The cheapest way I’ve found to do anti-spam, in terms of developer time, is to check for javascript. Crawler spam bots generally do not have javascript enabled, so if you use javascript to add a hidden element to a form, then most spam crawlers will miss it. Of course this doesn’t stop anybody making a concerted effort, but then, very little will. Here’s my super-simple method:

$(document).ready(function(){
  elem = $('<input type="hidden" name="antispam" value="somethingsimple" />')
  $('#form').after(elem)
})

Then, in whatever you’re using to handle the form input (Sinatra, php, etc) just check for the existence of that variable. First found this method to be mad effective when I was doing Wordpress sites, and the WP Antispam used this to good effect.

We’re pleased today to announce our upcoming Screencast series, and we’re excited to announce that Oscar-winning actor Christopher Walken has agreed to narrate our screencasts, which we’re calling “Walken on Rails.”

Walken on Rails // Collective Idea

This is awesome. Like. Christopher… Walken.

THERE’S NO NICE way to say this, but it needs to be said: video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb. And they’re not just dumb in the gleeful, winking way that a big Hollywood movie is dumb; they’re dumb in the puerile, excruciatingly serious way that a grown man in latex elf ears reciting an epic poem about Gandalf is dumb. Aside from a handful of truly smart games, tentpole titles like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Call of Duty: Black Ops tend to be so silly and so poorly written that they make Michael Bay movies look like the Godfather series.

The Most Dangerous Gamer - Magazine - The Atlantic

Time for a rant

If you think Skyrim is about the narrative or the characters, you have missed everything that Jonathan Blow is trying to get at. The characters, the plot, the sidequests - they’re there to create a background against which you, as the player, get to express yourself. And it’s one of the richest and most nuanced backgrounds in any video game to date. The central thesis of the game is expression, and the very point of it being in a video game gives many people the freedom to express themselves in ways they wouldn’t in real life. Gay kids can get gay married in Skyrim even though coming out to their parents might get them thrown out of home. Or a good person can try on an identity as an evil overlord, and see how the amusement suits them. It’s not about wish fulfillment - although it can be used that way - but it is about changing your thoughts, habits, and values within a microcosm.

Mr. Blow may or may not agree with my analysis (and I agree that Black Ops is not exactly highbrow art), but the condescension and dismissive attitude in this article is so palpable that it solidifies into a congealed mess of hatred. Which makes an excellent lubricant while the author is blowing Braid’s creator.

The article spends hundreds of words brushing off other games as stupid and sophomoric, with virtually no counterexamples. Marc ten Bosch’s Miegakure notwithstanding - after all, ten Bosch knows Jonathan personally, so maybe he’s within the halo of Jonathan’s smartness, rather than a second datum pointing to a corpus of smart and artistic games and developers.

There are no mentions in the article of the plethora of games which might be considered artistically meaningful, aside from brushing off Flower as a Thomas Kinkaide painting. And let’s be honest, if we’re going to go there, I’m ready to write off Braid as David Fincher’s The Game. But in a nearly 8,000 word article, not one mention of Notch and his synthesis of creative construction? Not one sentence about Tale of Tales The Path, which is also about noticing things? No mention of other eccentric auteurs like Jeff Minter?

But no; those things wouldn’t fit the narrative. Games are dumb. Movies are smart. Literature is smart. Classical music is smart, and it doesn’t matter how theoretical or mathematical Dream Theater got with Octavarium; they are rock and therefore, dumb. The author is smart, and you, dear Atlantic reader, probably are not.

Half the article is spent building up how smart Jonathan Blow is. He listens to classical literature audiobooks. He does Tai-chi. His childhood was spent learning self denial. He never wastes time – much like characters on Star Trek. He is the lone rebel against the crusading army of dumb that is the video game industry.

And what do we get at the end of the article? This gem:

Blow remained silent.

“Does that make sense?,” I asked.

“Yep, yep.”

“So?”

He smiled.

“Well, I would say that I would not be frustrated at all with that interpretation.”

After spending 6,500 words or so talking up how smart and well-read and zen-like Jonathan is, we arrive at the climax of the article: the author gets him. The author understands the deep mysteries Jonathan was trying to get at, and is therefor as smart and well-read and zen-like as Jonathan. The rest of the article is just falling actions.

Look, I like Jonathan. He has a lot of smart, thought-provoking things to say about game development. I liked Braid - it made me think, hard, and actually drew some emotion out of me. Pointing out that Jonathan is doing something artistic is good. Fellating him with 7,000 words of praise as an artistic demigod and condemning all other games as hopelessly dumb is probably the wrong path to take, though. The truth might be a bit more nuanced than that.

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

PHP: a fractal of bad design - fuzzy notepad

Jesus. This is actually an amazingly long list of gripes, most of which I’m familiar with from previous jobs. I still think PHP is a fine beginner language. It was my first intro to making dynamic web sites, and I turned out okay. But I wouldn’t want to use it in production any more.

Method: ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Array::Access#forty_two

Heh.

Project Glass - Google+

So Google wants to make the scifi glasses we’ve seen in every futurist scifi novel. Quick summary of how this might actually work:

All kidding aside, there’s something I feel people are kind of missing about the Google Glass video. Viticci has some smart questions, and Joe Stracci calls them out on the “out of the way” shenanigans and Gruber agrees.

What I want to know is: what do these glasses do that current mobile phones do not? Are they just a convenient way of accessing the functionality you can already pull out of your pocket? I can’t imagine paying several hundred dollars just to avoid pulling a glowing rectangle out to do something. I mean, taking a photo requires reaching up and touching the glasses - is that really vastly more convenient than pulling out a cell phone?

I think there’s room for future technology here, but Google’s video misses it. Imagine if the camera were always running - constantly recording video, with say a rolling 30-minute backlog. When you see something amazing, like a cute puppy or a funny mishap or a fight between friends, you hit a button and it saves the current backlog to a cloud server somewhere. Video you didn’t know you needed to record, that you wouldn’t have taken any action to record normally, is now yours for review and cataloging. You could do the same for conversations, with a Google Voice-like transcription recording the last 30 minutes of conversation you’ve had. When you need to remember something - important dates, travel tips, web sites - just hit save, and it backs up to your cloud.

Augmented reality directions are cool. Augmented reality with names hovering over people’s heads would be awesome (I suck at remembering names, especially at parties). Augmented reality games would be amazing. Halting State by Charles Stross has the best use of AR glasses I’ve read, and if you ever want wacky-but-plausible futuristic ideas, Mr. Stross is absolutely full of them. But Google, I think, hasn’t seen the greater vision yet. Their video is fairly pedestrian in comparison.

JQuery Cycle Plugin

Looked at a bunch of jquery carousel / cycling / rotating banner / etc thingies yesterday and today. This one is simple, unobtrusive, and generally not crap. Color me impressed.

Bought Pixelmator on the Mac App Store yesterday. This is actually my second time buying it - I think I got the previous version in a MacHeist, but I wanted to get the new version from the App Store so I wouldn’t have to manage passwords, registrations, or backing it up. So far, I’ve been really impressed.

Unlike Photoshop, it opens in less than five seconds. On my work machine it’s nearly instant. So far the range of tools has been perfect for doing images for some static web pages I’ve been working on - cropping with constraints, slicing with guides, and intelligently choosing an export format for the web have all been a breeze. I’ve barely even had to look at shortcuts.

Granted, I’m no illustrator, so I haven’t done anything fancy with bezier curves and layers. But for $30 you could hardly ask for a better web graphics tool.

How to completely remove Office for Mac 2011

This is why iOS has been so successful, even with its draconian sandboxing. Draconian sandboxing means you don’t have an 11-step process to uninstall a word processor, spreadsheet app, presentation app, and dozens of bizarre programs and settings I never wanted.

No 3 above was my article - reposted on Heyzap’s dev blog. Getting a real discussion going on Hacker News has been a goal of mine for a while. I’m no Dustin Curtis, but getting some feedback from smart people like wycats was an pretty cool.

Thanks, everybody!