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Showing posts from March, 2008

Information Overload

So just the other day I was talking about technologies and frameworks with a fellow engineer and then the million dollar question came up after much debate: "What have you done?" And I just sat there, trying to come up with an answer to justify my points and where I was coming from, but I couldn't respond with anything recent. I read about emerging technologies in the software engineering field. A lot. I think that's a double edge sword too, because as one keeps reading about the best practices here and there and what others have used and plan to use, you just sit there, wishing and planning on doing so many great and awesome things, but as time goes by, nothing gets done! So my advice, which I am going to eat my own food in this case, is to learn, but above all, START SOMETHING. A popular slogan comes to mind...

When CAPTCHAs Block Users

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I was creating a group with Google Groups for a weekly programming meeting I am a part of, and after filling out the first page, which asks for the group's name, email address, description and other settings, this CAPTCHA came up: It appears the CAPTCHA's service was unavailable, and so the challenge image was unavailable (I typed the error's sentence just in case I could continue), so I, a real human, was unable to create the group, and had to postpone my attempt until some other time. I wasted time in the previous page, writing the name of the group, email address, description; all content I had to come up with was to be wasted (though I saved it to a trusty text file). So here's my suggestion: why not verify "humanness" first -- before the user has to even start thinking about group names and descriptions. Get the "verification" out of the way first so that this doesn't happen to anyone else, because it was truly frustrating. This may soun

Why Blogging Is Hard

First of all, you have to setup the blog, but that's not really hard, because in this case Blogger makes it super easy to create a blog and get going in no time. Personally, the hardest part is actually blogging. Yes, I'm talking about clicking on the "New Post" link and actually writing something to share with whoever happens to find your blog. Then there's the actual reason of blogging (btw, not sure if it's "blogging" or "bloging"). Most friends couldn't care less about reading blogs or blogging themselves, and generally dismiss them, but in today's age, where blogs are so common and plentiful, I think they're great, because now I can have conversations and read information that other people took the time to type and share with complete strangers, and I think that has a lot of value in today's small world. It's not often you hear a stranger tell you, "Hey, check out how I turn this Diet Coke into a geyser!"