A Blue Star

To help stop spam activate the Akismet plugin.

1. Login to your wordpress blog
2. On the right hand side there is a pugin button, click it
3. Activate Akismet plugin (download here if its not all ready installed)
4. Get a Wordpress API key http://wordpress.com/api-keys/ (its free)
5. Set the Wordpress API key in the Akismet settings page.

99.98 % of spam will automatically be rejected. You should check the spam folder every once in a while to remove false positives.

I create a lot of windows application to make things easier for my customers. The simple act of coping a file from an email to a certain directory can become the most complicated tasks for a certain type of customer.

I use an Scriptable Install System provided by NullSoft called NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System). Ita great system that just plain works. Its free, open source, and can be used for commercial products, Great plugin system, Dead simple for simple things, ect.

The manual has lots of examples and function documentation to help get you started.

Over the last few years of using this program I have created a library of useful little snippets of code. Free free to comment with your own.

Opening a directory

ExecShell “open” ‘”$INSTDIR”‘
BringToFront

Registering/unregistering personal ActiveX files

UnRegDLL “$SYSDIR\spin32.ocx”
RegDLL “$SYSDIR\spin32.ocx”

Checking if a process is running
This uses the FindProcDLL::FindProc plug-in (here also):

StrCpy $1 “mybin.exe”
FindProcDLL::FindProc “$1″
;0 = Process was not found
;1 = Process was found
;605 = Unable to search for process
;606 = Unable to identify system type
;607 = Unsupported OS
;632 = Process name is invalid
StrCmp $R0 0 0 error
File “mybin.exe” ; Can’t use a variable
Goto end
error:
MessageBox MB_OK|MB_ICONSTOP “The application $1 is currently running. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL to display the list of running processes.”
Quit
end:

http://xkcd.com/305/

Rule 34: If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.

http://xkcd.com/330/

Rule Social-b. 99.1
If friends spend more then 60 minutes unable to decide what to do, they must default to sexual experimentation.

Ingredients

• 5 lbs oxtail, cut in 2 inch thick rounds
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup cajun seasoning
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 cup port wine
• 1 large Spanish onion, diced
• 1 large carrot
• 3 stalks celery, diced
• 3 italian frying bell pepper, cut into large pieces
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 (10 ounce) can whole tomato
• 1/2 can chipotle chile in adobo
• 1 cup sherry wine
• 3 bay leaf
• 1 bunch thyme, chopped
• salt
• pepper

Directions

1. Coat oxtail pieces with the flour and Cajun seasoning, and sear them in 3 tablespoons oil and remove from the pan.
2. Then degrease the pan and deglaze with port and reserve for later use.
3. In a separate pot caramelize the onions, carrot, celery and peppers, then deglaze with the red wine.
4. Add the oxtails to the vegetables.
5. Continue by adding in the tomatoes, chipotle, sherry, bay leaves and thyme and simmer for approximately 3 hours.
6. Season to taste with salt and pepper and serve.

Source: http://www.recipezaar.com/27422

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then, to make them searchable, transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Source: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html

Supremely awesome!