Thoughts on the world
I’m such a noob when it comes to blogging but hopefully not a noobie.
The reason making such a comment is not understanding how to put tags into my posts. Silly me somehow equated putting things into categories as tagging. I have no idea how I could of made such a mistake except by not paying attention to what I was doing.
Now to think of appropriate categories for the blog and appropriately sort my current posts. I’ll probably just add tags to anything new.
This weekend I should take some time and finish setting up this site. Now that I’m comfortable using MarsEdit, updates are a lot smoother. I just need to sort out how WordPress organizes everything so I can get all the links working.
My own projects always seem to take a back seat to work. Well, I lie. Video games have recently become a bigger vice of late. I guess that happens when you finally upgrade your personal system to the point where everything is up to date and fast.
Confession on the video game side. My Wii isn’t doing it as much for me as I had hoped. I’ve always seen my Nintendo systems as a social platform and to be honest, the multiplayer Wii games kind of suck. Mario Strikers was neat for a little while but didn’t maintain long term interest. Maybe Super Smash Bros. will be better.
This Gentoo bug has caused me to waste a lot of hours. I can’t believe they haven’t fixed it properly yet.
EDIT: The problem manifests itself after a fresh install of Gentoo on an AMD64 system. If you upgrade everything it will barf after glibc. You will start seeing errors such as
libsandbox: Can’t resolve open: (null)
The frustrating part for me was having a previous hardware problem that I thought I hadn’t actually solved because of this error starting to happen.
On a note to myself, put the damn details in the post. That way you can find things in the future when you search for them.
A few weeks ago it was reported that a botnet operator had cracked the Microsoft Windows Live Mail CAPTCHA system. CAPTCHAs are the pictures you see, typically of distorted words, when you sign up for accounts from various providers. Now it seems that this same botnet operator has successfully cracked about 20% of Google’s CAPTCHAs.
I would imagine that the technology and techniques that are being developed to crack CAPTHCA would have a direct application with OCR. If on the other hand it doesn’t, maybe companies like Google should take a look at their employee’s hand writing. They could then take the people with the worst lowest OCR success rate and use their hand writing instead of generating something with a computer.
Of course I’m no CAPTHA or OCR expert so I might be completely off base here. I think I’ll do some poking around on the net to see what I can find out.
I overheard a conversation on the train today. One memorable quote was,
“Science shouldn’t mess with things. Especially things that we want pretty.”
While listening, I couldn’t help but reflect on people tendency to pull out unverifiable statistics to try and prove their point. I think I’ve even done it in the past. Sometimes I think our imaginations get the better of us.
Edit: This is actually from Saturday but I wasn’t able to post until today. I assumed that it would have saved the creation date and not the ‘post’ date. I should have known better.