Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

Lots of sites have CAPTCHA “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” those warped letters and numbers you have to enter to register at some web sites or post comments on blogs. A computerworld article describes how spammers have programs that can now defeate them. It only succeeds 8%-13% of the time. But when you have a bunch of computers trying that is good enough. So spam coming from Microsoft, Yahoo and Google mail accounts is climbing.

But a company has come up with a Image based version. They alter the color and contrast on different sections of pictures. Then make the user pick a caption for a picture that has been overlaid with lines. Currently they believe only humans will be able to succeed at both tasks.

Recently I downloaded Yahoo! Autosync version 1.0.4.9 so I could put my Outlook calendar on Yahoo! and share it with the secretary at the office. It worked great at first — but then stopped performing as advertised — saying it was timing out when trying to communicate with the server.

Then when I would load my calendar at “http://calendar.yahoo.com” it would give me an error. Error 999.

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For several years I have been keeping my current files on an SD card synchronized with files on two different computers. Early on I tried to keep track of what I’d changed and copy the files using Windows Explorer. Wow — that got old, not to mention confusing, in a hurry.

I began to look for an application that would let me sync a folder without giving it a lot of thought. Initially I used something called Allway Sync, as it was presented as a free file sync via USB. Well, the free version only permitted you to do a few syncs each week. I did many syncs each week — sometimes several each day, so either I had to pay for the application or find something else.

That is when I found Unison, “a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.” (from The Unison Page)

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