Category: Technology

My boss Melissa plays a lot of golf. She sent me some photos of her local golf course at Mullumbimby, it’s a beautiful spot. Almost made me want to take up golf.

The photos were for the Club’s new web site. We set up a very simple pages-only WordPress powered site which Melissa will keep up to date with all the latest information.

I added some extra blue colorisation to the header photo in Photoshop, to help bring out the beautiful hills in the background, making a nice contrast with the rich green turf on the course.

For the site we used a very nice, clean templated design by Bernie from the WordPress themes viewer site.

Have you ever filled out a form on the Web with a “verification” type field, where one of the fields requires you to decipher some odd looking letters and/or numbers? This is the technology of CAPTCHA, which endeavors to foil spambots with a randomly generated image only human eyes can decipher. Key in the wrong letters or numbers, and you have to try another combination (and another) until you get it right.

The smart people at reCAPTCHA have shown that with this technology it is possible to kill two birds with one stone. As well as slowing down spammers, reCAPTCHA harnesses the skill of humans to decipher blocks of digitally unreadable OCR text.

OCR text is text that has been scanned (say, from a book) into a digital format which is then translated word for word by Optical Character Recognition software. It saves a LOT of typing!

The problem has always been the accuracy of the translation. Some words can be difficult to translate if for example the print is faint, or there are stray marks. The human mind can distinguish the shapes of letters and other characters far more easily than software (nice to know we still have our uses).

There are a lot of books and texts being digitally converted for public access over the Internet, and if you’ve ever had to struggle through an academic text which has been rendered through OCR you will appreciate the value of quality assurance!

reCAPTCHA works by offering two randomly generated words, one has already been deciphered so this is used to verify you as human, not spam. The other is a word that OCR software has been unable to translate – so YOU translate it. Check it out! http://recaptcha.net/

Apologies for the gratuitous use of “2.0”. Being a web-head it is tempting to apply this term to anything that is an improvement over an older version (it all began with Web 2.0).

In the U.S.A., a new typeface has been developed to make road signs clearer, and comparing the before/after shots in this New York times article by Joshua Yaffa attests to its effectiveness. The signage is clearer, and less time spent squinting at road signs to work out what they say can only be a good thing.

Not only are the signs clearer, an added benefit is they also halve your mileage as the above example shows..

As a follow up to my post last week about people paying others to “level” them in role-playing games, this news item came up today – in the last financial year Australians spent $1 billion on games software and hardware!

According to a report, the average age of a gamer in this country is 28, and players are found in all walks of life – it’s not just kids anymore. And the games are not all coming from overseas – Australia’s game industry is growing with over 40 companies employing over 2500 people. The industry is pushing for the same level of rating standards, tax breaks and funding enjoyed by other local entertainment industries such as film and television.

External links:
Billion Dollar Baby – posted by Jason Hill

I’m no gamer so this seems incredible to me, but there is a demand for people to play multiplayer online role-playing games on behalf of others who don’t have the time. The idea is to build status and “experience points” for their game character without the hard slog, by paying someone else to do it.

The Gamer Revolution documentary profiles a busy mother who outsourced her game character to a company in Rumania. She chose the level she wanted to be at, paid her money, and the company logged into her account and played the game around the clock to build up her character’s experience level.

It’s called “power-levelling” and one of the comments from the doco is that it is creating a new time economy for poorer countries to capitalise on the faster-paced lifestyles of Western societies. However it creates certain issues with the gaming companies, who say the practice is a security risk and against their terms of service; and the other players themselves, who view it as a weak move on the part of the player who pays someone else to “level” their character.

In the end, isn’t playing games all about having fun? these people are taking it wa-aay too seriously.

External links

• Gamer Revolution Youtube Clip (thanks to Helen in my NET12 class)
• Outsourcing your ‘Warcraft’ skills, Feb 2007 article on CNet
• Blog entry on The power-levelling industry by game design Raph Koster
• Wikipedia entry on experience points and power levelling
• Gamer Revolution page on ABC TV site
• ABC Message Board discussion about the documentary

Today I walked away from a web programming job I’d taken on a few weeks ago. It was for a family owned business, who had been referred to me by another customer.

Initial contact was made by the wife, who sent me a copy of their brochure with the products they wanted to sell. Shopping cart site I thought – lots of products, streamlined shopping process – Zen Cart customisation, easy.

We had a meeting, which I didn’t think went terribly well. I didn’t hit it off with the husband. He has a blunt manner which immediately put me on the defensive, he’d seen at least one other site I worked on and told me he didn’t like it. Nearly every time we spoke after that I would get off the phone fuming, kicking myself for letting it get under my skin.

Last week, after putting together a basic framework on how I thought the site would work, things came to a head. The man picked it to pieces and explained how he wanted it done. To me, the way he wanted it didn’t make a lot of sense, I thought it would be very confusing for customers. We discussed it till we were blue in the face, then I put H on the phone to try and provide a point of view from a customer perspective. The man has never shopped online, which may explain why he couldn’t understand what I was doing, but was adamant about the way he wanted to do it.

Finally I agreed to another meeting, as the man felt he wasn’t getting through to me over the phone. I tried to keep an open mind and see things from his point of view, but the crux of the matter is we couldn’t agree in principle on how to do the site. I foresaw many hours of work for something that I didn’t think would be successful.

I was honest with him, I told him it was turning into something I didn’t want to take on. So we agreed to end it, he is going to find another programmer and I wished him good luck. It may well be that he will end up getting what he wants, and it is successful. It will come down to selecting the right person for the job most likely.

Perhaps I SHOULD have done what he wanted, instead of being so fixed in my ideas. But on the other hand, there has been a little voice inside all along, telling me that this job would be full of problems. The rapport was not there and this made for poor communication and lack of trust. I think ultimately I have made the right decision and this client will be happier with another programmer.