The Cheezy Blog

I’m pleased to announce the availability of HelloHella 1.4 for immediate download.

My latest bit of development work, HelloHella is a full blown PHP5 Web Interface for HellaNZB. Really a logical extension of my HellaInfo script, it features everything that HelloInfo has, such as statistics on queue items including individual ETAs. as well as full control over HellaNZB, including the ability to re-order the queue en-masse. Meaning you don’t have to move each queue item into position manually, a limitation of current alternative web interfaces.

HelloHella 1.1 is now available for download.

I’ve just finished writing a neat little script I’ve decided to call HellaInfo.

It’s a PHP script that gives a nice text summary of everything that HellaNZB is up to. It’s quite useful if you use a program to pin it to your OS’s desktop, so you can see what’s going on at a glance, rather than having to fire up the web interface.

Download page

Enjoy, let me know what you think of it.

I’ve moved this into it’s own page now, to avoid it getting lost over time.

Just how long is a piece of string? Sara Golemon has the answer.

I finally got around to writing my own theme for this site, after months of using the excellent Outthere theme by Ben. The new theme has the standard blog stuff, a rather minimalist theme but most importantly it has a sort of “minblog” system that I’m calling notes. You see, I was criticized the other day for the lack of updates, but the problem is that, while I often see things I think would be good to add, they usually aren’t deserving of a full post, with only one or two lines.

The notes system lets me add them in a bullet format without detracting from the main blog itself. Rather nifty if I do say so myself.

I found this excellent list of all the various CSS hacks and filters that various browsers will or wont interpret.

A nifty site that shows how to make a nice simple gallery out of a list.

I’ve recently discovered that FireFox 1.5+ supports animated favicons. Although this does mean that your favicon may not display in other browsers, it does look rather shiny.

I was reading in The Register today about a form of CAPTCHA (that’s Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, otherwise known as the worlds most forced acronym) that’s different to the common one of a box of hard to read text that you have to send back with the form before the data will be accepted, much like this very blog uses. The “big idea” is that instead of having to do something difficult, like decypher a horrible string, the user just has to click on a series of images. The example given is kittens, hence the name, but you could use it for anything.

This is all very well, but the reason I’m posting is because, I really don’t think this is a new idea. When implementing this blog’s CAPTCHA, I experimented briefly with the idea of showing inanimate objects such as a boat, a ball, a car or something, then getting the user to type in what they saw. Of course this isn’t very robust, a determined bot could get past such a system in seconds, but the point of it wasn’t to be robust, but to prevent casual robots. More to the point, this so called “new system” is completely reliant on the number of animals or objects or whatever you go for to set how many possible combinations there are, and if you use too many you make the whole test just as hard as those horrible word boxes to begin with!

I may have to do my own experiments into CAPTCHA again in the near future.