reCAPTCHA – Combining Distributed Problem Solving with a Web Service

May 30th, 2007

I ran into an interesting project this morning called reCAPTCHA. In the spirit of distributed computing solutions, such as folding@home, it tackles a difficult problem by splitting it up and farming the pieces out. What makes this interesting is that instead of having computers solve the problem, people do.
ReCAPTCHA actually tries to solve [...]

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php|tek Slides

May 19th, 2007

Well, php|tek is over. It was a great conference and I’m really glad I went. This was my first PHP conference.
One of my main goals was to meet some of the folks at php|architect. I’ve been writing the Test Pattern column for them for over a year now. I was finally [...]

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Let Your Properties be Properties

May 8th, 2007

There is a coding pattern that I see (and have used) in PHP code that defines generic methods on a class for setting and getting properties.
 
function set($name, $value);
function get($name);
 Google code search for examples
Some times there are some ancillary methods to deal with unsetting, checking for existence, setting via an array, or dealing with references in [...]

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Where do you get your Wi-Fi?

May 6th, 2007

Sometimes you just have to get out of the house or out of the office. And some of those times, you have to use the internet as well.
I’ve collected a (short) list of places around town that have Wi-Fi. I usually use the Wi-Fi at a small local coffee shop. They are [...]

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