Centauri's Thoughts

I have seen Tag Clouds in use for about a year or two now, but I believe they have some interesting potential for a visual reference of content in many more ways than is being seen.

One recent app I saw was based on the bio's of your twitter followers: http://twitpwr.com/5vk/

So, armed with that knowledge, I made my own small app that text can be pasted into. It strips common words like a, an, of, the, by, for and so on.

Give it a try at http://www.centaurihome.net/cloud.php

I have been reading Dilbert for a number of years (even have the stress ball personifications of the crew), but reading the comics, and reading the blog of Scott Adams adds a whole new dimension into the person behind the comics.

Even though I have been reading dilbert comics since the 1990s, I only discovered the blog around 2002 (more or less). He comments on all sorts of things, and his perspectives on various topics are thought provoking. Its been an interesting journey, to say the least

Since I am a programmer, I can totally relate to the cubie lifestyle, and what goes with it in corporate life. Although I dont have any co-workers exactly like Wally, Alice or the others, bits of many types of personalities are indeed captured in his characters.

You know its really an abuse of all of our time and effort when we have to develop a system like CAPTCHA.

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo. reference

Spammers have no ethics, morals or respect of other peoples time. They are lazy and greedy, and want the world to provide them a free ride.

We have to spend a lot of time making sure our own software cant be abused by them. e-mail, blogs, forums, comments. anywhere that data can be entered is potentially at risk.

I know I shut down my OWN forums and blogs a few times because of spam.

I have CAPTCHAs now, but this war is far from over.

67 years ago, and this momentous event is almost forgotten, if you look at the web today. In fact, you have to search to find any news about the day that drew the USA into world war II.

We should never forget our wars, in order to not take war lightly in the present or future.

A few google links:
Georgia veterans share lesson of Pearl Harbor
For Utah vets, Pearl Harbor memories still vivid
Madison County veteran remembers Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor vets: 'Never forget'
NATION: 67 years later, Pearl Harbor remembered

Its frustrating to wake up one day, find your PC locked up, only to discover that something is seriously wrong and it wont boot up.

After searching for a way to recover the system (in vain), I took the hit and re-installed linux and re-compiled my apps. One and a half days later I am back with almost ALL the functionality I had before.

This is actually faster than I remember considering the number of apps that were NOT in the install distro.

*sigh*

As of yesterday, I passed 5 years since my first post. Certainly, much has happened in the world and my own life since then. I quit smoking 5 years ago this month. I moved a few times. I've noticed more gray hairs. The world has gotten crazier.

It seems that things do change over time, some for the better, some not. The ability to adapt to changes is ever-constant these days: technology, economy, job-market, weather.

I've been running unix/linux all this time, and couldn't be happier!

I finally edited EVERY blog entry here for the Tag Cloud. Only took a couple of hours (sheesh).
I can still see where some further splitting of some items might be necessary.
Just one more thing to keep up on when blogging, I suppose.

Sometimes, you just fight with a thing until you either beat it to death, or it finally starts working, or you give up (for a time). Today, the second option won the day. Hopefully, direct links and some other things will be working now.

After reviewing almost 5 years worth of blog entries, I believe its all formatted to look as it should. Of course, the older the entries, the more work to be done.

Finally after 2 days, the blog upgrade is fixed. Took a few phone calls, but ultimately, there was a way to upgrade the acct and run PHP5 and that cured the problems.

Hopefully, things will be smooth sailing from now on, blog-wise