Archive for January, 2007
Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
Adobe Reader is a bloated sack of crap
So, I needed to view a PDF on a new machine today and, of course, I head over to Adobe to snag a copy of Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Adobe Reader, or whatever it’s called today. Version 7 is out now, unbeknownst to be me, and Adobe has apparently invented more reasons to increase its version number, system requirements, download size, memory usage, and decrease everything desired: speed, ease-of-use, and simplicity. And I still don’t use a single feature that I didn’t have in Acrobat 4. I haven’t been to Adobe’s campus, yet–is it right next to the freeway? Whatever the case, there’s got to be some seriously potent fumes running through their offices to explain the horrible trainwreck that Adobe Reader has become.
In my typical, ever-so-slightly dramatic fashion, I typed in “Adobe Reader is a bloated sack of crap” in Google and found…
No Comments » - Posted in Productivity, Software Engineering by Jacob
Thursday, January 4th, 2007
Hassle your users with captcha
So, I’m trying to find some decent Jazz tickets the other day and I run into their captcha test. That’s “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”, of course. Unless you’re the programming-type, this will probably help: 
Over the course of my visit to Ticketmaster, I probably fail the test 25% of the time. Me, the programming-type, with 20/20 vision, and an itch to buy some egregiously overpriced tickets. Sites add these tests to their submission forms to keep sneaky people from doing things in an automated fashion, like posting comment spam on blogs on a massive scale. That’s nice and all, but it has gotten out of control on some sites to the point where users are regularly failing these tests multiple times in a row. That’s a serious impediment to users who are trying to give you money. Ticketmaster execs, I’ll bet you a cup of Starbucks per day for the rest of your life: you are losing a measurable amount of revenue at your captcha test screen.
