Tim Saylor

I don’t yet have any need to implement CAPTCHA myself, but if I did, it wouldn’t be your standard distorted and scribbled on text. It would be one of these:

Microsoft Asirra

With Asirra, to identify yourself as a human you have to identify a series of pictures as cats (excluding the dogs). It seems like a sound approach, but on the face it looks so nonsensical that I feel compelled to use it. Picture this internet argument: “Well you plainly have no idea what you’re talking about on this issue, so I won’t keep wasting my valuable time trying to fight with your stupidity! As soon as I click on these cats, you’ll never hear from me again!”

reCAPTCHA

This one is more serious, and has a purpose too. Instead of displaying random obscured characters, it displays a real scanned image of two words from an old book. One of these words has been identified and the other has not. The user types both words, the computer verifies the user’s humanity with the known word, and records what the human said the unknown word was. Through this process the un-digitized book becomes completely digitized. They’re turning CAPTCHA tests, a “lesser evil” annoyance, into something that’s actually good.

While looking for a job, I’ve been surprised by the number of places developing on a Microsoft platform. I didn’t know that it was so common, at least in Chicago. If you’re using a Microsoft OS, service, or language and it works for you then great, but aren’t there open source alternatives that are just as good and not as expensive? Especially MS SQL server; whenever I see that I can’t help but wonder why they aren’t using MySQL or Postgresql. Does anyone reading this work in the Microsoft world at work? What keeps your company there?

Rot13 is a common method for obfuscating text, often used to randomize passwords or to hide “spoilers” from online discussions. The tool I most commonly use to translate rot13′d text is http://www.rot13.com/, and that works well for translating long sections of ciphertext back in to plaintext. However, often there is just one or a few words to be translated from plaintext to ciphertext, and I find the site to be too much overhead for the task.

That’s why I made a simple php script on my website to do my rot13 translations from now on. The key difference between mine and rot13.com is that the form on mine uses the GET method rather than POST. This allows me to make a firefox bookmark to translate text directly from the url bar. To do this, bookmark this url: http://timsaylor.com/tools/rot13.php?plaintext=%s. Then in the bookmark’s properties add a value to the keyword field. My keyword is “rot”, so now whenever I type “rot [text]” into my url bar, it sends that to my script and opens a page with the ciphertext.

It’s just a simple utility, and writing this blog post about it took longer than actually making the script itself. I just had to rot13 something today, though, and I remembered wishing that I could do it more simply. A quick search turned up this rot13 php function, which meant all the hard work was done. I just wrapped that up in an html form and put it online. The source is here.

Today I was informed that a project that Dan and I collaborated on recently received a bit of attention on the internets. Our “In Case of Revolution Break Glass” box, pictured below.

Dan had the idea, I did the woodwork, and Dan painted and lettered. One major reason that Dan wanted to make this was so he could post it on a “Show off stuff you’ve made” thread on Something Awful. From there it was cross posted to Digg (edit: and made the #1 spot apparently!), then on to this blog, which was Reddited, and then on to College Humor today. There were many more too, 3,580 hits on Google. The only credit we got was someone in the digg comments saying “This is from Something Awful, a goon did it” (half true), but that’s to be expected. I’m still pleased. And next time it’ll say “timsaylor.com” across the bottom.

I got back from the Maker Faire last weekend, and it was amazing. Many of the projects I had seen online like the Singing Tesla Coil, the RepRap, Cyclecide and their freak bikes, all the kits from the Maker Store and Adafruit Industries, and some projects from Instructables were there to be played with in meatspace. The highlights for me were riding a double decker bicycle, seeing the 10 foot tall trebuchet launch a watermelon, Cyclecide’s bicycle powered ferris/hamster wheel, the CNC woodworking tools, learning how to spin wool into yarn, 5 minute t-shirts with Bre Pettis, and actually playing the singing tesla coils through a keyboard. Unfortunately I’m an idiot and brought my camera to the faire, but left the battery safely plugged into the wall in Chicago. Fortunately, plenty of other people documented the event for me. Enjoy the pictures, and start saving up for San Mateo in May!

I’ve been planning to go to the Maker Faire in Austin, Texas this October, and I’m surprised none of you are interested in going too. If you’re not familiar with the kind of stuff that’ll be there, here’s some videos showing the cool stuff at the first two faires.

http://revision3.com/systm/makerfaire
http://revision3.com/systm/maker07

Check out information about this years faire at http://www.makerfaire.com.

This story about evolutionary hardware design was indeed, as the URL indicates, a damn interesting read. The thing that struck me the most was that the design the evolutionary algorithm came up with didn’t work on other chips of the same type, just on the chip on which it evolved. The minute differences between different chips of the same type are negligible if their use is limited to things we currently understand, but if the only constraint is the laws of physics then the solutions that evolve are so complex and out of the ordinary that, were we to understand them, our advanced tools would probably seem like sticks and rocks.

Just the other day at work I was tasked with exploring various widget api’s to see if there’s potential in integrating our telephony product with these various web 2.0 sites. I’ve spent the last few days looking over the basics of the iGoogle and Facebook api’s, and there was a stark difference.

I started with iGoogle. I googled for “iGoogle api” and the first hit was this link to the Google Gadgets api documentation. Right there on the front page it says “Write a gadget”. I click Developer Guide, then “Hello, World”, and there’s some gadget code right in front of me. One search and two clicks is all it took to get a basic idea of how Google Gadgets work. Further reading of that page, and the next step in the documentation, “Writing Your Own Gadgets”, gave me all the information I needed to know. Total time: about an hour.

Next was Facebook. Googling leads me to the Facebook developers portal. “Getting started” looks like a good place to start. All it tells me is to install the Facebook developer application. I did that, and tried to start a new application, but it asked me for things that I don’t know anything about. So, back to the documentation. Hmm, nothing else on this page. I’ll click “Documentation” up top. I read around here for a while, and there was a lot of specific information but not general type stuff like I’m looking for. Down at the bottom I eventually see a link called Anatomy of a Facebook Application. This has got to be what I’m looking for. Nope! It describes all the ways a user interacts with your application, but no anatomy at all. I’m getting frustrated at this point; I’ve read all kinds of details about the Facebook api and what the application looks like to the user, but still nothing about how I go about writing one. (Notice, I don’t think they’ve even told me it’s written in php yet!) Finally, I see Guide to Creating an Application. After hours of looking, I finally find what I want. The guide is pretty good, but the example application doesn’t work. I can’t look at the finished product while I read what’s going on under the hood. Total time: A day or so, and still counting.

It’s pretty clear to me that iGoogle has people behind it who know what they’re doing and Facebook needs to get their act together. Their api has been out for several months, they need to get some good documentation written and better organized so developers can more easily figure out how Facebook applications work. There’s no excuse for it really, these applications that confused people aren’t writing could be adding considerable value to Facebook. For now though, I’m ignoring the silly walled garden and sticking to iGoogle.

The Wall Street Journal currently has a video about the steampunk artist “datamancer” on their front page. See it here. I love the computer styled like a typewriter they show in the second picture.

The fire has died down a bit, so it’s time to stoke the flames with another political blog post! My response to kungfooguru can be found on my non-tech blog here.