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A friend emailed me through my contact form and asked:

So what's the 2+2= thing below? Is that a security measure? Is it a way to keep out stupid people? Is it totally for fun?

It’s an anti-spam question. Spambots attack contact forms pretty regularly. Questions like that usually stop them. It’s the same principle behind a CAPCHA image (those annoying squiggly words you have to enter on some forms.) CAPCHAs are a pretty poor user experience and my 2+2 question isn’t much better.

One of the best anti-spam techniques I’ve heard of involves adding an input and making it invisible in the browser (display:hidden in the stylesheet) so humans don’t see it. Spambots don’t actually look at the web; they just dumbly fill in fields in a form. So when something fills in your hidden fields, you know it’s a spambot. You just add a little logic to your form — if that field is not NULL, don’t submit — and presto, spambot caught.

But I’m being lazy and using a WordPress plugin called contact form iii and not even changing the default question. I believe spambots have cracked contact form iii because I’ve gotten what looks like automated spam on another site using the plugin. Luckily the plugin allows you to change the antispam question and answer which stops the bots. I hope.

A few days ago, the Fail Blog posted this “news item”:

The problem is it’s a story that’s been floating the internet for quite some time and in popular culture even longer. Call it a hoax or urban legend or whatever. It just isn’t factual. I was suspicious as soon as I read the parenthesis under the headline: “(the actual AP headline).” The last sentence — “Lisa is blonde” — cinched it: bullshit. A quick trip to Snopes illuminated the issue.

It’s not like I expect the Fail Blog to be real journalism but for me the appeal of their items is their realness. So is it the Fail Blog getting pwnd when they blog dusty old urban legends?

Love the layout and typography on California’s Special Election voter info book.

An update on the netbook:

I’ve been using my Dell Mini 9 pretty much as my main machine. Even coding on it. I just like the portability of it. This past weekend however, things went awry.

A batch of routine updates caused my install of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to break. At the same time, my network connections broke. No wireless and no ethernet. And though Ubuntu has a different way of managing packages and updates than Windows and it’s frustrating to have to open another machine and look up the instructions for Ubuntu, I gotta say, it’s nothing compared to the frustration of dealing with Windows’ blue screens and broken .dll files.

After much struggle and many choice words, I got the network connections back up. And after several attempts, I got JRE repaired and properly installed. But Firefox was acting crazy. The back and forward buttons didn’t work. The search bar didn’t work. And the Ubuntu toolbar was busted. When I’d click on the power switch to shut down or restart, the whole toolbar would just disappear. (I eventually found the Terminal command to shutdown so I didn’t have to do hard shut-downs.)

I decided to move from Ubuntu 8.04 which came pre-installed on the Dell Mini to 8.10 and 9.04 to try to fix all these remaining problems. The hiccup here was that the 8.04 version installed was a Long Term Support (LTS) version and not automatically updated with every new release. To change this I needed to go to Software Sources and change the Update option. But my Updates tab had also disappeared.

So after all these hours of working on it, I finally decided this combination of problems was a Dell-created error and not Ubuntu.

Today, I bought a new 2GB USB stick, downloaded the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu 9.04 on my Windows machine, used the Disk Imager to create a disk image on the USB stick, booted up the netbook from the USB stick, played with the Netbook Remix for a while and did the full install, wiping my machine of Dell’s version of 8.04.

So far, it’s working like a charm and I love the Remix desktop.

One further note: when I bought the netbook, I wanted the netbook qua netbook so I went with Dell’s default 4GB harddrive. Little did I know that Ubuntu 8.04 took up 3.5GB. Ubuntu 9.04 uses 3.8GB. Though I’m not planning to keep any files on the netbook, I have few resources left for additional applications which I might one day want. This annoys me. It’s bad service from Dell. Just as their custom version of Ubuntu is bad service.

But their hardware is top-notch. So I’m torn.

I heard today that Dell is actually going to discontinue the Mini. I wonder what the reasons behind that are. If a Mini 9 with 16GB harddrive goes on sale for less than $200, would I buy?