Alex's Blog » web http://www.oconnoat.com/blog Thu, 03 Mar 2011 18:21:19 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Failing CAPTCHAs http://www.oconnoat.com/blog/2009/01/05/failing-captchas/ http://www.oconnoat.com/blog/2009/01/05/failing-captchas/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:15:40 +0000 Alex http://www.oconnoat.com/blog/?p=156 Every time I fail a CAPTCHA, I feel my humanity is slightly impugned. Given Flann O’Brien’s theory about bicycles and their riders merging, isn’t it also likely that someone who uses a PC as much as I do will suffer a similar, digital fate?

On the other hand, sometimes the tests are just too hard:
hardcaptcha

]]> http://www.oconnoat.com/blog/2009/01/05/failing-captchas/feed/ 0 The end of an era http://www.oconnoat.com/blog/2008/04/17/the-end-of-an-era/ http://www.oconnoat.com/blog/2008/04/17/the-end-of-an-era/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 11:42:31 +0000 Alex http://www.oconnoat.com/wordpress/?p=111 The first time I heard about Slashdot, it was a wonderful place. The ‘news for nerds’ was high-impact and usually well before any other sites. I spent most of the summer of 2003 moderating comments, I even have a few 5′s.

No more.

As of today, slashdot is off my list of rss feeds. The editor-based blog is not keeping up with headlines and worse the quality of the summaries is now so low that it seems to be wrong on basic facts. This story on MySQL was the last straw. It’s a typical example of what slashdot has become: either the story is late, or it’s all over the place with a misleading headline. I don’t mind bad headlines in reddit or digg, but the editors in /. used to mean something.

The sad thing is that there’s no real substitute since the linksites like reddit and digg have barely anything to do with tech and are pretty shoddy in their content anyway. It’s going to come down to assembling rss feeds on netvibes, and reading twitter. You can look at the stuff I read on netvibes through my Tech Universe.

]]> http://www.oconnoat.com/blog/2008/04/17/the-end-of-an-era/feed/ 0