Posted on September 26th, 2005%
C|Net’s News.com recently reported that three trade organizations representing record and movie companies released a program called Digital File Check, a so-called “powerful scanning engine that allows you to search your computer for installed file-sharing programmes , as well as media files.” That quote is directly from the home page, as is the grammatically-incorrect space before the comma.
Since I like being a victim, I decided to run this on my laptop, which was recently overhauled as a result of a hard drive crash. Here’s some interesting information on the overall experience.
The Digital File Check (DFC) Web site is written mostly in Flash. It is also configured to scale to window size, so peole with desktop resolutions of 800×600 will have a difficult time reading the blurry text without zooming in. Whoever designed this site needs to take some hints from usability expert Jakob Nielsen.
Nowhere on the DFC Web site does it say it only works . . .
→ Read More: Digital File Check: Disabling file sharing, thanks to record companies
Posted on October 31st, 2004%
A friend who runs AngryHamster was recently inundated with spam posted through the comments field of his Web site. His site, much like this one back in the pre-WordPress days, runs on a product called .Text by Scott Watermasysk (the product is now marketed as Community Server :: Blogs by Telligent Systems). Apparently, this comment spamming is not new, and some users have come up with solutions to this problem using CAPTCHA imaging techniques (particularly a .Net implementation by BrainJar).
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get them to work reliably. So, I did what any self-respecting coder would do: hacked it myself.
The implementation (which is running on this site) has the following features beyond the standard .Text 0.95:
A limited CAPTCHA method in the comments. I couldn’t get the image to render, so I just displayed it as text. This should solve the problem – at least until some spammers recognize what I did and try . . .
→ Read More: .Text, Comment Spam, Captcha, FreeTextBox, and more
Posted on April 15th, 2004%
I used to have piles and piles of CDs with old versions of software. Used to is the operative phrase there; most of those CDs have gone into the garbage over the years. Who ever thought I would need an old copy of Internet Explorer?
If you find yourself needing some old software, check out http://www.oldversion.com. They offer 51 (at the time of writing) different programs, and in most cases different old versions of each one. Want to see AOL Instant Messenger 1.0? They’ve got it. How about America Online 1.0 – a scant 0.3MB? Yup. Adobe Acrobat 2.0? It’s in there. They provide old versions of the most popular instant messenger, file sharing, e-mail, multimedia, and Internet applications.
You may need an old version for compatibility, or testing, or to be nostalgic. Whatever the reason, http://www.oldversion.com is a worthy bookmark.
. . .
→ Read More: Because newer is not always better, there’s oldversion.com
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