Tag: captcha

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More fun with captchas

I’ve been known to deal with captchas over the years, but today while posting something on Facebook, I got one that made me pause…

captcha

Well that’s new! I’ve never had one with the text flipped upside down before… but in the world of captchas, there’s always room for improvement.

Being a smart-ass literal person, I headed over to fliptext.org to make sure I got it right. I mean, I didn’t want to just type in “they” right-side up, as that wouldn’t be correct. (Right?)

There we go… Confident I successfully entered the words in the captcha, I hit submit.

And it worked.

I wasn’t sure whether to be surprised or satisfied.

But I was left wondering if just typing in “they” right-side up would have worked.

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Captcha the Resistance!

OK, I have to admit, I thought the Photojojo captcha was cute, clever, and fun, but if you’re not into photography, and are more of an electronics nerd… I have just the captcha for you!

captcharesisty

I saw this one over on the Adafruit Blog and then found this post about it. And if you’re running WordPress, you can install the plugin and use it on your own site.

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Photojojo Loves You!

PhotojojoI love Photojojo… They love making photography fun. They also love making you love them, and how do they do that?

Here’s their mission, placed prominently on their site:

We believe in doing one thing, and doing it very, very well

We find the best photo shiz anywhere

I’ve seen companies do the “love us” thing… The idea is to make your customers fall in love with you. Do whatever it takes to make them love everything about you. Deliver outstanding service, in fact, over-deliver outstanding service, go above and beyond, make them happy, get them excited, make sure that if they tell anyone else about you (and they will) that they are presenting you in a positive light. And you can’t just talk the talk, you have to walk the walk. Actions do speak louder than words.

Photojojo was a sponsor of PhotoCampMilwaukee back in 2009. They totally got it, and were more than happy to help us make that event happen.

Photojojo’s store is filled with stuff that isn’t high-end gear for serious photographers. It’s mostly simple things to make photography fun. (But there are some pretty useful items there as well.)

Even the little things about Photojojo are all about fun. For instance, their contact form doesn’t have some lame Captcha that forces you to decode a distorted string of numbers and letters… it looks like this:

Photojojo Contact Form

Yeah, fun stuff! It’s kind of what they’re all about… if you love photography, check out Photojojo… they love it too.

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Date Problems

It’s not easy being all nutty about dates…

When signing up for another online service, I was presented with the following form:

Dates of confusion

The part with “Which Looks Right” stopped me, not because it’s not even labelled ‘Date‘, I mean, I’m guessing that it’s a date thing, but I could be wrong here. Maybe it’s some sort of captcha or math problem, I dunno… Anyway…

The “Which Looks Right” stopped me because neither one looks right to me. To look “right” to me it would be 2005-02-14, though I suppose I could also accept 02/14/2005 if forced to. 4-digit years people! YYYY-MM-DD formatting people! Come on!

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Mac OS X, GD, Authen::Captcha

I needed to add some captcha foo to a Perl CGI I was writing, so I took a look at the Authen::Captcha module, which looked pretty simple, but, wait… requires GD, which requires the GD Library, which requires… you get the picture.

Luckily I found a guide titled: Compiling GD on Mac OS X HOWTO, which I followed, and which failed for me. (I did get newer versions of zlib and FreeType, but the rest matched up.) Once again, GD got me. After repeated attempts and failures (it was a long day) I finally realized that libtool was tripping me up. See, there is this bit: 

% cd ../gd-2.0.33
% ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
% ./configure

But after running the ./configure my symlink to libtool had been replaced by a file named libtool. This was easily fixed by running ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool again after running ./configure like so: 

% cd ../gd-2.0.33
% ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool
% ./configure
% ln -s `which glibtool` ./libtool

I am running Mac OS X 10.3.9, and I’m not sure what else is different, I’m just documenting what I had to do. Anyway, I’ve now got GD installed, as well as Authen::Captcha and I can now attempt to determine if someome is a robot or a real human being. (Or at the least, discriminate against those with accessibility issues. Apologies to Bender…)

(Thanks to Matías Giovannini for writing the guide.)