The rants and ravings of a Mac developer

I Love programming, Macs, the iPhone, iPad, Apps & iOS! In my spare time I like Programming in ExtJS, PHP, MySQL / SQLite3 and Apache - in other words a Real Geek's geek. I've tinkered around with programing for iOS in the not so distant past . During the day I work for Motorola Solutions in IT as BSA for our Export Compliance system JPMorgan's TradeSphere. At night I freelance program on the Mac & Web. I'm also a techie who likes Sci-Fi and Horror. Some of my favorite authors include Stephen King, William Gibson and Frank Herbert as well as his son Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson.

But my real passion is for Comic Book Collecting. My current freelance project is writing a web based application using ExtJS for collecting comics books. After I get the web application completed, I will be integrating some portion of the web application into a desktop client for the Mac through the use of web services for all data exchange & transaction. Eventually, the web site & Mac client would also include a social networking component as well as an iOS component.

I started collecting comic books as a kid when my grandfather passed away and we found my father's comic book collection when we were cleaning out my grandfather's basement. There were a number of early issues in that stash, such as Fantastic Four number one, The Amazing Spider-Man number one, number 22 of the Uncanny X-Men... and others. So needless to say, I was hooked.

After high school I stopped collecting - college, drinking and woman took priority (not necessarily in that order) over visiting the local comic book shop. Now that I have 2 kids of my own, I've gotten back into collecting.

reCAPTCHA - Protect your email address!

Was browsing Leo Laporte’s blog and went to the contact page to get his email address, and he had this really cool thing that prevents spammers & bots from harvesting your email address off your web page. Its called reCAPATCHA, and they have a full API as well as Plug-in for many web applications (WordPress, MediaWiki, etc.) and programing Languages (PHP, ASP.NET, Perl, Python, Ruby)…

If you don’t know, a CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine that the user is human, i.e., not a bot or another program. See Wikipedia for more info on CAPTCHAs.

Here’s a short description from the reCAPTCHA’s web site. 

reCAPTCHA is a freely available CAPTCHA implementation. It distinguishes humans from computers. This may be useful for:

  • A registration page for a forum or wiki.
  • A comment form.
  • Hiding information that could be useful to spammers (we recommend the reCAPTCHA Mailhide API for this).