Sure they are a great way to stop spam but they are an even better way to stop real users from using your site.

And once you understand how they work, they aren’t even that great. Most take a word that it knows, and then takes a word that it doesn’t know. If you want to have some fun, the easier of the two words to decode is the only word being validated. The other word it has no idea and you can type anything you want for it. While this doesn’t help the goal of recaptcha that are trying to automate decoding print text to digital, its the only thing that gets me through multiple tries of impossible to decode captchas.

Alternatives

Just because I hate captchas doesn’t mean you are left just dealing with spam. Most bots are pretty terribly written and after collecting some samples you can create some pretty good rules to remove spam. Feel free to implement some or all of these:

the a href tag
While a human may put in a url to a site, no human with good intentions will put in a url wrapped in the <a href=”"> tag. Just do a quick search for “<a href=” and if you find it, trash the form.

Repeating Entries
If the name, company, address and city are all the same thing, its probably spam.

Submission Time
By placing a form field and dumping the current time stamp (epoch time is easy) and then checking it when you submit the form against the current timestamp, anything under 3-5 seconds is probably spam.

Honeypots
Place 2 form fields, one with a prefilled text and another empty. Wrap the form fields in a css div and then hide the div with css. When you check the form, if the fields don’t match what you built the page with, trash it.

Zip Codes
If the zip code is 123456 then its probably spam.

These don’t work

Referrers
Unfortunately now a days security suites (anti-virus + internet security) started removing referrers from the GET requests. By limiting your forms to referrer fields will cut out a lot of real users too.

Missing Address Info
Often we forget that websites are international and some fields just don’t make sense in some locations. Many countries don’t have states or zip codes or 10 digit phone numbers. Be careful you aren’t cutting out users that you actually want.

GET and POST vars
Coldfusion is clearly running ontop of JAVA, to access form field vars you use #form.textbox# for POST and #url.idvar# for GET variables. But before you can use those, you need a <cfparam name=”url.idvar” default=”"> otherwise it will throw a fit if the variable is not included in GET/POST request.

Cleaning User Input – Integers
To clean integers don’t use <cfparam type=”integer” name=”url.id” default=”0″> because if a user enters a letter into the field, then CF will throw a 500 error and abort the page.  Instead don’t give a type and then use <cfset id=Val(url.id)> to recast it to integer.

More to come….

Separate your domain company from your hosting company
One day your hosting company will fail you and you will want to move, but if you run your domain through them, you risk being stuck with them. They might increase their rates, have a major server outage or you might outgrow them. Separate companies allow you to move away at a moments notice without risking losing your domain name.

Hosting companies all lie
They are smaller than they claim. Most just rent space from the handful of big datacenters. Unless you see outside reviews or uptime monitors (i.e. pingdom) don’t believe a word they say. They like to upsell points that you won’t understand — “Fast Dell Xeon Servers” is a worthless statement.

Use Google Analytics on everything
This is basic, but easy to forget as you add pages on the fly. Without metrics, you can’t tell what is working and what needs to go.

Your first design is going to need at least 2 revisions
You always think your first design is going to be a homerun, and to you, it always will be. But to your end users, you are going to need to change some core design elements. The first revision is just that, its a good start.

Placing ads on your site won’t make you much money
A common reply to how will this make money is to place ads on a site.
1 – you need a lot of traffic, average click through rate is under 1%
2 – you can’t get money out until you reach at least $100

Your friends will always say its awesome
You will probably be showing your website(s) to your friends all the time and they will always say it looks awesome and it’s the best idea ever. Truthfully, they just want the conversation about this to be over. Strangers are better for advice.

Keep it simple stupid [KISS]
When writing code, try to not make things too interdependent.  One day a new developer (or you will come back after forgetting everything) will be trying to make one small change on one page and won’t understand a thing you did. Keep it simple.

When scheduling cron/automated jobs, don’t run them at midnight
It’s easy to set the job up to run daily which normally means right at midnight. If you actually use that setting, all of your jobs will try to run at the same time and run slowly. Also most servers use GMT, so if you happen to have daily saving times, your midnight jobs sometimes creep into yesterday at 11pm. And your job might do some weird things. Run them after 1am and put a different minute setting on each job.

There is nothing worse than contacting a client and saying you lost their data
Run daily backups of the sql databases, if something happens, and this data is lost then you will have a terrible time explaining this to the client. Also, they will find a way to blame all their business failings on this incident.

Any competent hacker will delete all of your log files
Make a backup of the logs files on a remote computer, if you do get hacked, you won’t be able to see what else they did on the server or how they got in. Also most hackers use other hacked servers to hack from, so backtracing the hack normally isn’t worth its time.

UPGRADE INSTALLATION

Personally I hate upgrades compared to full installations, but with the amount of software we run, I also don’t want to spend a full day re-installing everything. Strictly speaking, the upgrade worked well across the two computers, all programs seemed to function and all enterprise domain network settings carried over fine.

When you put the disc in and start setup it will want to download an update file which reminds you that CD/DVDs need to be replaced. As you cheerfully click along, you will probably get to the compatibility screen which always seems to find something wrong the first time you run this. Setup quits and leaves a file on the desktop reminding you why it did.

Setup is a simple 2 step install that actually has like 25 steps that Microsoft doesn’t count because it wrecks their marketing that it is a simple 2-step installation. About 30-60 minutes later it finally restarts and you get to witness the world slowest startup where it actually finishes the installation while it informs you that it will only be a little bit longer.

Then Microsoft finally did something kinda right…

Once you get past the really long startup screen, it then plays a well done animated video explaining what’s new in windows 8 while it continues to finish setup. Unfortunately the video ends well before it actually done setting things up. Which, what is it possibly doing that is taking this long?

Then you finally get into windows 8, it has a pretty quick interface asking you to pick your default color and if you want to accept the default settings or if you want to do a custom setup. And the default values aren’t that bad, like windows update set to automatic. And then it loads the Metro Menu.

Multiple Monitors

And this is where it all fails for me. I realize not everyone is up to dual monitors but I am. Actually I use triple monitors at work. Windows has never had great multi-screen support. Sure it can do it, but not well. You end up installing a bunch of third party tools like GridMove to make it more useful. Even Apple doesn’t have great support. Well, Windows login screen just blanks out the extra monitors and uses only one. That is kinda like what Metro does but it just leaves the other monitors on. Metro is a full screen app, its kinda like when you play a full screen game on multi-monitors and your desktop is just left on the other screen(s).

But I can get over the leftover screen, its been that way since 2000/XP. The issue comes up that Windows got rid of the start menu and now is using hot corners (where you point at the corner and a menu appears). They set it so each monitor has its own hot corner. It’s a pain to point at the corner of one monitor when it wants to flow to the next monitor.

Pros

New elegant UI when in Metro Apps

Doesn’t feel any slower than Windows 7

You can tell your friends you have Windows 8

Useful widget-y Metro screen integrates with email, facebook, flickr, etc

Has a Microsoft account where you can store you Windows settings and it will follow you to any computer, maybe

Cons

Feels half-baked — like Metro is just an app running on Windows 7

Terrible multiple monitor support

Doesn’t feel any faster than Windows 7 and still slower than XP

Got rid of the Aero glass or maybe just upped the requirements to see it (though I heard aero wastes a ton of resources so maybe this is a pro)

Takes a bit to get used to no start menu (definitely install Launchy until you get used to it)

A lot of default “widgets” for Metro are designed for Microsoft products like mail and messenger

Terrible default login screen that if you have multiple accounts is a pain to change

Final Thought

Regardless if you think this is the best or worst, this is the direction Microsoft is going, so either get on board now or wait and get on board later. But it’s normally easier to keep current and make smaller updates.

Though I don’t foresee windows 9 to have a good future. I actually predict that Android and iOS will take over and full blown OS like windows or mac os will disappear  For most average users, they have no need for a full OS and most are so bloated anyways that its hard for them to make them faster/better. In the future with WiDi and bluetooth, I see just multicore smart phones linking up to desktop monitors/HDTV and bluetooth keyboard/mice.

In the end, windows 8 is the next step but unless you are planning to buy a new laptop/desktop, I don’t see any rush to upgrade to it.

Google Chrome:
Thu May 03 2012 12:40:00 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Firefox:
Thu May 03 2012 12:40:00 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Safari:
Thu May 03 2012 12:40:00 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

Internet Explorer 9:
Thu May 3 12:40:00 CDT 2012

Go figure… Everyone but Microsoft uses the same date format. There format doesn’t even make sense, why is the year after the time?

A workaround for IE so all browsers will instead produce Microsoft SQL datetime format

<script>

var nowin = new Date();
document.write(mssqlDateTime(nowin));

function mssqlDateTime(now){
var monthlookup=['Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May','Jun','Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec'];
var hours=now.getHours();
if(hours>12){
hours-=12;
ampm=’PM’;
}else{
ampm=’AM’;
}
var safedate = monthlookup[now.getMonth()] + ” ” + now.getDate() + ” ” + now.getFullYear() + ” ” + hours + “:” + String(“0″ + now.getMinutes()).slice(-2) + ampm;
return safedate;
}

</script>

Goto Start > Run

Type in “mstsc /admin”

Enter the server you want to as you normally do and click connect. It will log into the console session now.

Why this feature could be awesome

While its e-ink screen is easier to read than a backlight screen, there is nothing better than putting on headphones and having a book read to you while you are working on your computer, lying down with your eyes closed or doing anything else. Plus, you can set a pace and keep your reading speed up instead of getting distracted or tired and slowing down.

Why this feature isn’t awesome

First, its not easy to get to this feature (The shortcuts are Alt+Sym to start/stop and space to pause – but unless you look that up you will never find that). It has three modes, on – off – pause. You can also select male/female and slower/normal/faster pace but beyond that, its lacking in options.

A big complaint of almost all text-to-speech is its basically on or off. Normally I would sit down and want to read a chapter. This is a problem because unless the book you are reading has Chapter X at the start of every chapter, you can easily miss when a new chapter starts. Or if you lie down and want it to read the book to you and you fall asleep. You will wake up and it will be done with the whole book. With a chapter stop, at least you know you only have to redo one chapter.

Some books put in citations in paratheses (). It needs an option to skip over parathese.

When reading technical books, it often uses images for math equations – kindle graceously skips the image as though it isn’t there and smashes the word after it into the word before. If it would add a pause or say, see image 23, it would make reading more bareable.

Tables are the worst. When kindle sees a table, it should skip it with a pause. It is annoying to listen it read out row by row, column by column a smashed together string of numbers, labels and text. It’s enough to make you stop the text-to-speech and hit next page and start it again.

Next/Back page buttons- When kindle gets going, it doesn’t respond to next or back page when text-to-speech is on. When it stumbles into a massive table of numbers, and you attempt to nudge it past it, the kindle just ignores your plead for mercy. The only way to stop it is to turn off text to speech.

A list of words/symbols that kindle should not attempt to say or should be replaced with a phonetic spelling. Don’t get me wrong, kindle has a very advanced and good voice synthesis engine that gets most words correct. But if you get a book that uses a word over and over and it cannot say it, then it will be a long read ahead.

Conclusion

Overall you will be impressed with your Kindle’s reading ability but you will still wish it could a little better. Maybe the next generation will come out with some of the above improvements. But don’t hold your breath, Adobe Reader still has the same feature set of its text to speech from Adobe Reader 7.

I don’t know about you, but I hate reading boxes with their “theorical” max speeds. Here are real tested transfer speeds using win7 as a test program of various file transfer speeds. The list will be ongoing. Please feel free to leave comments and I’ll add it to this list.

I used windows 7 file transfer for one simple reason. Windows isn’t getting the max IO out when you use your computer, so why test it with a program that is designed to get the max IO. At the end of the day, you want to see how fast your files transfer by the program that you use everyday. Not what a test program can try to squeeze out of your IO. While its not the most scientific method, it does provide a more realistic environment to how fast everything is.

This happened to me and it only didn’t work on select sites. Unfortunately all the sites that are company accounts with passwords that are very complex.

The Fix

A file in Chrome eventually went damaged and Chrome stops saving any new data to it. To fix this, just delete this file and Chrome will create a new one that works.

1.) Close Google Chrome completely

2.) Open C:\Users\<insert your username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

3.) Delete the file Web Data

4.) Reopen Google Chrome