07.01.2008Appendectomy

Yep, I’m the new, recent owner of my very own appendectomy performed 6/18/2008.  While the above picture appears brutal, I’m grateful to have had the procedure done in the age of laparoscope and small incision vs. the old days of large incisions (and scars).

My recommendation is this: if you experience right-side abdominal pain, loss of appetite, and a low-grade fever, listen to your significant other and seek out a doctor.  As annoying and painful as an appendectomy is, the alternative isn’t nearly as pleasant. 

06.02.2008Captchas

I can’t stand CAPTCHAs.  It’s not that they are unsightly, clumsy, or a resource hog (which are all true at times).  The main reason I don’t like them is that they are really poor at serving their intended purpose: thwarting automated processes.

ZDNet does a great job at summarizing how ineffective the Microsoft CAPTCHA effort really is by recapping a recently published research paper entitled “A Low-cost Attack on a Microsoft CAPTCHA“.  The ZDNet summary of the paper:

In this paper, we analyze the security of a text-based CAPTCHA designed by Microsoft and deployed for years at many of their online services including Hotmail, MSN and Windows Live. This scheme was designed to be segmentation-resistant, and it has been well studied and tuned by its designers over the years. However, our simple attack has achieved a segmentation success rate of higher than 90% against this scheme. It took ~80 ms for our attack to completely segment a challenge on a desktop computer with a 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 CPU and 2 GB RAM. As a result, we estimate that this Microsoft scheme can be broken with an overall (segmentation and then recognition) success rate of more than 60%. On the contrary, its design goal was that “automatic scripts should not be more successful than 1 in 10,000″ attempts (i.e. a success rate of 0.01%). For the first time, we show that a CAPTCHA that is carefully designed to be segmentation-resistant is vulnerable to novel but simple attacks. Our results show that it is not a trivial task to design a CAPTCHA scheme that is both usable and robust.

90% failure rate compared to an intended failure rate of .01%.  That’s downright bleak and unfortunately representative of how easy captcha is to defeat even on other platforms.

While I am sure text-based CAPTCHAs are eventually on the way out, the battle for their replacement should be interesting.

05.29.2008Akismet Vs. TypePad AntiSpam

Anybody that runs a blog knows what a PITA comment spam can be.  Even smaller blogs like mine routinely receive comment spam, its an unavoidable fact of blogging life.  Any tool that can help combat the spam plague is a welcome addition in my book.  But how should I feel about solutions that aren’t marketed as standards but as proprietary formats?

How I ultimately feel about Typepad AntSpam ultimately depends on whether Typepad allows non MT based products to access it via API or other method.  Akismet has worked well so far, but I am always willing to look for alternate or additional methods of combating the plague known as comment spam.  I hope that 6A considers opening up the standard to everyone if it’s successful.  They well might given it would be a chance to provide a consistant anti-spam standard.  Then again, they may not if they take any ques from Apple.

05.22.2008Secret History of Star Wars

Star Wars has always been a big thing for me.  I saw all six films in the theater and can honestly say that I enjoyed most of them.

For true Star Wars geeks, The Secret History of Star Wars deserves at least a casual glance.  It’s long but interesting reading.  Several of the central ideas of this e-book are fascinating to me, namely:

1. Star Wars started as the telling of the tale of Luke Skywalker but ended up being about the life and times of Darth Vader.

2. George Lucas’ personal problems led to the abandonment of the originally proposed episodes XII-IX.

3. George Lucas’ propensity to rewrite history isn’t limited to his re-editing of his motion pictures.

I can’t vouch for the accuracy of either the facts or the conslusions of this work, but the author has made a large effort to properly annotate and credit his sources so I suspect there is at least some truth to it.

05.13.2008Radiohead - In Rainbows

After waiting a considerable amount of time, I’ve finally purchased Radiohead’s latest effort, In Rainbows, while at Target the other day with my wife.  After a few listens, I have come to the conclusion that I should not have waited.  ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ are two amazing efforts on an album full of goodness.

The thing I like about Radiohead is that every recording is different and it’s all good.  The writing is top-notch, the performance is stellar, and the recordings are incredibly clear with an amazing amount of detail.  Few bands/artists have Radiohead’s knack of remaining both interesting and relevant over a long career.  I’m committed to buying everything they release assuming they keep the current course.

05.05.2008There Will Be Blood

After watching the movie There Will Be Blood last night on DVD, I was left with some immediate impressions.  Daniel Day Lewis was fantastic as Daniel Plainview, the plain speaking oil man with the singular vision.  His performance was magnificent and deserving of the Oscar victory.  Having said that, I found the movie overly ponderous, extremely methodical, and slow overall.

The movie is worth watching for Lewis’ performance alone, but be prepared by stocking up on patience.

05.04.2008Franz Ferdinand (self-titled)

While browsing my iTunes library, I pulled up and started playing Franz Ferdinand’s self-titled debut album from 2004.  Harmonies are perfect, production is sufficient but not overbearing, and it’s musically interesting.  Not a bad song on the album.

Solid.