ivc blog

Recently I’ve received some blog comments spam. I received an e-mail for each new comment but I didn’t bother much about it.

Now, today after updating my e-mail server to better fight spam and bounce spam, I decided to do a clean-up of the blog comments. A quick search for ‘wordpress captcha plugin’ reveal a type of captcha I remeber liking because it wasn’t that unfriendly and time consuming to figure out. It’s called Recaptcha. It requires a API key since it’s essentially streaming the code in the background to the Recaptcha servers.

Preview:

Hopefully this isn’t to intrusive and bothersome. It cuts out all the un-necessary spam I was receiving and I’m happy about that.

Update: Recently I discovered that Recaptcha actually helps the Internet Archive project and digitize books, thus helps the optical character recogonition (OCR) system.

I had a problem with flash video stopping after 2 seconds and sound missing in Opera and Firefox. Flash video worked fine after relaunching the browser but after a few minutes the issue popped up again. Although I normally have 10-20 tabs in both browsers. But the weird thing is that I’ve always had this setup and the issue crawled up recently.

After uninstalling the current 9r115 version and installing the the previous 9.0r47 version Flash video worked again.

1. Go to \Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash, run the two uninstallers, uninstall_plugin.exe and uninstall_activex.exe
2. Download fp9_archive.zip from this Adobe flash page
3. Extract the 9r47 folder to the desktop and run the flashplayer9r47_win.exe installer
4. Voila! Fixed for Opera and Firefox

Update: Note that there are several security fixes in the newer versions, determine what you want to weight the most.

Reference:

• mozillazine.org

A week ago, Dan Thomas, Marianne, and myself, traveled to Newcastle, UK, for the weekend 18-20th January. The main attraction was the Ultimate Fighting Championship 80: “Rapid Fire” show in the Metro Radio Arena.

The transit flight to Schiphol was delayed 3 hours and we spent the night at the airport. Arriving in Newcastle the next morning, around 10 am, we unloaded at the hotel and figured we’ll make the most of the day. We started by visiting Forbidden Planet (awesome!) and Games Workshop before heading to the shopping area. Later Dan Thomas went off to attended a fighting gym east of the city center. Marianne was in shopping nirvana while I captured some pictures of Newcastle’s more interesting bits, like Chinatown, the city wall, Central Station, St. Nicholas Church, Castle Keep, Side Street, and the Tyne Bridge.

Later in the evening Dan Thomas and I headed for the UFC show at 6 pm and it was a blast! Gradually the fights got fiercer and the crowd wilder. The main event was the BJ Penn vs Joe Stevenson, both from USA. I’ve never been to Las Vegas but I can imagine the excitement is similar.

The last day we packed and put the baggage in the hotels luggage room before heading out to see the attractions on Quayside. The view from Castle Keep was astonishing, as was the close-up view of the Tyne- and Millennium Bridge. The musical arena, Sage Gateshead, was a cool architectural feat. Oh, and we managed to squeeze in a short visit to one of Europe’s biggest shopping venues outside the city center, the MetroCentre (360 different stores).

At the airport, after boarding the plane the captain announced that something was not working correctly and we waited almost an hour before departing. That meant we could miss our transfer at Schiphol. Fortunately, KLM is flexible and delayed the connecting flight. We got through the security check quick and ran to the gate, although it turned out the flight was not departing in another 45 minutes. The flight was pleasant and seemingly quick as I was reading a book about NLP that Dan Thomas bought at Newcastle airport. Arriving at Torp airport a little delayed, we drove off to Arendal, finally at home at around 1.40 am.

To summarize; a great trip with some minor hurdles.

• Newcastle picture gallery