Music and Coding

posted by pope on October 13, 2008 at 11:12 am

I know that this has been around for just about as long as this site has, but I just found out about it, and you're lucky that I even remembered I have this site to talk about it on in the first place, so cut me a little slack there, pal. Also, I haven't posted anything with images in a while, so I thought this could spice things up some.

The Mad Caddies

Keep It Going

Rating: 8/10

Listen to this if: you like Ska/Punk that is in touch with its Reggae roots, are sad and want someone to identify with you even though you've never met (use the album rather than MySpace), want an anthem for resenting something, or like songs with vaguely Spanish-sounding lyrics.

Don't listen to this if: you're in a good mood and want to keep it that way, have a drinking problem, or think the new Reel Big Fish albums are anything between "rad" and "cool," or really anything other than "shit."

UPDATE: The Comment Spam Invasion

I have the solution. I know i put captchas down before, and kind of insulted their overall existence in general, but today I'm a new man. I've done my homework and found something completely unexpected. There is a php captcha library that I don't hate. In fact, (and you know how hard this is for me to say) I think I actually like it. reCAPTCHA knows what they're doing, and they do it well. My main beef with most captchas in life is that they are just plain hard for people to do. My point exactly: Microsoft Live. I tried for roughly half an hour to make an account with them so that I could save my Gears of War progress (seeing as it's so frustratingly hard to make ANY progress in that game), only to repeatedly have to re-enter my guess as to what the hell letters those squiggly lines were supposed to look vaguely like. Eventually I either got lucky or the system gave up trying (a bot would've given up by now, right?) and I had a new account. By this time I had forgotten why I started that mess in the first place and started playing Counter Strike. Not what you'd call good user experience. But now, in playing around with options for my newest project (which I will explain later, promise), I've grown very fond of reCAPTCHA and the way they work.

reCaptcha asks you to copy two words. Both of them are typically very easy to read and very easy to copy, but if you're not sure on part of it, they provide a simple refresh button which fetches a new one for you, without refreshing the page of course, not to mention how easy to use the "play me some numbers instead" button is. On top of this is one of my favorite features of this. One of the two words in your captcha is a randomly generated word to make sure you're a human, just like all other captchas, but the other is a word scanned out of an old book. You never know which is which, as they will both look the same and will be in a random order, but one is testing your robot-ness and the other is helping to digitize an old text. So this mostly pointless activity becomes a generator of huge sums of data as well, in the form of newly digitized text.

The point of all this is that while I expressed my hatred for the idea previously, reCAPTCHA has made me reconsider captchas as a way to solve this site's comment spam problem. They'll be popping up on here soon. Meanwhile, check them out for your own robot-ness checks.

permalink |
tags: reCaptcha, site news, music, The Mad Caddies, coding, web development, all tags
0 comments: view | leave one