arnekolja’s current stuff

When I thought about securing forms against spam earlier today it came to my mind, that there's one technique around that's never been used for this purpose as far as I know: SVG (or even canvas). SVG offers so many possibilities to implement a securing method, has there really never been someone to try this? Or does one of my readers know about someone who did?

I mean, it's such a great way to style things of all kind. It could be used to draw simple letters without background patterns like a normal captcha (so it would be way easier to read), one could even draw simple symbols that could be combined with a select box of possible names for that symbol or things like that. Before this method gets broken too, the spammers would have to implement a combination of graphics interpretation software (like they use for captchas right now) and a way to generate a bitmap picture out of SVG first. Sure it wouldn't be so hard to implement the latter, but seriously - it would make us being one step before the spammers again, wouldn't it?

I'm just writing this, because in my opinion we should make interpreting captchas easier for humans again, as the spammers made us go that far, that even humans cannot always read these things.

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I'm a bit afraid of the German eBook situation when it comes to the Apple iPad. I am totally willing to switch from snail mailed paper magazines to eBook magazines, as long as I got a good reading device to handle them and the iPad seems like just the one thing that makes me do this.

But in Germany, as you may know, it's always a bit different: We are always disadvantaged by our media, because they tend to be late on every single comfort advance. We're paying more for mobile phone calls than anyone else in this world (okay, that's polemic, I don't know if that's true, but you get the clue), we still have a really awkward situation here when it comes to video on demand or high definition tv and for god's sake, we're not even able to watch the shows we'd like to watch, because everything that comes to television is at least half a year behind, almost never available in its original language (for those who like to enjoy it this way, like me) and it gets cancelled and they're mixing up seasons like being on drugs. It's just no fun to not pirate stuff over here, haha.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, I'd like to take advantage of the iBooks store the iPad is offering us. It sounds like heaven to me: Buying your magazines online, not having that paper mountains in your home office any more, without the need to throw them away.

So, Apple told in their press briefing that the iBooks store will be open to US customers at its release date. That's not telling us that international iBooks stores won't be online at that date, but it tells us that Apple's not sure yet, if it gets its contracts signed until that. For me that means that it's safe to say that Germany will once more be behind the states again. It's a bummer, but that's just what we have to live with. As far as I can imagine that's for sure not Apple's fault, it's just the German publishers not getting their ass up to make customer friendly deals again.

Anyhow, that much for spraying out some polemical opinion here again. What's way more interesting: Yesterday I asked myself if the German magazine publishers are even willing to publish their magazines on this platform (or even the Amazon Kindle, for those who prefer that) or if I'll be stuck in that typical German cage at this topic, too. So I emailed the Heise Verlag (just exemplarily, because I like their magazines very much) and asked them if there's any chance to read their mags without having the big old paper problem in the near future. And the answer is not very surprising, but yet very promising - and I totally hope that 2010 is the year to switch from paper subscription to eBooks:

"We're currently not offering an online subscription, but we're actually working on an implementation for this. This includes an implementation for eBooks, too. As soon as we have found a practical and legal solution for this, we will announce it."

Again, that doesn't sound as good as I hoped, but it's at least a step forward and I'm totally positive that it's going to be better with magazines than it is with television. Thank you, Heise Verlag!

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Is there still anyone in need for a Google Wave invite? Seems like Google gave me some, so I'd be glad to spend them to anyone. First come, first served.

Somehow the last two weeks it seemed like the hype is already over... haven't noticed any questions for invites on Twitter or something. Anyhow, Wave is quite cool, so if you want to check it out just let me know.

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I don't want to start a flame war here between smokers and non-smokers, really. Of course I know that I am not allowed to say anything against cigarettes in this world though, right? ;-)

Anyway. You all read some news about Apple not repairing a smoker's Mac, right? I only have one single question about all those news these days: Why the heck is everyone talking about "permission to smoke in front of your Mac", instead of focusing on the damage of the machines the news were about? All magazines and all blog articles mention the damage, but then ask for terms and conditions for smokers which just isn't the point here. The point is that smoking in this cases caused self-imposed damage, not that people aren't allowed to smoke any more.

The problem's the damage. Not the permission to smoke. The damage. Goddammit. Damage! Smoke as much as you want, as long as I don't have to buy your smelly, yellowed Mac afterwards ;-)

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Now this one is funny. My intention was to show you how much I paid for Wing Commander 3 in 1995 and I almost missed the funny "name" at the bottom.

And yes, it has been very expensive for 1995, too. Don't know why I spent that much money on that game, but when thinking about it - it's been absolutely worth it!

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So thanks to http://dac-xp.com/ I'm activated for Google Wave now. I so much wanted this but... and now? Don't know what to do with it without having any friends activated for it too. Doesn't anyone want to make my buddy Ulf and me a present and send him an invite too, so I can really try it out? I assume there isn't anyone out there able to give another invite, as Google is not giving out any new ones these days, right? A bummer.

Anyhow - anyone having an account too and want to connect? Just let me know!

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Whenever your web application is going to offer user management, you might want to install at least a default admin user when creating your database. I searched the web for ideas to implement this and most of them come up with adding fixtures to your migrations. That's a really good one, of course, but I bet there is no way to dynamically hash your password using a fixture. I am using restful_authentication right now and this plugin does not only hash your password using SHA1, but adds a salt too. So a fixture is not what I wanted.

Instead I included the model itself in my migration, so the hashing and validation methods are used automatically. Hope this snippet is going to help others who are seeking for the same stuff. Let me know if it came in handy for you :-)

require 'app/models/user.rb'
class LoadDefaultUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    say "Trying to insert default user(s)..."
    user = User.create( :login => 'admin', :password => 'password', :password_confirmation => 'password', :email => 'admin@site.com' )
    unless user.errors.empty?
      say "Could not create admin user, see errors below:"
      user.errors.each do |e|
        say e
      end
    else
      say "Admin user created"
    end
  end
  def self.down
    User.delete_all
  end
end

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