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Archives for May 2021

What Do You Think? Will this Be the Death of CAPTCHA?

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I’ll admit, I “ugh” every time I am served up a CAPTCHA. Is this the CAPTCHA killer that will rid the word of my “ughs?” Well, at least those “ughs?” 🙂

Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness
An experiment that uses hardware security keys (like a YubiKey) to replace CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: if a real human is sitting at their keyboard or uses their phone, they can touch their security key’s button or bring it near their phone to demonstrate that they are human.

A Quick Word About HostGator

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HostGator splash pageLast year I had some trouble with a web hosting provider. Although I paid for their more (I think most) expensive shared hosting plan, the kept complaining I was hitting limits. I did everything I could to reduce resource usage (and did bring it down by turning off back-ups, blocking IPs, and even removing at least one site), but you have to understand that I just dabble on the web. This blog may have the most traffic, but it only has double-digit views each day. (Although, I think my Bowflex C6 Indoor Cycle review may have almost hit 400 views one day.) If I was butting up against limits, it wasn’t from popularity. 🙂

Either way, this unnamed provider basically was extorting me to move to a much more expensive VPS solution, which made no sense since I am a dabbler, not a serious web content provider. (Extorting me in the sense that they were going to shut down my service.)

Enter HostGator. All I can say is that I couldn’t be happier. Within my budget I was able to sign up for their Cloud Business hosting, which is significantly faster than the old host and the second web hosting provider I have. They provide all the same “unlimited” features we’ve grown to expect from these less extensive all-you-can-eat offerings, but without taking a hit on speed, having my WordPress back-ups (via the Duplicator plugin) fail, difficult DNS configuration, etc. They have none of the issues I had (and have) with other companies. [Read more…] about A Quick Word About HostGator

Power BI Nibble #3: Showing the Refresh Time

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This week’s Power BI Nibble is about showing a refresh date/time, with the bonus of how to control the time zone it is shown for.

Plus, some advice on its usage (e.g. generally you shouldn’t).

Although you can watch the video below, please visit it on the Nibbles Wiki for more written advice, code samples, etc.:

Power BI Nibble No. 3: Showing the Refresh Time - Nibbles Wiki
How do show a refresh time in Power BI, including controlling the time zone it is displayed in...

So you want to watch it here, eh? 🙂

Are Shared Libraries Bad?

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Counterintuitive IT™ logo This e-mail response from Linus Torvalds (think: Linux kernel) is worth a read if you do any programming with shared libraries (he comes out against them):

Subject: Re: Very slow clang kernel config ..

On Fri, Apr 30, 2021 at 8:33 PM [EDITED OUT] <[EDITED OUT]@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Yes, it’s intentional. Dynamic linking libraries from other packages is
> the Fedora policy[1], and clang and llvm are separate packages (in Fedora).

Side note: I really wish Fedora stopped doing that.

Shared libraries are not a good thing in general. They add a lot of
overhead in this case, but more importantly they also add lots of
unnecessary dependencies and complexity, and almost no shared
libraries are actually version-safe, so it adds absolutely zero
upside.

Although never as my primary job, as a programmer, I always thought shared libraries were good. So, at least for me, Torvald’s advice is counterintuitive.

Sharing Truth

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Leo Tolstoy book coverGreat point:

People very often do not accept the truth, because they do not like the form in which the truth is presented to them.

Great advice:

If you know the truth, or if you think that you know the truth, try to pass it on to the others, as simply as you can, along with the feeling of love for those persons to whom you pass it.

— A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Peter Sekirin)

(Cross-posted on my Nibbles Ninja blog.)

Just Do It

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Book coverI’ll be up front, I am not a fan of Nike (for multiple reasons). However, as this quote from a devotional I read from John C. Maxwell implicitly notes, their “Just do it” tag line is wise:

The trick to acting on your goals is getting started. President Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked, “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” That’s good advice. You don’t have to be perfect; you only need to make progress. Or as the Chinese proverb asserts, “Be not afraid of going slowly; be only afraid of standing still.”

— The Maxwell Daily Reader: 365 Days of Insight to Develop the Leader Within You and Influence Those Around You by John C. Maxwell (image from Amazon)