It seems its not just me but quite a few people who are not too fond of CAPTCHA. Author of the post linked below has come up with a neat trick to avoid spam without using CAPTCHA. He makes use of the fact that humans are more intelligent than bots; but without asking the site visitor to recognize weird looking letters and enter them in a text field. Instead he creates a simple text field and makes it hidden using CSS, so to human eye it wont be visible but when a bot fills the form it would fill in this field too, as this field has been made invisible from CSS not HTML attribute. In the end he checks if this field has any value then ignores it as spam.

http://freecodesnippet.com/articles/security/preventing-spam-on-your-website-without-using-captcha/

Japanese automakers and government are collaborating to develop an OS for automotive electronics. This initiative dubbed JASPAR (Japan Automotive Software Platform Architecture) includes Japanese auto giants Toyota, Honda, Nissan etc along with Toshiba and Economy, Trade and Industry Ministry. I am not sure if this OS is going to be open source or not but if it was they could have really used alot of help from seasoned OS programmers and probably complete it sooner. 

Cant wait to see this. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates will be making a joint appearance at D: All Things Digital conference being held May 29 to 31, 2007 at the Four Seasons Resort Aviara, about 30 minutes north of San Diego. They say they will be discussing history and future of digital revolution.

An article at dowjones.com says

Both executives have made multiple individual appearances at the conference, which will celebrate its fifth anniversary this year, and is known as D5. But this will be their first joint session at D, and a highly unusual event.

This conference is an all-interview event organised by Wall Street Journal

In this years’s Summer of Code, among other projects, Google is sponsoring 20 projects of Drupal, a very popular open source content mangement system. Financial value of this contibution is said to be $100,000. This is a really interesting way to contribute to open source projects.

Think your boss is crazy, read this. News.com’s Michael Kanellos publishes his crazy boss hall of fame list. He writes -

… which brings up the unanticipated side effect of nutty supervisors: they are often very effective. Thus, to be in the Hall of Fame, they can’t just be crazy. Like Highlights magazine, they have to be crazy “with a purpose.” …

I came across this article on Newsvine. Its really funny. Try going to maps.google.com and get directions from New York,NY to Paris, France. It does give you directions and in the map it shows the highlighted path through Atlantic Ocean. I was wondering what mode of transportation would it suggest to travel transatalantic. I thought it might ask to go to EWR or JFK and fly, but it didnt. To my surprise it asked me to go to somewhere near Boston and swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3462 miles, to get to Paris.  

Its not just antivirus or other legitimate software companies that offer subscription and support for their software. Even malware, trojan writers have adopted this business modal. Its really amazing how sophisticated they are getting in terms of doing business.

http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;838771320;fp;16;fpid;0

Security fix analysed spam samples collected last month and found that many of them originated from computers on networks of big corporations like Oracle, HP, ExxonMobil, Home Depot, Electronic Arts and Dow Jones to name a few. Some of these machines are even listed in Spamhaus.org’s “Exploit Block List” (XBL).

One of my favourate open source projects, Open Office, realeased version 2.2 today. Enhancements include better text display and enhanced pivot tables. Recently they had also added VBA macros to calc (excel equivalent). It seems development of this project is catching good speed.

 It can be downloaded from http://www.openoffice.org/

Though my smartphone provides Internet connectivity to me, the browsing experience has not been very pleasent. Most of the times when it transforms actual layout of any page to displayable format, it becomes very difficult to browse.

Microsoft labs has launched a project called Deepfish to enhance browsing experience on devices running Windows Mobile 5+. It creates a full screen size thumbnail of actual layout of the page and displays a zoom box that you can move and zoom a particular part of page, which then displays that part of page zoomed to the screen size.

Sounds really interesting concept but lets see if it really improves the browsing experience. Sadly its in limited beta and has already exhausted the limit. Lets see if they increase it.

A nice article describing new features in Windows Vista. I agree with the author’s claim that Vista is more than just a pretty face but I still think its very expensive for home users considering that OSs these days have become commodity software. Corporations might be able to afford Vista and features like the ones described in this article might persuade some software developers to upgrade from older versions of windows but for a regular home user alot of these features are not that important to justify the price. Anyway this article gives a good insight into the new features of Vista

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars 

These days you can see almost every other person (atleast in corporate world) having a smartphone – a blackberry or a symbian/windows mobile phone, which not only lets you make and recieve calls but also provides internet connectivity enabling you to check emails, access calendar and surf internet on the move.  Since so many people are carrying these devices (including me) that are connected to internet all time, I wonder how many of them have anything like an antivirus or some sort of firewall installed on their phones. I think this is a very serious issue specially after reading this article -

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9014118 

Whenever I (and I think alot of other people) have bought a new computer or reinstalled OS on a computer, first thing I do is get all latest patches, install virus scanner and configure a firewall. I really wonder how many people update their smartphones with latest patches. Also I never connect my computer to internet directly without a router being in between or a firewall being installed on it but our smartphones dont have any kind of firewall and are connected to internet all the time.

I think this is a very important security issue specially for corporations whose employees have these phones and might have alot of confidential information/data stored on them. 

These days you can find a new web application (web 2.0 startup as they say) being launched everyday. Quite a few of them rise to fame as soon as a major blog or a social news website writes about it but sadly, in most cases this fame is very short lived. This article on Read/Write web very interestingly divides these web applications into the WAIT list, the WALK list and the RUN list, and suggests some strategies to effectively market web applications belonging to each category.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_market_your_web_app.php

http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/ten-things-you-can-do-keep-an-old-computer-useful/ 

Came across this post today. This is one of the things I really like about linux that you can customize it enough to make it run on very old boxes. Being a software developer working on Microsoft technologies, I am a very avid windows user but I have always secretly wished to be able to do my .Net based devlopement on linux. Though to some extent Mono helps but it still has a long way to go.

Anyway I have a very old currently non-functional laptop that I am now thinking to get fixed and install some flavor of linux on it, most probably Ubuntu.