second ago but I think it’s so funny and so true that I had to link to it for posterity.

 “The Ballmer Peak” on XKCD.

(Via InsideMicrosoft.)