So, I want to make this more active, and actually something people might read (yes, yes, might read != actually read). Thus, I’d like to share some of the photos from my recent trip to Hawaii over the holiday break.
This is by far my favourite picture. The colours just make the jellyfish pop out and gives it an eerie feel. This jellyfish was floating around in a rotating tank with several others at the Waikiki Aquarium.

I headed out after work Wednesday, and as most of my trips start, it was already off on a bad foot; I left my cell phone at home.  Luckily, I had purchased a netbook specifically for this trip, a Eee PC 1005HA.  With it’s bluetooth capabilities, I was able to get a headset and use skype as my phone for the entire conference.

This was obviously not ideal, but made me realize how much we depend on our cell phones.  I could not accept incoming calls (well, I could through a chain of Google voice -> Gizmo -> Skype, but I did not have my netbook on all the time).  I had none of my contacts.  I was almost completely stranded.

I’ve heard the elder generations discuss how they didn’t have cell phones when they were young, but I wonder how they were able to deal with so little communication, non constant.  How were parents able to cope?

Well, enough about my random rant.

So, I finally have gotten around to creating an initial version of an idea that intrigued me a while ago.  Google was experimenting with a CAPTCHA where users needed to rotate a picture upright in order to prove they were not a bot.  While this solution would take more time than I intended to spend, I realized I could simplify the idea, and let users chose the upright image rather than rotate it themselves.  While not as strong against bots, a simple 4×4 grid would still give a 1/256 random chance of being correct, and a .4 guessing percentage is nothing to sneeze at.

So where else do I want to go with this?  Well, observant testers will realize that there is a Yahoo! API key field in the ACP.  This does nothing at the moment, but hopefully in the future will provide a way for admins to easily grab images from Flickr for use in their CAPTCHA.  That is one of the greatest weaknesses for image based CAPTCHAs; if everyone has the same library of images, bots will load that library and have no problem.  With the ability to grab uploaded, unique, images a bot would need to download all photos on Flickr in order to find the one that matches.  If they can do that, then we really are in trouble.

Use of this CAPTCHA is rather simple.  Images uploaded to the includes/captcha/plugins/imgrotate folder will be resized and used in CAPTCHAs immediately.  Only jpeg images are supported at the moment, and I have not decided whether to support more.  4 example images are included in this release, for easy testing, but in the final release will not be included for reasons above.

I hope people find this useful, and I would appreciate any comments you have about the project.

download: Rotate Image Captcha for phpBB 3.0.6 v0.1 (321.71KB) added: 15/06/2009 clicks: 162 description: A CAPTCHA that has users select the upright image from a set of images in order to determine if they are human. This is an initial release with basic functionality, but limited in features and design

First off is from my trip to gasworks park last Tuesday.

I will make this more clear later, but I would like tostate that theme images are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Licens.  This allows for redistrobution, but no commercial work or modifications to this image.  This is not to say I am against sharing these rights. Entities interested in using my work for commercial business, or would lke access to higher resolution images are welcome to contact me personally at ckwalsh *AT* u dot washington dot edu.