Brudvik.org » Wikipedia

Store Norske Leksikon

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 16:04:06 +0000

Finally it was decided that they would offer this service (Norwegian) for free. And surely there isn’t much you can complain about when it comes to content. Now that they even opened for user-contributed content I am sure we’ll see that this will quickly expand and in time it might even be able to compete with Wikipedia on Norwegian articles. That being said, I am amazed that they decide to offer this kind of service in such a shabby shape. The webpage looks like something thrown together in the last minute, the placement of the various elements are aweful and surely they haven’t put much effort into branding themself in a good way. If this were mine design project I would rather jump out a window before handing this of for public appearance. There are several links around the webpage that doesn’t even work. For instance, when you enter an article, they have this big sign in the upper-right corner of the content area, saying quality proofed. This sign has a link attached to it, clicking it just leads to a webpage saying no such publication.

Futhermore the usage of gradients and the colors they chose to go with it is far from the best combination I’ve seen. The placement of ADs looks like they just got a bunch of ADs they wanted to place, and placed them a bit here and there, caring little to nothing for the design. The usage of popular elements based on prototype like ballon tooltips and such is a good idea, but the design on the ballons are aweful. Taking a look at the source of the main page shows that this is a quick product when the developer(s) didn’t even care to remove bug comments. So to speak, the content here is absolutely thrilling, and I would love to see this wrapped in a good design, and not something a 14 year old kid came up with – 7 for usefulness, 1 for design – but I think I’ll keep to Wikipedia.

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Captcha – are you smart enough?

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:02:10 +0000

I read a Norwegian news article earlier today regarding that spammers had overcome the current version of CAPTCHA that Microsoft uses at their services. And I can’t but help thinking that why are we fooling ourself? If it can be programmed then it can be reversed – end of discussion. Does it help? Not really, it only slow down the spammers, and make life miserable for the end-user of your webpage. Soon you need a doctor degree in typography in order to actually understand what the CAPTCHA is trying to tell you. Sure, it’s impressive to see what new ways they are coming up with to try to keep the robots out; but when I need to take out a dictionary to form words or look up on Wikipedia to figure out what kind of animal they just asked me to describe – then in my eyes its gone way too far.

It gets even worse, as I were browsing around the internet following various newspapers that had picked up this so-called-story; I found numerous services where they claim that they can beat quite a few of the CAPTCHAs out there; though there is one that really stood out; an Ukranian company – OCR Research Team. These guys have broken services like:

Friendster
MySpace
Rapidshare
Paypal

And thats just a few of the services where they have automated the CAPTCHA responses. We can only hope that someone soon finds a better way to tell man from computer; since CAPTCHAs really have outlived their role.

The OCR Research Team

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FreeCol – Colonization of America

Kjell Arne Brudvik — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:41:02 +0000

If you’re like me, then you probably played the old game “Colonization” by Sid Meier. In my eyes Colonization was the better one compared to Civilization, though I am quite aware that I am most likely putting gasoline on fire by stating that. Now, I continued to play Colonization until a few years ago, since then it started to get harder and harder to work on new computers, and finally I just gave up. It was with great joy that I stumbled over “FreeCol” the other day, a open-source contribution and appreaciation of Colonization.

The first thing that caught my eye is that this version is coded in Java, and I instantly started to drool – so I actually went forth downloading the source before I actually downloaded the game and started to test it out. I must say that I am quite impressed with what they have achieved so far; sure – there are still a few bugs here and there present, but overall, quite a great effort.

Links

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Store Norske Leksikon Finally it was decided that they would offer this service...