The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Little green bunnies

“Alba”, the green fluorescent bunny, is an albino rabbit. This means that, since she has no skin pigment, under ordinary environmental conditions she is completely white with pink eyes. Alba is not green all the time. She only glows when illuminated with the correct light. When (and only when) illuminated with blue light (maximum excitation at 488 nm), she glows with a bright green light (maximum emission at 509 nm). She was created with EGFP, an enhanced version (i.e., a synthetic mutation) of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammalian cells (including human cells) than the original jellyfish gene.

Alba, the fluorescent bunny

Ah, leave it to the French to concoct a gazillion-word manifesto on the artistic and social æsthetics of mutant green bunnies in French culture (and I don't mean a yogurt based sauce either).

And oh, by the way, the mutant green bunny actually exists.

Testing a reverse captcha

Back when you could sign up to get email notifications of updates around here, I noticed some spammers were attempting to abuse the script, and after playing around with it, I decided to scrap that feature, but later mused on using a reverse captcha to keep spammers at bay.

But while I dont' have comments, I do invite comments on another website I control. And that form is now getting spammed (and like my former Obligatory Email Notification, the only one who sees anything is me).

Heavily.

And when they're not hawking 3″ mortgage extensions, I get incomprehensible stuff like:

Name
embohette
Email
gorgiovgit@list.ru
Comment
<a href="http://salihome.info/show/index.html">Three hip-hop artists have key parts in American Gangster.</a><br> <a href="http://oscines.cn/myspace-layout/index.html">Andre 3000 takes a turn with Charlize Theron in Battle in Seattle.</a><br> <a href="http://myspace-layout.tripod.com/">Robert De Niro and Al Pacino reunite next year in the crime drama…</a><br> <a href="http://rigolu.cn/sex-portal/main.html">MORE big screen… </a>
Submit
Panic

So I decided to put my “reverse captcha” theory to the test. I added a non-displaying <TEXTAREA> to the form, and if it's changed in any way, I ignore the submission. I'm curious to see how long it takes the spammers to adapt, if any bother.

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