Now, the concept is certainly good.  Have a program automatically check for new versions so that people can keep up to date.  But the fundamental flaw I find is that this check always takes place when you first start the program.  At this point, you're trying to use the program immediately and don't want to wait for it to download and install an update first.  So I always cancel out and never get the needed updates.  So the notification turns into nothing more than a nuisance.

So I thought of a solution, but it would be quite a feat to pull off, and it's not without problems.  What we need is an update agent that checks for updates behind the scenes and informs the user in a non-intrusive way based on how the user set it up.  A single program that will support checking for updates for multiple products.  That way the user would have a central place to view and optionally install these updates, or could configure them to automatically install when that program is not in use.  No more annoying pop-ups when you're trying to use the software.

But here's where the difficulty of such a solution comes in:  As far as I know, there is no standard for distributing updates.  To implement a standard, it would require the cooperation of the vendor for each piece of software.  The other option would be to make the program extensible so that anyone can write a plug-in for it to add support for a particular piece of software.  Now I could certainly write a framework to support this in my sleep and use duck typing for cross-version plug-in support, that would not be a challenge.  The problem is that I can't possibly write a plug-in for every piece of software in existence, or even most.  I'm not exactly good at promoting standards either.

But I'm wondering if I should make the solution for myself anyway, and implement plug-ins for the software that I use, and make it available for free and see what happens...

There was a lot of negative hype surrounding Vista during its development.  It seemed that I heard nothing but bad things about it.  So naturally, I wasn't very excited for its release.  But being impartial as I am, I was willing to give it a chance.  So I asked some people who have used Vista some simple questions:  What advantage does Vista have over XP?  What are the new features besides the spiffy graphics?  The fact is that no one could give me a straight answer.  So for me, it wasn't worth spending that much money for something that really didn't seem to have any benefit.

Well, being an IT professional, I managed to get my hands on a free copy of Vista Ultimate.  Now that cost was not a factor, I installed it on my laptop.  Just as with XP SP2, I had to make numerous tweaks to get the interface right, a new one for Vista being disabling the annoying and useless "User Account Control", of course.  Besides that, I had no problems with hardware compatibility or anything else.  In fact, I made quite a surprising discovery...

Vista is fast.  I thought the extra graphical effects would slow down the interface, but in fact, it's significantly more responsive.  Programs load and close much faster.  I've even experienced faster file transfer rates over my home network.

Microsoft just might have made a believer out of me.  And if you think about it, it makes sense.  XP has been around for over 6 years, and has since been hacked to pieces and bloated with thousands of updates.  Vista seems fresh and light-weight in comparison, with many of its sub-systems rewritten to work well with modern hardware.

So why all the fuss?  Do people not like change?  Are they afraid they won't be able to do as many illegal things anymore?  Are they upset that Vista won't work with their ancient hardware?  Welcome to the world of computers.  Things change.  Get with the program and upgrade your stone-age Pentium.

I used to agree with people who criticize Microsoft's business tactics.  What I realized, though, is that all of Microsoft's competitors are doing all the same things, and nobody points the finger at them and complains.  Microsoft gets picked on because they're the biggest.  I, for one, do not use Microsoft's products because I am somehow conned into it or because it is the most popular standard.  For instance, I used Java and IBM WebSphere and Eclipse for quite some time at one job I had.  Yet, the reason I prefer .NET, C#, and Visual Studio is because they are, in my opinion and for very specific reasons, better.  So yes, Microsoft is a formidable foe for competitors because they make really, really good software, and Vista is no exception.

So in conclusion, don't knock Vista until you've tried it.

Come on, people, seriously.  You'd think that since Windows became a stand-alone operating system starting with Windows 95 some 13 years ago, they would have figured this out by now.  Why haven't any of the Windows releases since then incorporated being able to reconfigure the operating system without ever restarting?

Now it used to be that the whole "You have to restart your computer for these changes to take effect" thing was just a mild nuisance.  Unless it involved drivers, you could just click "No, I'll restart my computer later" and what do you know?  You don't even have to restart your computer half the time.

Has this improved at all in recent years?  No, in fact, it has gotten worse!  There are now artificial measures intentionally put in place to force users to restart.  For instance, after installing Windows updates, you will be prompted every 10 minutes or so that you have to restart until you do.  Or when a program is installed, it will not let you install another program until your computer is restarted.

Device drivers aside, as a developer for the past 10 years, I have never encountered a scenario where any installation step involved in installing a program could not possibly be done without restarting.  Why are users still being required to restart?  Is it because developers are too lazy to figure out how to enable the program to function without restarting?  Is it a "just in case" measure to reduce technical support calls?  Or maybe it has just become tradition.  In any case:

If your installation process requires restarting, your installation process was poorly designed and needs to be reworked.

This is, of course, unless restarting is necessitated by some external factor, in which case, said external factor (e.g. Windows) is a product of a poor design and I hope the designers (e.g. Microsoft) gets grilled for their gross negligence until they correct it.

Home users may simply find this annoying, but when you talk about servers, many of them must be kept up during certain hours, which means that some poor technician has to come in early, stay late, or spend part of his weekend performing updates to the servers, or else the company has to suffer a loss in productivity or even business during the time that the server is being restarted.  This is unacceptable when there is no reason why installing a program cannot be done without restarting.

For those who don't know what a CAPTCHA is, it's a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.  It's those images that web sites sometimes display that contain distored characters or words that you are required to enter as text in order to verify that you are, in fact, human and not a computer program.

I've always liked the idea behind CAPTCHA, being very anti-SPAM myself.  But what constantly bugs me are the dozens of different kinds of CAPTCHAs I encounter that seem so easily defeatable.  For one thing, they make the text a totally different color from the background so that it could easily be isolated from it.  Second, they usually barely distort the text.  You know, I haven't the slightest clue how OCR (optical character recognition) works, but I bet I could write from scratch a program that could defeat 90% of the CAPTCHAs I've seen on the web.  But instead of egotistically trying to prove my programming prowess, I decided to design my idea of what an undefeatable CAPTCHA would be.  So I just quickly wrote up a rough draft.

Basically, I would think that a program to defeat CAPTCHAs would try to find patterns in the image that resemble characters, right?  My idea is that a CAPTCHA should not have any patterns or follow any rules that could be programmed against.  It should be completely random.  But how could even a human recognize the image if it were completely random?  Probability. 

The idea is that every pixel in the image is a random color; however, the random number generator is designed such that there is a slightly higher probability of the random color being darker where the text is.  So any color can appear anywhere in the image, but where the text is, it's a little more likely to be a dark color, even though it could even still be white there.  Humans can easily pick up on this, because our advanced brains are infinitely more intelligent than any software ever could be.  In fact, the entire makeup of our brain is about making connections even between seemingly unrelated things, whereas computers have to deal with descrete values.

Ok, so I guess this algorithm technically creates a pattern.  But it's the most random, least pattern-like pattern I could come up with.  Anyways, I bet you're just dying to see an image of what my algorithm generated...  Here it is:

It can easily be fine-tuned.  Plus this is a draft.  I would definitely add some distortion of the text before applying the color distortion.  In any case, it may seem easy to read or even defeatable, but look at it extremely close.  No two pixels next to each other are the same color, there are equally dark pixels in the background as the foreground and equally light pixels in the foreground as the background.

Please, I encourage you to open this image in your favorite graphics program and try to isolate the text from the static.  Try using software to defeat this CAPTCHA.  I'm curious to see how easily this can be defeated.

Comments?  Criticism?

I have become aware that comments are not working on this site.  I was hoping to fix this quickly, but unfortunately, it may involve switching hosting providers.  In any case, I will post as soon as this is working.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Though I haven't posted in a while since I've been busy, I am still working on the duck typing project.  I have at least one bug fix and I'm working on support for generic methods.  You can expect another release soon.  So stay tuned...

My custom web site was short-lived, I guess.  It has been replaced with this blog.  This should help me keep things up to date.  Also, people can leave comments easier so I can actually get some feedback.  And, of course, developers can subscribe through RSS feed.