Monthly Archives: January 2005

HIP-CAPTCHA: Stop comment SPAM in 5 minutes (Updated)

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For a while I was thinking of adding a CAPTCHA to this blog but the comment spam was pretty low. It seemed easier to remove spam manually, than modify and re-compile .Text.

Last week the spam got silly, so I now use Miguel Jimenez’s HIP-CAPTCHA control:

No compilation of the .Text source is required! It is very simple to use and will only take you about five minutes to install. What that I hear some say? ‘But I don’t use .Text, what can I do to stop comment spam?’ Implementing Miguel’s control is done via a httphandler, and should work with any ASP.Net form.
The dll and instructions can be downloaded here:

http://blogs.clearscreen.com/migs/archive/2004/11/10/575.aspx

Thanks Miguel!!!


NON TECH: The Black Napkin Mystery

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In the USA I have noticed waiters at higher end restaurants often whip away the white napkins, leaving black ones in their place. This has been puzzling. It even got to the stage where I Googled ‘Black Napkin’ once, but still did not find an answer.

So for years this has been a mystery. Was it that I and my fellow diners look like messy eaters, or potential red-wine spillers?

Last night Shawn’s fiancé asked a waiter. Apparently it only happens if you are wearing dark clothes. Placing a white napkin on a black dress it could (horror of horrors) leave visible lint from white napkins; obviously that would lead to social exclusion from the trendy in-crowd.

So who invents these ideas? Has anyone ever seen the black napkin thing outside of the USA?

VirtualPC SP1 is out + how to run VirtualPC over RDP

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SP1 has been available since the 12th December 2004:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b07c9ef0-265a-4237-ae3b-25bc8937d40f&displaylang=en


It certainly makes virtual machines start faster and feel more snappy. Before upgrading remember to shut down all your virtual machines first otherwise they may not work after installing SP1.



A personal VPC bugbear was using VPC over RDP – the mouse was out of sync. Many newsgroup postings recommended all sorts of ideas relating to video card hardware acceleration. Well today I finally installed Virtual Machine Additions which solved the issue. The Machine Additions are on VPC’s action menu and is installed to virtual machines, not the client that runs VPC.


RDP and VPC is a great combo. Buying one of those thin client PC’s and moving this noisy (but fast) 64Bit box to my server ‘room’ is getting more tempting now I can use VPC over RDP.

Tech Calendar for Jan/Feb 2005

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This was more difficult because few groups are posting information on their 2005 meetings yet. Keep checking back as I will update it with more details every couple of weeks:



http://dotnetworkaholics.com/techcalendar/



Highlights for early 2005 are:

17th Jan – Keith Smith at the .Net Mobility Group

17th Feb – Free MSDN Event at Phipps Plaza

21st Feb – Shawn Wildermuth at the .Net Mobility Group



Updated: Rocky Lhotka will not be presenting at the January .Net User Group. Instead local uber-blogger Michael Earls will give the main presentation.