Tools for a mobile office
I'm constantly trying to boost my productivity. For me that includes to enable myself to write ideas down instantly. In the present age of the smartphone, the question is no longer which device you should use to write down notes on the go but instead it is: Which applications should I use?
In this article I will present my current tool set of choice for the iPhone.
Thoughts on HipHop for PHP
It has been almost two weeks now since Facebook announced HipHop for PHP. The source code is still not available because apparently they've ran into some compilation issues, according to their GitHub status. So in essence, not much is known about HipHop for PHP but I want to try to give my thoughts based on the small amount of information we have and my experience with similar technologies.
Please note that the bits and pieces of information come from various sources and things may or may not be exactly as we think they are.
In order to understand what HipHop for PHP does it is important to understand how PHP itself gets executed. In this article I will give a rough overview of the PHP execution process and make a few educated guesses in what aspect HipHop for PHP differs from there.
Based on the little information available online I'll discuss how HipHop for PHP is suitable for large businesses and what might turn out to be obstacles that are yet to remove.
Scrum with pen & paper
A friend of mine recently asked me if I'd know any good freeware tools for use with Scrum. Well, I told him, I don't have any first hand experience with freeware Scrum tools but there certainly are a few.
However in the case that you're just starting with Scrum I would argue that you might be better off without tools. All tools force you into some kind of process that works for somebody else, but might not be optimal for you.
So instead of jumping to a fancy tool that comes with all the bells and whistles instantly, I'd recommend starting as low-tech as possible, learn the basics and discover your individual needs. After that you are enabled to get the Scrum tool that does exactly what you need it to do.
How do you start low-tech? Use pen and paper.
The CAPTCHA arms race
CAPTCHAs... we have all seen them. CAPTCHA means Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart and is a family of techniques to make sure a user (typically on a website) is indeed a human being and not a program trying to act like one.
When you leave your comment on this blog you will be asked to type in two words which are displayed as distorted graphic. Most bulletin boards and free mail providers ask you to do the same before they allow you to create an account.
CAPTCHA 101
The reason behind is the same most of the time: Preventing SPAM. Spammers use forums, blog comments and contact forms to post their ads. They use bots (quite similar to the bots that update the search index on Google, Yahoo and all other search websites) to automate that process.
So the idea of CAPTCHAs is to present a task to a website visitor that is difficult to solve for a machine, but easy to solve for a human. The graphical CAPTCHA is the most commonly used one.
There are other CAPTCHA variants such as audio-based ones or image recognition based CAPTCHAs. I've even seen a simple math question as CAPTCHA.
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