Do I Cross?
I don’t know that this question was ever on the
deer’s mind, but it was steadily heading for the
road (and nearly on to the road) when I got this
picture.

The day after a mid-week holiday is always a bit on the unusual and pathetic order, if you ask me. I actually talked to a client of ours today on the phone for a bit, which was oddly nice because it’s been pretty quiet (and he’s a good dude). While I didn’t necessarily get a load of stuff done today, I did make some significant progress in the quest to refactor a portion of the application. Enough so that I’ve now developed enough of a pattern to make the remainder of the refactoring go more quickly.

Interestingly enough, I found several little bits of code that I’ve either removed completely (they were duplications or no longer in use) or significantly improved over the previous look. I’ve also been standardizing the look of the code for the many similar classes in the portion of the application in which I’m working right now. These were two goals I’d been working toward, and I’m fairly confident that I’ve accomplished them so far.

I’m still working in the light color (white) on black world right now, and it’s growing on me a bit, but I’m still not sure I’ll stick with it once the end of my current refactoring bit is complete. It works really quite well for refactoring (because you have to look at code differently (it appears differently) with the different colors), but I can only change the editor window color scheme. The remainder of the IDE (development environment) is still the more standard black on white. So to me it looks a little strange to have a big black window in the midst of several that aren’t in the same color scheme. As I noted several times now, we’ll see…

One incredibly awesome thing that broke up the run of the mill stuff today was the arrival of the SPAMALOT tickets in the mail. We are officially going now! It’s going to rock. So that made my day happy. 🙂

Moving to a more ironic note, yesterday’s post included a bit about CAPTCHAs. Interestingly enough, I had one of the most perverse (in a non-sexual way) form spam messages come through this morning. It would have been three printed pages worth of form spam. Unbelievably horrible.

So, I spent about an hour or so tonight correcting that issue (at least on one site). For this particular project, I was using the Asirra HIP/CAPTCHA from Microsoft in accomplishing this. I’m also looking at another more traditional CAPTCHA from Carnegie Mellon University which uses the traditional image with letters obscured, but chose Asirra because it was fairly straightforward to implement, didn’t require I sign up for an API key, and uses pictures of cats and dogs (asking you to identify all of the cats in a particular set) rather than the sometimes hard to read numbers and letters.

So we’ll see how that goes.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve really got to write about tonight, so I’m calling it a night and will write more next time…

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”
– H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927

–MZ