Today I am attending BarCampSheffield being hosted by PlusNet. It is naturally good to catch up with Tom, Dave, and a few other familiar faces, but it is great to meet new people who are new to the BarCamp game.

I decided to do my presentation on the hi-tech treasure hunt game Geocaching. The broad concept of the game is to hide a “cache” with a log book and publish the GPS coordinates online, then someone uses this information for find it.

The most common place to publish the location of your cache and find others is Geocaching.com. This site is operated by Groudspeak in the United States. There are a number of caches around PlusNet that we may go look for later.

There are a number of other resources that are worth noting. The most useful to the UK based cacher is GeocacheUK.com that collates statistics about caching and allows advanced searching. Trigpointing is also a site that appeals to may people who are drawn to caching. Waymarking.com is another GPS site that evolved from Geocaching.com and is also operated by Groudspeak. There is also an organisation called the Geocaching Association of Great Britain that consists of UK Geocachers and helps with may things including getting permission to place caches on private land.

A big well done and thank you to the team who put together BarCampSheffield, and thanks to Stuart Grimshaw for taking the photograph above and releasing it under the creative commons. All my BarCamp images are released under Creative Commons.

Personally I hate Captcha, that horrid technique of placing some messed up text on a image that a human should be able to read but a computer should not. My main complaint is that it is time consuming and I often just not readable by me. That being said I have not got a better idea for the masses.

Now if you concede that something like this is needed then Carnegie Mellon University’s reCaptcha is an amazing idea. They have been scanning books using OCR software, but not all the words can be interpreted automatically. An unknown word is used for the Captcha, along with another word that is now known, and then user needs to enter both words. This way people are entering the unknown word to identify it while confirming they are human with the known one. The service can be used by other web sites and a number of code libraries are available.

It is not perfect. Some text is imposable to read, and without the context of the sentence I suspect some words will be interpreted incorrectly. That being said I find it easier to use than most other Captcha solutions.

The problem of spam has now got silly and there are many people doing many things to reduce it. Personally I use some simple javascript on my contact page to generat my email address on the browser to prevent it from being harvested, and that works rather will, although I would never put my personal email address on a web site. I have also been playing with BoxBe that requires users to interact to sent the mail to me. That is also working well, but it appears many users can not be bothering to follow the process through and email is not getting to me.

Following a discussion with a friend I started using Project Honeypot to try and trap these harvesting spam bots by feeling varying email addresses to each IP address visiting our sites and then seeing which of these addresses get spam sent to them. This has also worked well, but other than seeing the breakdowns of where the spam is coming form it has been of no use until now. Currently Project Honeypot are releasing an announcement every day this week and today http:bl was announced. This is a similar service to email DNS block lists but lists the servers that look for email addresses and not the ones sending the spam email.

I have produced some demonstration PHP that will make it easy for most people to contact me normally (still using the javascript), but make it harder (probably using BoxBe) for people and bots coming from suspect IP addresses. Click for my http:bl example code.

Update: Yes it will work if you are using OpenDNS. This is why I check the first address octet is 127.

…if you believe Windows Update.

I have just run the restore disks on my old Sony Vaio laptop so I can do some Windows development for hardware incomparable with XP. When I came to do the essential Windows update (after upgrading to IE6) I got the message…

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.

This website is designed to work with Microsoft Windows operating systems only.
To find updates for Microsoft products that are designed for Macintosh operating systems, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/mac/.

All is not lost as I did manage to find an unofficial service pack with the most recent updates and hotfixes.

This is a quick post to let you know about Hack Day on the 16th and 17th of June in Alexandra Palace London. All the information is on the web site so I will not waffle on. I have signed up and appear to have made the cut, so if you do as well and live close by then get in touch and we can car pool.

If you have been reading my blog over time you will know that I am a fan of the BarCamp format. I have attended both the London BarCamps and intend to attend at Brighton. I may also attend at Sheffield, but the lack of a stopover makes the journey some what less appealing.

The good news for everyone around the North East of England is that we are planning a two day BarCamp in or around Newcastle upon Tyne. We have a web page up and running here and I will be blogging more information when it comes in.

We already have sponsorship in hand and are looking at options for the venue. The hard part is finding a venue that will allow several dozen people to sleep on the floor. All suggestions welcome.

When listening to Tech Talk Radio on a podcast I herd about Pure Text by Steve Miller. This is a neat little app that sits in the icon tray and when you press <windows> and <v> (or another customisable combination) it pastes the text in the clipboard without formatting.

This is a solution to a problem that has needed a fix for years. In the past I have had to search the menus for “Paste Special…” or paste in to notepad and copy again. Now if I can persuade a few others to use it I will not have to continually remove the varying formatting in shared documents, or fix web pages blatantly copied form a Word document.

This is not the first usefully application of Steve’s that I have enjoyed using. As a developer Dependency Walker is a great help in diagnosing Windows compatibility problems. He also has many other useful applications on his web site.

The photo sharing site Zooomr has lifted all it’s limits, including transfer and storage limits, forever. This means that you can upload all you photos to the site and share them (or not) for free.

This site was a flickr equivalent, but with geotagging long before Yahoo (the current owner of flickr) integrated it.

The service (still in beta) has been going through a tough few days trying to get it’s third generation site up and running. This work is still ongoing and the old version 2 site is currently live. I hoped that when version 3 of zooomr is launched it will have over taken flickr again and that the race will continue to give us all a better product, regardless of the service we use.

Personally I will still be using flickr for my “arty farty” pictures and geek community photo sharing, and Picasaweb for small collections of stuff, but I have decided to upload all my digital images to zooomr and share a selection of them. It was my intention to take out a pro subscription with flickr and upload everything, but if zooomr is free and will have more features I am willing to give it a try first. Let’s just hope the business modal holds up and we have a great service for years to come.

I have just tweaked my web site configuration (hosted by SteelPixel) so it does not redirect “agm.me.uk” to “www.agm.me.uk” but still prefixes the www to all other pages.

The reason why I have done this is because of OpenID. I use the root of my web site as an open ID as it is quick to type in and I have full control, but until now when I type in agm.me.uk my OpenID login annoyingly becomes www.agm.me.uk.

The following needed adding to the “.htaccess” file in the route of my web site for it to work. The second and third lines are those that I have just added, and you need them both for reasons that I can not currently fathom.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/index.php$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^agm.me.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.agm.me.uk/$1 [L,R]

Naturally all this is fairly pointless in the global scheme of things, but I feel better now. I have also added a search facility for all my sites using Google Co-op that is slightly more usful.