David Morris – brassedoff.net

From today’s silicon.com weekly roundup email, speculation on what a proposed Microsoft High St store might look like…

So what would a Microsoft Store look like? Let’s indulge in a flight of purest whimsy and find out.

For starters, as you approach the shop front you’ll notice all the windows are broken – the glass held together with little sticky patches (updated regularly of course).

Once inside the store you’ll be faced by a phalanx of security guards who question your every move as you make your way past the wall of antivirus software boxes and towards the software stand.

Once you’ve bought your copy of Vista you can take it and your laptop directly to the Downgrade Zone where a grizzled, bitter Windows Veteran will downgrade you to XP free of charge with complimentary cursing.

Once you’ve taken advantage of your Vista downgrade rights you’re free to explore the rest of the store. Head upstairs, treading carefully around the store manager sitting on the floor muttering “I’m a PC, I’m a PC…”

Upstairs, it’s all about fun.

Granted the Xbox 360 area will absolutely rock but your enthusiasm will soon wane as you head quickly through the ‘Zune Zone’ where industrial strength fans whirl constantly in a vain attempt to keep the music players dust-free.

Then there’s the Genius Bar-equivalent where angry men with high blood pressure will shout: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” at you as you approach.

Finally, as you leave the store you’ll be handed a complimentary box of tissues because you’ll have almost certainly picked up a cold while you’ve been shopping…

Since I changed the backdrop on the Killamarsh Forum captcha to a photographic backdrop, the spam applications have dropped to zero. Mind you, in the same period I haven’t had ANY applications, so it could be that the captcha is unreadable to everyone, human or machine! With that in mind, I did check earlier today and yes, it is still readable. Score one for the non-spammers.

Oh, I’ve fixed the masthead image as well. I’d been a bit over zealous with the permissions when I installed the new software and had denied access to the theme image directory. Doh!

I also think this theme needs a bit of work to make it compliant with Wordpress widgets. A little light reading is in order over the weekend. When I’ve fixed mine, I can go and fix Mrs Woolforbrains‘ theme as well.

One of our groups was landed with a £600+ phone conferencing bill last week. All necessary calls, but the cost took them a little by surprise. I’ve done a bit of ringing around to see if I could find a cheaper service, but at the same time, had a little think. Most of the time when this group are conferencing, they’re VPN’d in to the office so they can share desktops. I’ve got an Asterisk server running on one of my desktop machines that I’ve played about with in the past. Asterisk supports MeetMe conferencing. All we need to do is give the users a copy of X-Lite – a free SIP softphone, a handset and off we go. Instant savings. In these days of credit-crunch, every penny saved is a good thing isn’t it? Don’t forget about the ztdummy module if you’re using it without a zaptel card for providing timing though. I found the zaptel kernal modules package for openSuse11.0 had the dummy driver in. Symptoms of not having it loaded are errors about not being able to create the psuedo-device when trying to call in to the conference and a spoken error message about an invalid conference number.

Asterisk may be a bit of a bugger to configure, but it does the job. I’d really like to get to install it in a live environment though! As well as a conferencing server, £500-worth of hardware would enable it to work as a pretty good voicemail server as well.

Anyone want a bit of consultancy work doing? :)

It seems that the phpBB team are having enough problems of their own at the moment, and seeing as the web site is down, I decided to have a go at trying to come up with a way of stopping the cracks to the captcha. It appears from the links in the posting a couple back that one of the ways of defeating the captcha is to examine the first few pixels to determine the background colour. What I’ve done is take one of my photos, crop a bit out and use that as the background of the captcha image. This should defeat the examination for regularly appearing colours because although it’s predominantly a similar colour (background of trees) there should be enough variety in the individual pixels to make identification of a single colour difficult. This could be defeated easily if the cracking algorithm looked for similar colours, but I bet most of them don’t. The acid test will be if the number of spam registrations drops off. At the moment I’m getting four to five a day. If it stops, I’ve got it cracked for a while. Time will tell.

It’s not a particularly scientific mod – more of a hack of the code, but if anyone’s interested in the changes, let me know.

Snow again today; the roads are pretty much covered. So, I decided today should be a pushbike day again. All was going well until I hit some snow covered ice near Broad Oaks just below Darnall. I can’t remember the last time I came off my bike. Fortunately, I wasn’t going very quickly, the nearest car was 50m or so behind me and not going very fast which was a good job considering I was in the middle of the road!

A Good Samaritan who was walking up the pavement on the opposite side came across to see if I was OK and wave at the oncoming car to stop – thanks, dear lady! As for me, the handlebars were still at 90′ to the front wheel and boths wheels were still round so back on and on my way. I’ll probably have a bruise on my right hip for my folly.

I felt better when I watched a car lose it on the same stretch of road and ram into the kerb sideways.

It looks like someone has found a way around the captcha on phpBB3, the forum software I’m using for the Killamarsh Forum. I’m seeing a lot of bogus account applications. I inadvertently approved one the other day only to be on the receiving end of about 5 spam postings. All the applications so far have come from the following email addresses:

*@mail.ru
*@gmail.com
*@tmail.com
*@convertor-3gp.com

Needless to say I’ve banned anyone from these email addresses. It’s a nuisance because there may be legitimate applications from gmail. I use gmail. I’m not prepared to have the forum spammed though. I wonder how these spammers do it though? Is it automated? If so, it must have been done through some reverse engineering and cookie tracking, or so I thought. Wrong. A quick Google turned this one up:

http://www.darkseoprogramming.com/2008/05/12/phpbb3-captcha-is-super-easy/

…and this one…

http://www.apathysketchpad.com/blog/2007/06/05/how-to-crack-captchas/

So, time to look for a new captcha me thinks. Both of the articles above highlight the fact that the captcha is made easier because of the uniform background colour. I wonder if  superimposing the captcha on a suitable photographic image would be any better?

I opened the front door this morning to drive to my Mum’s house to change over to my bike and had a bit of a shock:

Oops

The car, in the night, had slid down the drive, coming to rest inches from the front door. I dread to think what damage could have been caused if it had gone a bit further!

Fortunately, we were still able to get out of the house. I think you can probably see on the photo that the drive is very icy after yesterday’s snow and overnight freezing. Presumably, the heat from the car melted the snow. The water subsequently froze – it was below zero again last night, and the Mini decided to go for a stroll.

Talk about close!

I made a conscious decision this morning. If it was going to snow heavily, I’d be better off on the bike than warm and comfortable in the car. Score one to David! It took me just over 40 minutes from work to my Mums house where I left the car this morning. I had an hour there for the traffic to subside a bit and get warmed up, then it took me 90_ minutes from Handsworth to Killamarsh… solid traffic jams from the Asda at Handsworth to the bottom of Coisley Hill near Woodhouse. From Coisley Hill, around Crystal Peaks and out past Direct Cars to Killamarsh, there was practically no traffic.

I knew the conditions were bad on our estate, but keeping the Mini in 3rd at around 1500rpm, I got up the hill with no trouble at all.

This was the first time I’d had the Mini in snow and I’ve been pleased with the way it handled. The bicycle is definitely the way to go though. If I’d cycled all the way home, I would have been back home for around 7:30pm I reckon rather than 8:30pm, but at least I got home safely.

The burning question now is what’s the situation going to be like in the morning.

One more little thing to look out for. I’ve started using twitter. If you want to see what I’m up to, you can follow my twittering here.