 |
« | Week of May 23 | < | Individual Entries | > | Week of Jun 27 | » |  |
 |
 |
Goodbye, Comment Spam
announcements
June 26, 2004, 12:16 PM
Following an annoying comment spam flood last night, I've finally been pushed into installing the CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin for Movable Type. What this means for you, dear reader, is that there's now a little image that will appear in every comment entry form with a number on it. You'll need to retype that number into the text box next to the image in order for your comment to get posted.
The reason for this odd-seeming requirement is that most spam comments aren't posted by humans, they're posted by computer programs ("robots" or "bots") that crawl the web looking for comment forms and automatically submit junk comments so the spammer can sit idly by while his computer does all the dirty work whereas I have to manually clean up the mess. Not very nice at all, but spammers aren't very nice people.
The image thing prevents robots from posting comments automatically, since the robot can't read the number in the image like a human can (computers are notoriously bad at tasks that require recognizing words in noisy images, whereas humans are notoriously good at such things). If you're interested in getting more information, see the CAPTCHA project's web site.
I apologize for the inconvenience, but I had to take some measures to stem the tide, and this seemed to be the best option. Sadly, it's only a matter of time before any open system gets abused by the assholes among us.
Role-Oriented Workspaces
design
June 24, 2004, 10:20 PM
Like many knowledge workers, I find myself playing many different roles throughout the average day. Some of these roles are part of my personal life, many are part of my professional life, and an increasing number of them involve my computer in some form or fashion. For example, I'm a research assistant on the U&SA project, the project manager for our capstone project team, a soon-to-be unemployed user-centered designer looking for a job, and of course the author and maintainer of this here weblog, just to name a few. I've mentioned some thoughts on how to deal with role overload before, but now I'm thinking of ways that my computer could help me out with this problem. What I really need is a role-aware operating system.
Unix windowing systems have supported multiple desktops for a long time. For power users, this is a useful feature since it allows you to organize the windows that hold your documents and applications in some sort of task-oriented fashion. But this is only part of the way towards supporting different roles. Certain programs may need to behave differently depending on what role I've currently assumed; for instance, my instant messaging and email clients may need to log in to different accounts depending on whether I'm in a "work" role or a "home" role (and perhaps should automatically put up appropriate away messages when I'm switched off of a role). Certain preferences settings may need to be different. And so on.
The latest version of Mac OS X, Panther, supports this notion better by providing a fast way to switch between multiple logged-in user accounts. But this may be too much separation; the tricky part of implementing a role-aware operation system is hitting the proper balance between separation of different roles and integration of globally useful options. After all, this is the same person and his activities will often not fall neatly into one role or another. If the system puts up too many barriers between roles by making it hard to get information from one role to another, this paradigm won't be useful.
At any rate, I think this is fertile ground for design exploration.
Email Rob:
More Friends with Jobs
people
June 24, 2004, 07:37 PM
Congratulations (slightly belatedly) to Mathilde for her acceptance of Ebay's offer to join Micah in their UI design team. With people like these on their side, it's hard to imagine how the 'bay could possibly go wrong.
Also, congratulations to Chad, who has already begun work at Google along with Kevin and to Haven, who will be working at Catapult Thinking, a design consultancy in Boston.
Makes you think perhaps I should be getting off my duff and finding work for myself, eh? Well, hold that thought a bit longer... ;)
Email Rob:
Email Rob: