I recently bought a mac mini to serve as a central server, backup manager. It sports an Intel core duo 1.83 GHz processor which runs about 2.5 times faster than the 1.67 GHz G4 processor in my powerbook. Well, now I can barely use my powerbook because I’ve gotten used to the speed of the mini. Hmph!
If you’ve used the internet even casually over the past few years you have probably experienced CAPTCHA already. From wikipedia:
A CAPTCHA (IPA: /ˈkæptʃə/) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human.
It is common to see an image like this:
and be asked to type the letters you see into a text field. If you answer correctly then your input is accepted. Otherwise you are assumed to be a robot, and your input is rejected.
CAPTCHA is an annoyance to the user because it makes him spend extra time every time he submits a form on the internet. It is, however, necessary, thanks to spammers.
This “annoyance” sparked an idea in some researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, to try to derive some good out of this situation. They made a key observation about CAPTCHAs:
Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.
If this catches onto some high-traffic web sites (say Facebook, or Gmail), imagine the productivity that we can attain in digitizing these old books.
I have to say that this is one of the cleverest ideas I have seen in a long time. It takes wasted energy and transforms it into useful energy.
I was recently in the market for a new car, and I found myself constantly switching back and forth between Craigslist and fueleconomy.gov because I wasnted to see what the gas mileage was like on the cars that were for sale. Suffice to say, this was tedious. So I developed a tool that allows me to see both the Craigslist ads and the fuel economy ratings of the advertised cars in one place. The tool is available for free at http://fueleconomy.weblite.ca.
See the press release here.
I discovered Digg and Reddit a few months ago and was immediately impressed by the quality and relevance of content contained therein. So I subscribed to their RSS feeds so that I could keep up to date with the latest internet news in my RSS reader.
For those unfamiliar with Digg and Reddit, they are web sites that allow users to rate other web sites and articles that are found on the internet. Users essentially vote for web sites and articles that they like and popular sites show up in the top 100 list.
This presents a problem for RSS feeds, however, since every time a ranking of an article is changed (e.g. it is ranked 21 instead of 22) the timestamp is updated, so it appears at the top of the RSS feed again. Needless to say it is quite annoying to finding 30 or 40 Digg and Reddit articles at the top of my news list every time I refresh my subscriptions.
Preferably when an article breaks into the top 25 or top 50, it will show up in the RSS feed - and will never show up again. Even if it rises to the top. I want my news feed to contain news - not “olds”.
I created a feed filter that takes RSS feeds and filters out duplicates. Even if the timestamp has changed, an item that has been loaded once, will never be loaded again.
You can find the tool at http://feedfilter.weblite.ca.
Now I can subscribe to Digg and Reddit without being bombarded by old news every time I refresh.
I have recently become more annoyed with spammers and their deceptive tactics. Especially since I have launched some web sites recently that leaves me open to receive more spam. I found this interesting article that goes over some of the developments with larger corporations like AOL and Microsoft engaging in court battles with spammers.
Found this great site for reading mailing list archives. Provides an excellent search to search multiple lists at a time by category. Good heirarchical view. It’s called Nabble.com
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