JobStats

A quick shout out for a revamped favourite site of mine – JobStats. JobStats has been tracking the IT job market for over 10 years now and plotting in on an exciting graph. Sadly the site was moribund since early 2003. The graph still automatically plotted itself though so it was always worth a check.

Good to see then that someone has updated the site and made it a bit flashier. The exciting graph is still there and there are more locations, a personalisation bit and predictably more adverts – Oh well. So if you’re like me and have a morbid fascination with the IT job market I recommend that you check it out.

The Human Clock

I’ve not worn a watch for years for reasons too dull to mention. For similarly dull reasons I’ve recently needed to embark on a dull shopping trip to various dull watch vendors to look at various overbig, overstrappy overpriced, dull as ditchwater watches before electing to purchase the least offensive of the bunch. Dull, dull, dull. Dull and pointless indeed when you consider the timekeeping excitement which is the human clock.

Rather than a boring old circular watch face with some numbers and pointy hands the human clock tells the time through the medium of well … humans. Every minute of every day is displayed by a new piccie that someone has sent it. From the routine street numbers, to birthday cakes, to patterns in the snow to car registrations – every field of human endeavour is used to tell the time. It’s a humanist marvel.

So throw out your watches people and tell the time through the medium of the human clock. In fact in these wireless times it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to fashion a watch type device that would display the human watch where ever you are - the iHumanClock. Come on Apple, make it happen.

The Sad Deletion of Jeff Atwood

It’s a modern day tragedy. I was browsing wikipedia this week when I just happened to check out the entry for my favourite blogger Jeff Atwood. I was shocked and dismayed to discover that the entry has been deleted - Mr Atwood has been deemed as being too trivial. In the tawdry old real world Jeff’s star seems very much in the ascendant with the release of the programmer’s wiki-portal stackoverflow (very much worth a browse). Sadly things appear not to be going so well for him online.

So whatever next for Jeff? Will all his blog posts be erased? Will his facebook account be defaced? Will his twitter tweets be expunged? Will all signs of his online life be purged from the Internet? It will be worse than online death. It will be obliteration. It will be extinction. It will be like he never existed at all. He will just be left with that shallow, dreary existence we have come to call the real world. What a truly tragic fate for a truly geeky man.

Recaptcha

It’s very wisdom of the masses, the power of crowds, web 2.0, wikinomics and all that – but your very own website can digitise books without trying. Using captcha’s the little squiggles many of us spend much of the time entering in can miraculously help digitise texts.

It’s all handled by the people at Carnegie Mellon University (http://recaptcha.net/ ) Basically –they provide a plug it to website that provide the captcha display for your website. It’s a few lines to hook it up and then you’re off. I did it in PHP but it available in .Net, Java and more languages than I’ll ever know.

To implement

1. download the relevant library i.e recaptchalib.php
2. Sign up to recatpcha for a public and private keys
3. Code to display the captcha in PHP below

  <?echo recaptcha_get_html($publickey, $error); ?>

4. And to deal with the post back – a bit more but not rocket surgery.

if ($_POST["submit"])
{
$resp = recaptcha_check_answer ($privatekey,
$_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"],
$_POST["recaptcha_challenge_field"],
$_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]);

if ($resp->is_valid)
{
.. do some processing to the valid form
}
else
{
# set the error code so that we can display it. You could also use
# die ("reCAPTCHA failed"), but using the error message is
# more user friendly
$error = $resp->error;
$displayForm = true;
}
}

I was listening to the leader of the project on a Digital Planet podcast. They use OCR to get about 80% of the words and farm the hardest 20% out to people doing captchas. Apparently they are digitising hundreds of books a day through this. I am genuinely impressed.

Sadly though – it appears that captchas generally are gradually becoming less effective . But I guess so long as your site is more secure that the next guys… (all IT security professional grind teeth at this statement – OK, I realise it’s no better than recommended that I hide my website registration under a stone).

Boogle – The future of search

Why, oh why, oh why does Google waste it’s time developing cutting edge applications such as Google Earth, Google Checkout, Chrome etc… when hiding in the Google closet of unwanted applications is Boogle. I first came across Boogle 6 years ago when a co-worker in what can only be described as a moment of extreme boredom, was inputting variants of google.com into a browser. Imagine everyone’s delight when he came across Boogle – a search engine which fires a random quotation and a completely unrelated but vaguely inspiring image at you on each page refresh.

So I was completely delighted to see this week that Boogle still exists. Sadly its stablemate, Froogle, has become the boring Google Products Search Beta. A sad demise – but the important one, Boogle still exists, its heart beating stronger than ever. I have this vision that in Google Towers there are teams of attractive, thrusting, excessively enthusiastic American youths working on the next release of Google Apps/Youtube/Gmail etc… and in one dusty corner is a bearded, pallid individual (sex undecided) who has sole responsible for maintaining Boogle.

But let’s all rise up now and show our support for this benighted individual. So I urge you all to forget Google.com, cast aside Google.co.uk and delete your personalised Google accounts and make the mighty application that is Boogle the homepage for your browser. And if you work on a I.T. helpdesk – make Boogle the homepage for your entire organisation. They’ll thank you for it in the end.