After several hours of tweaking, I finally managed to get OpenCaptcha v1.1 released under the GPL. OpenCaptcha is a php script designed to dynamically create a captcha image in .png form. It uses a randomly chosen background, a randomly chosen string of a randomly chosen length, color, size, and orientation, along with randomly coloured and placed lines to create an image that only a human can interpret (well, for the most part). Here’s a screen shot of what my captcha can look like:

This project started out as something I was going to use in projects that I was working on, but I decided that since there weren’t any open-source captcha solutions out there (none that I could find anyway), I’d make this one available under the GPL. Version 1.0 has not been released under the GPL though because it contains a lot of code specific to my own uses.

There is quite a bit of work taking a product from personal use to distribution. I had to clean up the code quite a bit, taking out shorthand that I tend to use, so that somebody who wants to modify it can more easily understand what’s going on. I had already commented it quite well, but I had to add much more detail.

I had to write README, and INSTALL documents as well. Those took up quite a bit of time. Even though the script is fairly single-purpose, not everybody thinks as I do, so I had to write fairly detailed instructions.

Finally, I had to get the scripts section of my website up and running, so that I’d have a place to store it and other scripts I plan to release.

You can also get OpenCaptcha here, and on HotScripts.com. If you get a chance to try it out, let me know what you think of it.

Only 6 weeks after our family dog Kiley died, we had to have our cat Franklin put to sleep. He was 9 years old, and until a week ago seemed happy and healthy.

Frank’s lungs were beginning to fill with fluid, and that was causing him difficulty breathing. Unfortunately there wasn’t anything we could do to help the poor little guy. We just had to make sure he didn’t suffer any longer.

He was a great companion. If you had a lap, he liked you. Never before have I seen a cat that liked attention the way he did.

We’re going to miss him deeply.

I was getting pretty tired of the Wordpress theme that I was using. I had played around with changing fonts and colours in the style sheet, but I haven’t been happy with the design for quite some time, so I decided to make my own theme.

I wanted something clean looking, so I decided to ditch the 2-column layout that everybody with a blog seems to use. Instead, I put all of the sidebar information at the bottom of the page, and limited the number of posts that show up on the front page. People visit my site to read the latest post, so that’s what I focused on.

I still have some work to do though, so what you see isn’t the final product. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

I’ve been using Synergy at work for a few months now. I have two computers and limited desk space, so having 2 keyboards, and two mice was too much clutter for me. Synergy was the perfect solution.

It’s a software KVM, so you still need the second display, but I actually prefer it that way. The way it works is by TCP/IP. You run a server on one machine, and clients on all the others (you can have any number of machines linked together). The server holds information about the position of all the displays so that the mouse moves off one screen and onto the next just as it would if you were using dual displays.

Even better is the clipboard support. If I cut from one system, I can paste in another. The only thing I can’t do is drag windows between computers, which is easy to forget if you’re used to using multi-display systems.

The best thing though, is that Synergy is platform independent. You can use it on Windows, OS X, or Linux. You can configure Synergy to handle any difference there may be with keyboard support, and the clipboard works fine between platforms as well.

One more thing…it’s open source.

If anybody out there knows how to update a smart playlist that is selected at random, I’d really like to know. It seems that the only time you get random songs is when you first make the playlist. Do you have to add a condition that says “Not played in the last 7 days” or something like that to make it work? If so, that’s not exactly random.

Anyway, just complaining.