I sometimes think that algorithms were hard-wired into my brain from my very earliest days on the planet. And, no, Lincoln wasn't President then.



When I was a little kid, I remember cutting covers of Time Magazine off. Then, using a ruler, I'd draw a grid of "cells" on each cover. A cover might have a matrix of 50 or 60 cells in the X axis and 70 or 80 in the Y axis when I was done with it. I would then make a judgment call on each cell of the grid as to its relative lightness or darkness level. Using a typewriter, I would manually transcribe each cell into a typewritten character. A really dark cell might be an X or an M. A really light cell might be a space character or a period.



After painstakingly transforming the grid into a typewritten page, I got some pretty cool results. I think I still have my "portrait" of Nixon press secretary Ron Zeigler around somewhere (contact me for pricing info ;-).



The reason I bring this up is there's a technology out today -- sometimes called a Captcha -- that generates text in JPG form to prevent automated access to certain web pages. For example, when you create a Yahoo account, you're asked to enter a textual phrase that appears as a morphed image. The tacit assumption is that only a "real" brain can perform the necessary pattern recognition.



But why are JPG's even necessary? You could use (TT) text in the HTML itself. Here's an oversimplified example:



............ZXX............ ..........

...XXXX....Z...Y.............3333...........

...X...X...Z...Y....6555....3...............

...X...X...Z...Z...6.........3333...........

...XXXX.... ZZZ.....6666.........3.......---

-. X..X.................6....3333........---

-..X...X............6666.................---

-..X....X................................---



which you would probably recognize as 'Ross'. The HTML font size would be very tiny. Colors could be used. The text could be slanted, italicized, whatever.



So why does this matter? One unique aspect of the text-based approach is it conforms to accessibility standards (e.g., the font size can be increased at the browser). One of the complaints about JPG images is that folks with visual impairments can't increase the size. From your Internet Explorer menu, do a View >> Text Size and increase the text-size to see the effect.



This "text-based bot defeater" answers the accessibility issue and provides help to folks with vision problems. At least, that's my take.



Entertainingly dull



Is this really The dullest blog in the world? It actually is more entertaining than you might think... at least for about 45 seconds or so. :-)



Rant-o-Matic 2000



Speaking of childish rants -- okay, actually we weren't, but -- I was having a conversation with Mr. T about the fact that he hasn't updated his blog in about a week. His response:

But I'm out of town. Waah. Waaah. WAAAAAH.



Okay, he didn't actually cry. But my response was:

NEWS FLASH: ITS THE F**KING WEB



Not ten minutes later, his blog was updated... with a scathing indictment of one of my blog entries. But he's not bitter.