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… you get the idea…

What were they thinking!

Many websites choose to use something called CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to deal with this problem. Normally the CAPTCHA implemented is you having to read a word from a box (which is actually an image generated by the server) and write it down. Unfortunately these aren’t as good as they used to be now. You see, OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has moved on a fair bit in recent years to the point where computers are very very good at reading what the word says (sometimes even better than the humans).

There are of course a few other variants of this system such as picking the shapes etc, although many of them can be solved by the computer through trial and error.

But complex (and more often, useless) as these current solutions are they are still somewhat flawed. They require the human to do something to stop spam, not the other way round.

Clearly these are not an ideal solution. I prefer something known as negative CAPTCHA. This is a system where you have a comments field, but you hide it from the user using a language the robot can’t understand (CSS in this case). You then have a another comments box which the user does see but is not called comments (something like feedback will suffice). Then, when a comment is sent in, you check to see if the comments field (AKA, the hidden one) is filled in. If it is then it must have been a robot because the user couldn’t see the box to fill it in. This way the user ha nothing to do and it is up to the robot to give itself away.

This is a nice system and one I have been using for several years (it seems to be a very rare idea which I hardly ever see mentioned, people for some reason seem to like proactive defence) with a very very high success rate.

To give you an idea, when I first put this in I was getting about 70spam comments a day plus on my gallery, maybe more. When I put this in I get maybe one spam comment every couple of months.

All very nice you are thinking, but there is more…

You see, when going through my logs I have found an anti spam side effect of a feature I use all the the time.

My gallery uses ID numbers for pictures. When you request a picture you might request the following:

URL http://www.craigk.org/pictures/p/403/

Now this URL suggests that you are viewing the index page in a folder called 403 which is inside the folder pictures. However, I actually use something called mod rewrite to change the URL’s. So in this case the real URL which this links to is as follows:

URL http://www.craigk.org/pictures/view.php?id=403

Now I use mod rewrite to make the URL’s cleaner and nicer looking.

For those who care, the code for this is placed in a .htaccess file in the current folder and reads:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^p/([^/]+)/$ view.php?id=$1 [L]
</IfModule>

This has a side effect though for spammers. You see, this means the spammers don’t know there is no folder called 402 or called p. Instead, when they read my comments file is called add_comments.php they have to make the assumption that this file is located here: http://www.craigk.org/pictures/p/403/add_comment.php (which it isn’t). Instead, it is actually located here: http://www.craigk.org/pictures/add_comment.php (if you click it you get the error you see when you didn’t use my comments form to get to this file (which you wouldn’t be if you click that link)).

According to my website log this .htaccess side effect has stopped 53 spam comments in the last 10 days.

I like getting something for nothing.

So, I came across this test here. Basically it has a girl spinning and depending on which way you see her spin determines which side of your brain you use more. Apparently most people see her rotate anti-clockwise. Clockwise is for people who are right brained, and anti-clockwise is for people who are left brained.

Here is a table of attributes which each side is meant to show you have:

I have now been looking at this test for some time. It is driving me a little mad. I see the girl spin in both directions, I can make her change direction or keep her spinning the same way by thinking about it. Every time I glance at the image she is spinning a different way.

Then I thought I would identify which side I am by reading through the table. I think I know why she spins both ways for me. I split almost perfectly down the middle with that table. Many I an neither one nor the other and for the rest I have an even number of both sides.

OK, it has to be said, my computer and the way I use it is fairly unusual. Let us take Firefox (my browser).

I currently have 74 tabs, spread over 7 windows using a total of around 1GB of RAM.

It has to be said, my Firefox session is pretty huge. I have windows for groups of tabs based on subject plus one other main window for my main tabs like news sites, forums I use a lot, social networking (just because it says I’m logged into the Facebook doesn’t mean I have looked at that tab in hours).

I don’t remember the last time I restarted my session. I know it is less than 5months ago but it is defiantly since before the summer. You see, the Firefox session is everything, your browsing history, your current tabs and windows, your history within each page. This means I can go back to a tab I was working on months ago and hit back a couple of times and it will take me to maybe the Google search result page I was on to get there. It is kind of like bookmarks with state.

Many people think this way of doing things is a little nuts. This is in part because they restart their machine more often than me. I put my to sleep most of the time which gives it an almost instant on feature (sub 1 second).

OK, so next, drive letters. You see, these days everything is USB and everything is a mass storage device (it comes up as an effective harddrive).

I don’t think Microsoft ever thought we would start using as many devices as we do when they suggested using letters to identify drives. I put together a list of all the drives I would be using if I plugged in every device I use (note, not own, just the ones I actually use day to day).

1. Floppy drive
3. Main drive
4. Data drive
5. Temp drive
6. DVD drive
7. CD drive
8. Card reader slot 1
9. Card reader slot 2
10. Card reader slot 3
11. Card reader slot 4
12. Data backup drive
13. Backup drive
14. Linux drive
15. Virtual CD drive
16. Jump disk 1
17. Jump disk 2
18. Phone SD card slot
19. Camera
20. External drive 1
21. External drive 2
22. MP3 player main
23. MP3 player SD card slot
25. Public network share
26. Private network share

Yes, I know you can map folders to drives so I will never actually run out as such, and I also know some of these don’t need to be there like the network drives, but still, the point remains… scary. And yes, I have enough USB ports to plug all that in!

Let me explain. Last year I did my final year at university. Clearly that didn’t go too well given I’m still here. Last year one of the major contributing factors in me decided to skip the year and start again was my final year project got out of hand. It was too big and I focused so hard on building it I would have never got all the documentation done and would have almost certainly failed it, despite having a fairly in depth and working product. As I think I have explained before, my system was called SORT (Scouts Online Records Tool) and it was for my scout group in particular but really, for any group. The idea was to get all their records online for the leaders to access in one place. It also contained a messaging system allowing them to e-mail parents and parents contact them.

Now this sounds a lot like a webmail to me, so being me I went and built one. I built an integrated webmail system that handled connecting to an IMAP account, getting headers, reading if they were new and un-read, handling importance flags, handling the replying, forwarding, the replying to all, the sending of attachments as well as the downloading and viewing of received attachments.

This is all a lot more complicated than it sounds. Almost every e-mail client sends e-mails in slightly different ways, and yet more ways depending on if you have them set to use HTML etc. Then yet more ways if you send an attachment and yet more ways after that if you send more than one attachment. In short, making your e-mail client(webmail in my case) work with every other one is very very complicated.

Being me, I went and did it. I built this system. It worked. It worked with every e-mail client I could find to test. It worked with attachments and without, it supported HTML e-mails and plain text. It was all pretty smart stuff. It took me just over a week in total.

Today I had a meeting with my project leader about my new final year project. I was pinning down the structure of my project as I’m not a great fan of repeating mistakes. I recounted this story to him. He then explained that a year or so ago he was the tutor for a masters student who did a whole project on just solving the getting attachments, plain text and HTML issues I had with all e-mail clients. He did a project on something I solved in 2-3 days.

In short, less than one sixth of the deliverable I designed which I did in 2 or 3 days was someone’s whole masters project.

I feel like a very stupid clever person.

I have 2 hours a week in something called “advanced internet application”. I have another 2 hours in something called “data management” and then a final 2 hours in “web mastery and network management”. I then also have a module called “managing the e-enterprise” which is an online module which involves an essay a week which is submitted and then feedback is received a week later. Then I have the heap that is my final year project.

Now it has to be said that in picking my final year project last year I seriously overstretched myself. It was in a lot of ways my downfall last year. I undertook a system of which each one of the 6 components was bigger than anything else anyone else took on. One of these components was a fully working webmail system to give you an idea of scale.

This year I have already made my pitch to the head of the school for my project. In fact, I did it Monday afternoon. This year my project will be an investigation into moving the functionality of a CMS from within the front end scripting language (such as PHP or C#) into the database engine itself taking advantage of the new levels of power and control in modern query processing engines and T-SQL.

The beauty of this project is it takes advantage of my interest in databases systems as well as being new, interesting and most importantly, without limit and as such, without end. This way I can work on it as much as I like without it having a clear end for which my result to be measured against. I agree there is a danger in this approach that I would fall short of the requirements, however, this is part of what the tutors roles is in helping me manage my project.

This first week has not been without it hiccups and oddities though. Firstly i was reminded over the course of a few lectures and tutorials how many stupid people are still out there. I saddens me to think that the last two levels of the course have not weeded them away. My favourite moment was when we were talking about Biztalk server (which is basically a business process manager. It allows you to set up the middleware or business processes of your applications in one place and it controls the workflow. Someone then asked if this was like exchange server… You what… you mean the e-mail server…. how in Gods name did they come to that conclusion. The two are so very far removed that you would have thought at least a level 3 student would see that…

Anyway, I’m sure I will get over it… Or they will go away…

I went into the school office to sort out my module choices for this year. I hadn’t done at the end of last week because I wanted to talk to a few people about what I’m allowed to do. One of the things that came up when discussing me staying on and re-doing the year is they might place restrictions on which modules I could do. I had never managed to find this out so far. So, I went into the school office, picked up the form and then as a side note asked which office Pavle (who is my course head) was. I was told that he has actually died last week.

Now I didn’t know the man that well, but he was the person who helped negotiate with the university for my re-doing the year. I had several length talks with him about what went wrong, what I would do differently etc. He managed to put me at ease over something which had worried me for some time. He gave up a fair bit of time to help me best he could and it would be fair to say that without his help I may not be getting this second chance.

I thanked him many times for his help, but I can’t help feel I didn’t thank him enough. I credit this man with my second chance, he even wrote a letter of recommendation to the course board on my behalf.

This is very saddening news to myself and anyone he worked with him I’m sure. Before today I was planning on going back into university and thanking him again.

Note to self, take opportunities when they present themselves, you never know how long they will be there for.

Firstly, a lot of people simply don’t bother backing up because they don’t think about it or don’t care. I normally find the idea of loosing every photo from the last 5 years makes most people quite upset, as does the thought of the hours of work spend on essays and alike going down the drain. Backing up is painfully cheap, very easy to set up, costs very little and makes life so much better when things do go pointy bits up.

If you are anything like me you have whole swaths of your life stored on the computer, shouldn’t you be more careful with it? Laptops in particular are very prone to disk failure. They are after all laptops, they take a lot of knocks, bumps and generally get a fairly rough life. They are also what almost all students trust their lives with. By their very design they only have one disk built in, it is your single point of failure, it goes and your data goes with it.

There are several ways to do backups, some ways are very simple, other not so much, some cost a fair bit, some are dirt cheap and some require lots of effort, some require none at all.

DVD’s

The most basic form of backup that I can think of is just to back your work up on DVD. Most computers from the last couple of years and beyond come as standard with the ability to write DVD’s. Every major OS in current use can write to them with no special software and they cost almost nothing. At first glance I can find a pack of 25 disks for £4.99. Those disks have 4.7GB of storage on them. To put that another way, that’s 1340 photos from my fairly expensive camera which produces HUGE files. Most current cameras I see don’t make images bigger than tow thirds that. So that’s around 2000 images per disk. So in other words, with a pack of 25 disks you could keep the most important data to you backed-up for a year or so.

External hard disks

DVD’s do have their downsides, they require you to do some work, they require you to update them from time to time and they also take a bit of time to get your data back off if you do kill your machine.

With any form of harddrive (in this case an external one) you can set it up to copy your data over as things change or as I prefer to do, get it to wait a couple of days just in case I want to go to the backup and get an older version of the file. You can pick up an external harddrive for scary money. I have just found 1TB (1024GB) for under £100. Even I would struggle to fill that, so the cheaper options will almost certainly be for you.

As for software to set backing up, I suggest something called Syncback. This has a free version linked to on their downloads page. It is pretty simple to set up, it has an easy mode and holds your hand through setting backups up. You just pick your my documents folder as the source and then your external harddrive as the location to backup to.

Internal disk

If you have a desktop you can take this a step further by adding an internal disk, they are even cheaper and even more reliable, especially as they don’t have to take much in the way of knocks and bumps.

If half this article was too complicated for you, then just copy some stuff to DVD’s and lump it into your bottom draw, its better than nothing. But please please make some form of backup, recovering data from a broken disk can cost thousands of pounds and take months to get back with limited success. If you also don’t think this will ever happen to you, know that i have 2 disks in my computer and 2 outside of it dedicated to backup and I have fixed a awful lot of machines and got back a lot of peoples data, but it isn’t always possible and I’m not made of spare time.

Now in theory i should have been able to do this for years, and i sort of have before, but now i have a new battery for my laptop this is actually a viable solution long term.

Somethings Tech just rocks, especially when all of this is happening on a train…

So this is photos, videos, music, e-mail, the web, contacts, calendars, instant communication etc searchable, accessible, available all the time.

This is something thanks to our modern computing generation we are getting closer and closer to this, however, much as I try, this is still a very very complicated goal to achieve.

For example, all my photos, music, videos, contacts, calendars etc are all on my computer. I have done a fair bit of tagging of my photos based on events and people in them, this makes that data searchable. So, lets pretend I’m looking for some info on Demelza. So I type her name into my computer as a search term. That then spits back all the photos with her in, any videos she might be in, her contact sheet in outlook which contains a profile picture, her phone numbers, addresses, e-mail address. I get back any calendar events she has been tagged to, like me visiting her at home this coming week. I also get any chat logs we have between us on MSN.

Not bad going, that’s my computer fairly sorted. I also carry my phone with me which contains my full calendar, my full contacts list. I also have my task list, my notes, and although I don’t bother for reasons that become clear, I could have my favourites too. My phone also has access to most of my e-mails as my e-mails are mainly IMAP accounts. This means the e-mails themselves stay online and whatever device I’m on just contacts to them, so be that my phone, my computer, my laptop or even webmail, they remain the same for all.

Bookmarks is a tricky one, or even my Firefox session. I’m looking at ways to have all my bookmarks tag-able, searchable online so I can get to them everywhere.

I also did look at having my MSN chat logs online (behind a password) so I could get them from anywhere and again search them. This turned out to be a lot more complicated than you would have though, I also have my logs on my phone, computer and laptop for all IM logged separately with no way as yet to search them all at the same time.

So most of this has come a long way, however it didn’t get there quickly, nor was it easy. In the last year I have taken about 9,000 photos, all of which needs to be tagged for this to work. I have maybe a weeks worth of work on them to clear the backlog.

The technology is just about caught up with what’s need, but its still not easy enough, fast enough or useful enough. I still don’t have all my files available to me from anywhere. I could remote in but that’s not quite the same, I could access the files in their directories but that wouldn’t give me access to all the nice search data i want.

I think i have even forgotten where this post was going, maybe I’m just trying to explain that at the moment, keeping track of your data is a nightmare.