So last time I mentioned the spam on the minipoll system. It only took another few hours after writing that blog post before I ended up putting a captcha on it!

I wouldn't have minded so much if it was good old fashioned spam but instead it was just lame random letters which means that someone was either out to annoy me, and succeeding mildly, or a person trying to point out that I needed security on the minipolls, which also succeeded slightly.

I would have been annoyed if I didn't like coding, but the fact is I do and I love a challenge. Especially an image based one like a captcha!

So after about twenty minutes of fiddling, testing and slight refining I came out with this:

I don't think it's too bad really. Needs some fine tuning as about 50% of the time it's unreadable to humans let alone bots. But I think the slightly blurry ditherd look is nifty.

You can check out the code for it over in the codebox: http://sandbox.palmnet.me.uk/testbox/codebox/index.php?module=snippet&id=90

Any ideas, suggestions on tweaking things like performance or ways to annoy spam bots more are always welcome in the comments.

And don't forget to see it in action over on the mini poll site

Work
A few people may know I finally got hired to code for a living. Clear Design are awesome people and are all equally awesome at what they do.
I've been set the task of making them a new intranet system, which sounds fairly easy and it is on paper. But I'm using CakePHP which though technically should make for 'Rapid Development' it has slowed me down a bit because I have to keep googling things and reading the API documentation. That coupled with bad documentation and me using an release candidate version make for some slightly slower coding time!
However, I'm starting to get the hang of Cake now and things are coming along nicely. If only the data validation part would play ball too.
I'll probably post some screenshots when I take it past the "it kinda works" phase so you can all see the wonderously fancy things I've been up to.
At work I also found out I'm not to shabby at table football either. At least 5 times as good as I am at real football anyway!

Projects
Webserver
I wrote a little webserver many years ago in VB6. It totally sucked and could barely do 1 get request for a html file.
I found the code for it the other day and started to give it an overhaul. It now handles multiple requests at the same time, does all sorts of fancy logging, supports any file now, not just html and it's also got a half done PHP CGI going on. Still no use for it, but it might be handier to have on my USB key than the mammoth yet almighty apache. So not that interesting but still a nice little project I revived to re-live the good old days

GifCaptcha
I was getting a bit of spam on the minipoll system and considered using a captcha system. I don't use captchas anywhere normally for the same reason I don't have adverts: I hate having them myself, why make others have to do them?
Anyway, normal captchas are boring, and kittenauth is a bit overkill despite its awsomeness so why not be interesting myself, thinks I. I'll make a captcha in animated gif format, so that each frame is really badly distorted to stop captcha cracking bots, but when all the frames are put together it becomes visible to humans due to POV.
It's not the greatest bit of code ever and still fairly easy to beat too, but it's different Unfortunately I'll never be able to use it on Palmnet as it uses a third party program to convert the still images to the animation, and I can't run that here. But it was a good little script I wrote so I thought I'd mention it anyway.

MNAH
Still living up to it's acronym I'm afriad, but perhaps once work dies down a bit I'll have more time, but plans are still there, don't worry.