I have been researching captchas recently . The goal being, to understand how to make captchas better. I spent some time trying to determine the various forms of catcha available out there. There were quite a few and some were innovative (innovative does not necessarily mean easy to use 
). Here are some that will interest you
Recaptcha:
The most common form of captcha is recaptcha. Recaptcha does a good job of displaying some sort of cryptic letters and numbers to its users. But it is far from the captcha solution that an end user might want. An image based approach promoted by captcha.net is also available, but some images are thoroughly confusing. I am currently researching better ways to categorize and display images. There are more problems to be discussed in image based captchas, which I would rather cover in a seprate post with an implementation.
I was browsing the internet today and an interesting website caught my eye. Creately offers the ability to draw diagrams online and save them. You can also collaborate and comment on diagrams. There are a range of diagrams to choose from. Flow charts, UML diagrams, Wireframes etc. You can check out the complete list here. I managed to create a small diagram in a few clicks.
Flowchart:
So the next obvious question that came to mind was, how much does a tool like this cost. Its a pretty nice tool. You can edit diagrams online, no installation, no platform dependencies etc etc. So I traversed to their pricing page which asked me to upgrade, which lead me to the payment page. And this is where it got real confusing.
Pay what you want:
Blogger, which google acquired a while back is now ten years old. Google is celebrating the 10th anniversary by distributing presents. Its been quite a journey for blogger since its acquisition and the last ten years have seen tons and tons of blogs being added to blogger.
So as I surfed the web today, like any other good internet citizen I faithfully typed google.com into the browser address bar. Here is what I saw
Google promotes reader:
Gmail, google’s popular email service took an outage today. If you want to get a hint of what kind of impact that can make, check out google trends . The top 5 search terms are about gmail being down
Google trends:
I am sure some posts will crop up with something negative to say. But show me an email service that uses ajax, tags your emails, provides chatting integrated with the browser, (oh ! I could go on) and is so reliable. When was the last time you heard about a gmail outage ? Some of the best services out there are not as reliable as the free gmail.
Google’s SLA was also broken due to the down time, which seems to have spanned about 2-3 hours. If rumors are to be believed, google is offering a 15 day service chargeback to its paying customers instead of a 3 day service chargeback that the SLA covers. That would work out to around 2$. Gmail labs also provides an offline service, so not all users may have been affected.
Here are 5 free UML modelling tools you can use. I use the JUDE community version. I found the user interface easy to learn and the product was also feature rich and simple. The products are not necessarily arranged in any specific order and the list is certainly not exhaustive.
Have fun designing
JUDE – community: http://jude.change-vision.com/jude-web/product/community.html
UMLet: http://www.umlet.com/
Argo UML: http://argouml.tigris.org/
BOUml: http://bouml.free.fr/download.html
Visual paradigm – community: http://www.visual-paradigm.com/product/vpuml/editions/community.jsp
