reCAPTCHA

A CAPTCHA image:


I read about this amazing bit of technology today. It's to do with CAPTCHA, the challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. Classically the CAPTCHA image text is entered into a form when signing up for a website (to prevent spammers, etc, using computers to sign up millions of accounts automatically).

A CAPTCHA image being used signing up for Google:


Essentially there's a problem in the academic world with converting current physical texts (books, papers, scrolls, etc) into digital media. The most advanced text-scanning software is called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) but still can only accurately read about 90% of the words. Around one word in ten is mis-read by OCR. As there are around 100 million books waiting to be digitized and the only way to accurately decipher these words is with human intervention, this is a big problem.

OCR mis-reading words:


The ingenious solution the guys at OCR have come up with is called reCAPTCHA. It puts the undecipherable words into CAPTCHA images for website sign-ups. To double-check the authenticity of the response to the CAPTCHA check they put the image out to two different people and if both the responses match - bingo.

A reCAPTCHA image:


With this solution the guys using OCR are able to decipher around one million words per day - saving around three thousand man hours per day. And that's awesome.

Original article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7023627.stm
CAPTCHA on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha

OSS vs MS

I know what the problem is - connecting to my databases is unbelievably slow and then hangs when performing any tasks. The problem is that everything is proprietary Microsoft software.

The PC is running a version of Windows that I now know is not legit (it will be soon, but isn't right now). I'm in the process of getting it all sorted but I inherited this computer and it came with a dodgy install that I wasn't initially aware of.

This means that I can't run the latest version of the Microsoft database software (SQL Server 2005) and the previous version is buggy and causing this problem. This is really annoying. I've patched and updated the computer as best I can (in fact the latest update I can make is being installed now) but I'm not sure this will solve the problem. It's really getting on my tits and slowing down my work spending a day getting everything sorted.

I'm building a workaround on another computer but this is all woefully convoluted and a real pain in the arse. To have the separate pieces of software reliant on each other in this way is really annoying and frankly not good on behalf of the software builders.

What's more frustrating is that I've been playing with my new Ubuntu Linux computer and none of this is an issue. Everything's so open and easily updated as well as being free from any costs. Plus I'm not trying to get tied down into any sort of agreements on how (or how not) I'm supposed to use my own computer. There's definitely change afoot in the world of computers in a big way and it's manifesting itself in only 1/4 of the screens in our office now showing Microsoft products (and I'm a MS developer!). The majority are Macs but to be honest I've been looking at them and thinking about installing Ubuntu on one of those as well.

Yesterday I set Windows file sharing on the Macs so now I can switch files between OS X, Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux machines at the click of a button. Happily all the computers are fully integrated now and getting all this sorted has been in the most part really easy. Ubuntu was the easiest, then the Macs a close second but a way distant third was the PC. (Ubuntu uses Samba to share which comes pre-installed and pre-configured, Mac OS X uses its Windows File Sharing utility that you just switch on, with Windows you have to go crawling around network connections and user accounts to get it working as you want). I'm a happy geek.

So now it's time to put the plan to get my Microsoft workaround in place, it's not massively elegant but I've gone past caring - it just needs to work frankly. Hopefully soon the OSS (Open Source Software) guys will build a module that translates proprieatary MS SQL databases into MySQL (OSS) and also a query analyzer that translates MS SQL queries into MySQL queries. This should mean that I can run an ASP emulator like ChiliSoft as well as the proposed module and move all the code and projects onto a non-Microsoft platform. That'll save everyone an immense amount of money frankly.

I hope it gets rid of this rising tension too.