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Posted by on 29th April, 2004

Implement your own CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA stands for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart." What it means is, a program that can tell humans from machines using some type of generated test. A test most people can easily pass but a computer program cannot. You've probably encountered such tests when signing up for an online email or forum account. The form might include an image of distorted text, like that seen above, which you are required to type into a text field. The idea is to prevent spammers from using web bots to automatically post form data in order to create email accounts (for sending spam) or to submit feedback comments or guestbook entries containing spam messages. The text in the image is usually distorted to prevent the use of OCR (optical character reader) software to defeat the process. Hotmail, PayPal, Yahoo and a number of blog sites have employed this technique. This article demonstrates how to create such an image and employ it within an ASP.NET web form....

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Posted by on 22nd April, 2004

Anonymizing Google’s Cookie

If you use Google, and you accept it's cookie, you should give some thought to the implications, both good and potentially bad : this page tries to help you do that, together with an easy way to anonymize it without missing out on its benefits....

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Posted by on 21st April, 2004

Side-by-side code comparison: Java vs C#

Clean and clear code comparisons of all aspects of both languages. This site will get your attention if you know one of the two and thought different of the other one. Also excellent overview for AS programmers, since AS is very very similar to both these languages. Check it out:...

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Posted by on 14th March, 2004

I am a new dad

It has been a week since Spencer was born and what a week it has been. Sleepless nights and constantly changing diapers pretty much sums it all up (I am the father of a tiny poop factory). Spencer was born Saturday March 6th at 18:46 hrs, weighing 8.5 pounds and 20 inches. All in all, we think he has been pretty good. Sometimes he even gives us three straight hours of sleep during the night! Spencer, we love you, but please let us sleep. Your proud dad. Check out the pictures: Spencer's...

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Posted by on 26th February, 2004

Keeping track of programming tasks

When writing code, there is a lot a programmer needs to keep track of: variables, functions, parameters and their integration with other modules and pages. And as your coding away, you are reminded of other things that you have to do when you are done with the line you are writing. Most of the times the only place where this information resides is in my brain and it will take me a good time to pick up where I left off just a few days ago. I know that there is sophisticated project management software that will keep track of all tasks, but I have found this very simple to-do-list application that will do exactly what I need. Keep track of my programming to do list for a particular project in a simple manner. The data is stored in an XML file, so you could have it online and have oher developers access it as well. No installation required, just a standalone executable. Anyways, you can find it here:...

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Posted by on 2nd February, 2004

Animation with only HTML and CSS

Think it is not possible? Think again….this site shows how to make a box rotate smoothly with only HTML and CSS. Quite clever. It includes a page on how it was done. Check it out:...

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Posted by on 19th January, 2004

Inside Avalon

In this new column, Jeff Bogdan gives an overview of the goals behind developing "Avalon," the presentation subsystem of the upcoming "Longhorn" release of Windows. Article here:...

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Posted by on 14th January, 2004

Amazing Math experiments

I thought that nobody wrote Java applets anymore, until I found this site. Paul Falstad has written some truly amazing math/physics experiments and visualized them in Java applets. The source code is provided and you could "almost" copy'n'paste the code into Flash. Check it out:...

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Posted by on 14th January, 2004

Microsoft joins the blogging world

MSDN has now an official Microsoft developer's blogs aggregating site. Sarah Williams writes: "As blogs become more a part of daily life for developers, we wanted to make them more accessible to more developers and make it easier for devs to use blogs. So today I’m pleased to announce that MSDN is launching...

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