Base-10 Design & Development Inc. | Blog » Cool Stuff

Captcha Fail

Casimir — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:37:43 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks we have been struggling with a rather intelligent spam bot (or person?) that has been hammering one of our clients forms. Currently we are using a non-image based representation of a set of digits you have to type in to successfully post the form. On top of that we have implemented a minimum time limit as well as a dummy form field that is positioned off screen so a user will not see or fill it out. If it is filled, we know it is a bot because in the markup, it is directly below the real input field… It worked for a couple days bit has now been broken =( We have a couple more tricks up our sleeves that we are working on and will report back on our findings. Now the question that comes to mind is, should I post the details of the new captcha if it is successful? Or would that just give the spammers the means to break it?

Here is a really cool CAPTCHA implementation from www.captcha.net and is based around the concept of tracing around a specific image from a set. It is called squigle-pix: http://server251.theory.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/sq-pix . I would like to see a bot break that!! Only problem is, I can’t find an easy to implement version of this; it seems like it just exists as a proof of concept.

9 Station Pour Over Bar @ Cafca

Casimir — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:31:21 +0000

It just so happens that our office is located within walking distance to probably the most fantastic café in Vancouver (imho). The name of the café is a bit of a mouthful, but well worth the effort to remember: The Café for Contemporary Art or just cafca for short. Last night they hosted an after party for the Vancouver Coffee & Tea show and featured a 9 station pour over bar.

9 Station Pour Over Bar

I am very much a coffee fan and love discovering new methods and gadgets for brewing coffee, along with different roasts and grinds that can diversify my coffee experience. I started with the drip coffee my father used to make and then moved on to espresso, press pot, siphon, vac pot, percolator, clover and so on and so forth. Now I am told that I should not have ventured past my fathers method of drip coffee because apparently that is what makes the best cup of coffee; much to my fathers amusement. I see no difference between ‘pour over’ and ‘drip’ coffee. Purists claim that pour over is brewed on a cup by cup basis with more attention given to how and where you pour the water, hence pour over.

It's all in how you pour the water

Personally I use a press pot at home because it is easy to clean and quick to prepare. A trick I learned from the fine folks at Cafca is to scoop of the top layer of grinds before you plunge the coffee after your brew time of choice (4 minutes and 20 seconds is my prefered brew time). This results in a cleaner tasting cup that will stay clean even if you leave it in the pot for a period of time. Do you have any secret methods for brewing your coffee?

Google street view finally comes to Canada

Casimir — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:57:21 +0000

I figured I would join the party in blogging about the launch of Google Street View in Canada. Privacy concerns aside, I think it is a very cool service and will come in handy for all sorts of things. Other then personal uses, we will be integrating it into our real estate sites so that users can check out a house as if they are standing in front of it.

One downside of the service is that you have no control of when or what was taken in the photos. As you can see from this shot of our office there is a huge van in the way =(

Hacking your sleep

Casimir — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:53:26 +0000

I came across an interesting product during my afternoon web wanderings; so interesting in fact, I decided to blog about it. Being somewhat of a geek and coming from a programming/system administration background, I naturally try to optimize my surroundings and myself. Some would call this being a perfectionist or a tad OCD, but I think it is just a healthy urge to make oneself better. Lest I go of on a random tangent, the product I came across today is called the Zeo Personal Sleep Coach.

It is essentially a suped up alarm clock with a head band that will monitor your brain waves while you sleep to accurately record things such as, length of sleep, how long it took to fall asleep, deepness of sleep, different stages of sleep, etc. You can even upload this data to their website and get ‘coaching’ on your sleep. My inner conspiracy theorist is having a field day with the prospect of willingly uploading your brain data to someone’s website!!! but it is a cool concept. By keeping historical and accurate (how accurate?) sleep data, you can now actually make empirical tests on different sleeping techniques, relaxation methods, etc. On top of all that, the head band is pretty stylish…

Pretty much everyone I know is chronically sleep deprived and it is so easy to forget how important a good sleep really is. Its not just the length of sleep, but the quality of sleep. Especially for anyone who uses their brain and/or body heavily during work. My personal favourite methods of getting a better sleep are:

Reading a fiction book before bed (fantasy), not a work or non-fiction!!
Not eating a big meal right before bed, but having a light snack
Don’t do your evening workout to close to going to sleep
This one is hard for me, but very effective: going to sleep and waking up at the same time every weekday

I wish everyone a good sleep tonight