Okay, let’s be frank. CAPTCHAs, “Completely Automatic Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” suck. Their very existence reflects the sad state of our society that there are enough creeps on the internet to necessitate these crazy eyesore tests with the idea that there is such a thing as an automatically-generated image that is messy enough that computers can’t read them, but humans can. The phpBB folks had a good blog article discussing problems with CAPTCHAs a few months ago that I completely concur with.

One of the CAPTCHA implementations I’ve historically had the most complaints about has been phpBB3’s CAPTCHA, but there’s good reasons behind why it irks me more than most. phpBB is an open-source program whose source-code is freely available for anyone (including people trying to beat out phpBB’s CAPTCHA) to view, meaning that for an open-source program like phpBB, they have to make their CAPTCHA implementation secure to a much higher standard than closed-source websites. And in the jargon of CAPTCHAs, more security equals less readability.

However, this post isn’t about phpBB’s CAPTCHA, it’s about a different kind of CAPTCHA option. You may already be familiar with it, but up until about a week ago, I wasn’t. However, I was looking for some kind of effective way to protect the custom-made web forms I put together on one of my websites from being targeted by automated garbage, when I stumbled upon a service called reCAPTCHA.

reCAPTCHA is essentially a JavaScript-based CAPTCHA service that you can implement into any web form (if the form uses a supporting programming language, such as PHP and others). However, because it is run from a separate website, all of the image processing for the CAPTCHA is done off of your site, as well as the process of verifying whether or not the submitted CAPTCHA was correct. It was surprisingly easy for me to integrate it with my web forms and is quite effective.

But what’s even more interesting is that reCAPTCHA is a project which brings a secondary purpose to the act of completing a CAPTCHA. The group at Carnegie Mellon University, who put reCAPTCHA together, are actually producing reCAPTCHA alongside multiple projects to scan and digitize old books and documents. However, due to old age (and archaic font types), OCR (Optical Character Recognition) often has difficulty figuring out what a word actually says, and has a tendency to mess it up. So the idea behind reCAPTCHA is that it actually presents one of these words that’s unreadable to the computer and presents it to the user entering the CAPTCHA–this way, after getting numerous responses for the same word, it can compare those responses and figure out what the word actually says, thereby helping to digitize documents one word at a time. reCAPTCHA presents two words in each CAPTCHA–one of them is a word with a known correct answer alongside the unknown word in order to verify that it’s an actual human filling out the CAPTCHA. It’s really kind of nice to see that someone has transformed something as annoying as a CAPTCHA and turned it into something useful. (More on how it works.)

So overall, here’s a high-five to reCAPTCHA for providing a great service (and a CAPTCHA that I can actually read) with a great purpose. If you’ve got a site of your own that you want to protect from spam, you should definitely give reCAPTCHA a try.

A worker died after being trampled and a woman miscarried when hundreds of shoppers smashed through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart Friday morning, witnesses said.

The unidentified worker, employed as an overnight stock clerk, tried to hold back the unruly crowds just after the Valley Stream store opened at 5 a.m.

Witnesses said the surging throngs of shoppers knocked the man down. He fell and was stepped on. As he gasped for air, shoppers ran over and around him.

“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. “They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too…I literally had to fight people off my back.”

Read the Full Article

How has our consumerist society gotten to the point where people go to stores at 5 AM to save a little bit of money on Chinese-imported goods and literally run on top of people, breaking down store doors and jumping over barricades to do so? Not only was this worker killed, but fellow officers and employees to tried to give him CPR were stepped on, and even when police tried to evacuate the store afterwards, the people refused to leave and kept shopping!

How cruel is our society to allow such an act to take place? We need to take a hard look at ourselves. Taking a worker’s life is no excuse for trying to save $20 on a TV. If this is what we can expect from ourselves, then this whole ritual of Black Friday sales needs to end. Now.

Or at the very least, try opening your doors at a decent time in the morning. And that’s coming from someone who wakes up at 5 AM practically everyday.

Tags: Black Friday, Long Island, New York, News, trampled, Walmart

Another retro Daily Show clip to share with you on this Happy Thanksgiving. (Isn’t it amazing, I’ve successfully abstained from mentioning the singing turkeys! Err, um, oops…)

Have a very Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and enjoy your last day of peace before the craziness of the commercial Christmas shopping season starts!

So tell me, how do you give a gift to someone that requires that person to be with you at the store when you buy it for them? Like, say, the iPhone 3G, which stupidly requires the person using (and paying for the service plan for) the phone to be physically at the store where they get the device?

Well, here’s what some genius at Apple came up with: the iPhone Gift Card. Of course, rather than just get the device yourself and give the physical device to the recipient so that they can immediately open it and start using it while they’re still in their PJs under the tree, how about we give them a gift card that may or may not be for the full value of the gift and force them to leave the house, find a nearby Apple Store (if they have one nearby since this card apparently doesn’t count at AT&T stores), make them wait in the inevitable line for their phone to get activated, and make them have to pay for their own service plan for the next two years?

It gets even crazier when you can consider that you could just get them an Apple Store Gift Card to do the same thing. (Or that, quite frankly, the iPhone Gift Card can be used for anything else in the store, so it might as well be an Apple Store Gift Card anyway!) Oh, and the thing can be loaded with up to $2500–that’s your choice of either, um, twelve and a half iPhones (or ten iPhones if you include sales tax), or it could be enough to pay for that iPhone and all of the cost of the two-year contract. Oh wait, the gift card can’t count towards that contract–man, that might have actually made it worth it.

Wouldn’t it have just been easier to go back to the way it was with the original iPhone where someone could buy you the physical device, wrap it up, and then when you unwrapped it, you could go onto iTunes and activate it by yourself on your own time in your own PJs? (Never mind that iTunes was slower than molasses on Christmas Day last year.)

So, here’s to the latest Sarcastically “Great” Idea: the iPhone Gift Card. May your wallet have mercy on your soul.

Tags: activation, Apple, crazy, gift card, gifts, holidays, iPhone, Sarcastically "Great" Idea, store

I’m a big fan of David Pogue, New York Times Tech Columnist and CNBC Tech Contributor, because unlike many tech commentators, he has a good sense of humor in everything he does. And now, he and the New York Times have put together what they call the Pogue-o-Matic product finder, in which a digital representation of David Pogue guides you through the process of narrowing down gift products to the ones you want. Right now, they only have four categories: Cameras, Camcorders, TVs, and Smartphones, but it’s still a really nice bit of work.

Plus, I was bored, and so I sat watching the intro page for quite awhile–David Pogue spends up to like five minutes just doddling around waiting for you to click something! It’s quite funny.

High five to Pogue and the New York Times for this great service.

Tags: David Pogue, gifts, New York Times, product finder, tech

There has been an incredible amount of hype circulating around the WordPress community during the past few weeks regarding the up-and-coming release of WordPress 2.7. 2.7 should most definitely take the cake for the most-hyped release of WordPress, thanks to the brand new administration panel that will be coming along with the new release–the first major administration panel redesign since… the end of last March.

Indeed, it hasn’t even been eight months yet since the release of WordPress 2.5, which came billed as having a radically newer, cleaner, and less cluttered administration panel and Dashboard. However, as I mentioned in my WordPress 2.5 review, its administration panel really wasn’t that different, other than having a newer theme that was much brighter on the eyes, compared to the blue colors of WP 2.0-2.3.

And so, apparently, the good folks at WordPress went back to the drawing board this summer to look at how to further improve the WordPress admin interface, but this time, they came up with a codename for the new project called Crazyhorse (though I don’t get what’s so crazy about making software better), and this time, they claimed to use lasers in their testing. Great. (Actually, they apparently talked all about it at a WordCamp SF 2008 session that I missed because I had to leave early.) And since then, the hype has been alive and well on the WordPress Development Blog. They’ve been doing surveys since September to get feedback on what the interface should be like, showing off videos and stuff about what the new Dashboard looks like, and for Pete’s sake, they’ve even announced each beta release of 2.7 on their development blog, something that they’ve never done before! (It might be smart if they put a warning in their beta release posts about some of the possible problems inherent with running a beta for those crazy people out there who upgrade and then find something screwing up…)

I have given the latest Beta 3 of WordPress 2.7 a try, on a separate testing installation. (All of my live blogs are still using 2.6 and I won’t be updating until 2.7 is final.) While I am going to save a complete review until after it goes final and I’ve had a chance to give it a try on my REAL blogs, I will say that the new layout is quite impressive once you start to figure it out–the transition takes awhile to adjust to. The navigation has fundamentally changed (gone are the “Write”/”Manage” verbs that used to be part of the navigation and in their place are nouns like “Posts”, “Pages”, “Media”, and “Links”), and there’s a lot more AJAX inserted into useful spots. Many of the screens are now a lot easier to rearrange and customize to your liking, and satisfy a number of qualms about things that I felt should have been in WordPress 2.5. There are a couple of unexpected glitches that randomly pop-up, particularly in the drop-down navigation menus, so it is going to take awhile for me to fully adapt. But then again, it took me awhile to fully adapt to WordPress 2.5 as well, but I did.

All in all, I’m looking forward to the eventual release of WordPress 2.7, which will definitely help make WordPress a more attractive option for bloggers and content creators. Quite frankly, I think it would serve it more justice to make it WordPress 3.0, but I don’t really have much say in that now, do I?

Tags: 2.7, administration, Automattic, beta, Blogging, Crazyhorse, Dashboard, interface, preview, release, WordPress

Yes, I know that it’s now been nearly two weeks since November 4th, Election Day, or what will likely be turned into National Change Day once Obama becomes president. (Okay, just kidding.) What can I say, there’s so much change going on right now that I feel like I’m drowning in coins!

In all seriousness though, it’s obvious that this was an historic election, and if I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that, I’d be rich enough to buy our country’s economy right now. This was the first time since 1964 that a Democrat won with more than 51% of the popular vote, and the first African-American to be elected president. But what I think is even more incredible is that Obama accomplished this with everything imaginable being thrown at him, from the Hillary Clinton campaign targeting him as being inexperienced (this accusation got funny later when Sarah Palin entered the race), to the McCain campaign trying to put up a figurehead “plumber” as being “representative” of Americans, and going strongly against Obama, to both campaigns playing the game of Obama being connected to controversial public figures such as Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers. And yet, you did not see the Obama campaign throwing this kind of mud back at the Clinton or McCain campaigns. In the past, attacks by the Republican smear machine have worked to tilt the election in their favor, but this time, the American public by-and-large ignored these senseless attacks and voted in an election where issues and policy mattered, not character flaws and gaffes.

But why in this election? The fact that our country is in an economic mess and still entangled in an unwinnable occupation in Iraq definitely has a lot to do with Obama’s success, but I think his success in the fact that for once, we finally got a different kind of Democratic campaign and a different kind of Democratic candidate. Most of the Democratic candidates we’ve had have been weasels, without the guts to get anything serious done or to take serious positions on anything. For the most part, our elections have been nothing more than a selection between the lesser of two evils–two rather uninspiring, weak candidates to choose from. Why else have the turnouts from the past few elections been so low, and the margins of victory so small (case in point: the 2000 election)? The major change that we saw in this election was that we saw a Democratic candidate who was strong, who had a strong stance on the issues that matter, who inspired many people, especially young people, to take democracy into their own hands and vote. We had a different kind of candidate and a different kind of campaign, one that promised the kind of change we need. And now, that candidate will be our president-elect in two months.

But for those who look at Obama’s election and proclaim that it marks an end of the legacy of racism and hatred in this country, you are sadly mistaken. If nothing else, this election has gone to shine more light on the bigotry and hatred that is still alive, albeit relatively undercover, in this country. In the aftermath of this election, our country has seen an increase in hate crimes and a massive increase in the purchasing of guns. I heard a report on the radio the other day that KKK membership has gone up–all this in response to the fact that we just elected a president who happens to have slightly darker skin color. And at the same time, national attention has turned in the past two weeks towards my home state of California in response to the unfortunate passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages in the states. We have not moved away from these 20th century ideas of people who are different than us being inferior to us, we have simply shifted the target from African American people to homosexual people. In what is probably the most ironic thing here, the media is saying that exit polls showed that 79% of African Americans that voted in this election voted in favor of Prop. 8. Probably Keith Olbermann said it best last week:

Like Keith, I don’t have much of a personal relationship with this issue. I know no one in my family who is gay, and I personally don’t have any tendencies towards either side of this issue. The whole idea of there being a “sanctity of marriage” is rather ridiculous in my eyes, because I don’t really sanctify marriage at all whatsoever. But it should be shameful that now, in the twenty-first century, we still choose to deny certain people equal rights simply because they are born with a different genetic trait than we are born with.

At the same time, however, I can’t help but find these anti-Prop 8 protesters somewhat behind schedule. Where were you people BEFORE November 4th? I saw lots of “Yes on Prop 8″ rallies all over my county during the weeks before the election, and only a small handful of individuals rallying against it–and my county overwhelmingly voted against 8. Maybe all of the folks who were against Prop 8 were just too busy before the election to do anything important about it, or maybe they just assumed that Prop 8 would fail for sure. But then, once it passed, they weren’t so damn busy anymore, and now over the past two weekends, we’ve seen huge protests across the state and across the country. Which is all fine and well except that THE THING ALREADY PASSED! WHERE WERE YOU??? So no, I don’t know what’s going to happen with this thing going forward, I just hope that someday in my lifetime, we’ll be at a point where we look back on this with disgrace, the way that we look back on the discriminating events of the 1960s with disgrace today.

This election has brought me a bittersweet victory, and it took a few days for me to feel it sink in. In two months, a group of seniors from my high school and I will travel to Washington, DC to witness history. On the 220th anniversary of when George Washington was first inaugurated, a black man, for the first time, will take his oath of office, and move into the White House, a house built by slaves.

“Oh the times, they are a-changin’…”

Tags: Barack Obama, Countdown, election, gay marriage, history, Keith Olbermann, president, Proposition 8, protests, Video

This is one of my favorite “retro” videos from The Daily Show, which aired eight years ago, in 2000, five years before Stephen Colbert got his own program (and a few years before Steve Carell became a big TV/movie star). He does some hilarious acting in this skitch which is just classic and the perfect complement to any Halloween weekend.

Tags: funny, halloween, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, The Daily Show, trick-or-treat, Video

I’m not really much of a sports person, but when Colbert did a Lame Sports Edition of his Sport Report segment, it was just right up my ally. I love how he sarcastically pretends as if mundane, every day things are super-thrilling, because that kind of sarcasm produces what are, in my opinion, some of his funniest moments.

Tags: baseball, chess, Colbert Report, funny, games, race, Sport Report, sports, Stephen Colbert, Video, xiangqi

Despair, Inc. is one of the few companies (okay, the only company) that I willingly am on the mailing list of, because their, um, interesting line of products and, well, unique way of marketing them are always enough to get a good laugh every so often. But this week, they’ve released three new demotivational posters, and two of them really made me laugh out loud and think, “I gotta blog about this.”

And why shouldn’t I love their stuff, especially when 95% of their offerings have been rated as being perfect for “disaffected college students.”

A big high-five to the Despair, Inc. guys for their excellent stuff. If you haven’t seen their demotivators before, you might want to check them out.

Tags: Blogging, demotivators, despair, Despair Inc., funny, opportunity, posters