Until it’s gone.. or stops working for no reason.

How good is the Spam filtering on GMail? Really fricking good, that’s how good. At a given moment, I’ve got around 10k in the spam box, and it tends to be 99.999% effective in only removing the things it should. So good in fact, that I suggest that if you aren’t using it already, you should at the very least bounce your email through GMail on it’s way somewhere else. Anyway, sales pitch over.

For some reason, the GMail spam filtering stopped working yesterday and for most of this morning. My inbox was absolutley overloaded with utter junk. It really is the difference between email being useful, and being so overwhelmed with crud that you seriously consider selecting all and deleting the lot..

So, thanks for fixing it so my email works again. I wish it wasn’t the case, but certainly for my email address, without industrial strength spam filtering it would be utterly useless.

Loads of speculation recently around the press event at which Apple launched a bunch of new iPods. While these will no doubt go on to continue to change the world like their predecessors, I don’t think that they are really what Apple needs..

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While I like to read about what people are up to with CSS, for some reason the article on Sitepoint about replicating table layouts with a bunch of markup and CSS features which will be implemented in IE8, just seemed wrong somehow.

Isn’t the point of CSS to take markup which is semantic – markup which means something – and turn it into something which has asthetic. Using more markup to replicate tables seems a little bit backwards.. perhaps it’s just me..

We recently upgraded the image captcha solution on imoc to use ReCaptcha, instead of the built in phpBB driven one.

We did have a fairly serious problem with adult weblinks being posted on the board by automated phpBB bots, which was a minor annoyance compared to when they worked out how to post images of their wares.. (not to mention the waste of volunteer moderating time).

So, in the space of half an hour or so, I added ReCaptcha to the site. Result – no automated spam since we did it, really, really impressed.

Which is what makes it all the more depressing when you read things like Inside India’s CAPTCHA solving economy (via WebmasterWorld).

No CAPTCHA can survive a human that’s receiving financial incentives for solving it, and with an army of low-wagedIndia CAPTCHA breakers human CAPTCHA solvers officially in the business of “data processing” while earning a mere $2 for solving a thousand CAPTCHA’s,

Oh joy. Although thankfully, IMOC must be low enough to not warrant it.. yet..

Never has so much been owed by so many, to so few.

Well, maybe once before – but those behind the scene coders who have developed the GNU toolset and operating system have changed the world in their own way, and this year, the project is 25 years old. So, happy birthday GNU!

(via BoingBoing)

Now Honda are entering the game with their Prius competitor, it could get good.

Well, it could.

Ok, the technology will be interesting anyway..

Competition drives things forward. Even though IE still commands a large share of the market, it’s glacial slow-progression forwards means that even non-techy users are looking for something else to surf the web with. Until now, people have had the choice between Firefox, Safari or Opera.. (stats).

Now they have another choice – Google Chrome.

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Caught this looking backwards up the motorway this evening, fantastic looking sky. Almost makes me feel bad that I don’t have a rear view mirror.

Almost..