Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is a new HIP (Human Interactive Proof) test released by Microsoft Research. It asks users to identify pictures of cats and dogs, as opposed to numbers and letters that the familiar CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) systems use. HIP is in essence a challenge to say are you a human or a machine?

  CAPTCH can be somewhat difficult for people to navigate correctly. The “tougher” you make the image, i.e. more resistant to automation and attack, the harder it is for humans to use. I use it on this blog to help prevent comment “robots” that would fill my blog with advertising and other unwanted content.

There has been a lot of pro and con talk about CAPTCHA in the development and user communities, but the simple truth is that other than CAPTCHA there has not been a really good alternative… until now!

The premise of Asirra is to display several pictures and ask the user to identify the species of the animals shown. The approach is not unique, other attempts have been seen, but they have all suffered from a common weakness, namely a relatively small database of images to draw from.

Asirra uses the Petfinder.com database which contains @ 3 million images. So this should not be an issue, at least for awhile!

Check out the web site, the system is free, and there is example code and connection info available. I am going to take a look at implementing it on my own blog.

Cheers,

Robert Porter

This issue is not due to lack of sleep or too much caffeine, rather it’s due to a bug.

Get the bug killer here and install it into the copy of Visual Studio you love the best!

(Poor prose and writing style probably due to lack of sleep and way too much caffeine.)

Cheers,

Robert Porter

This has happened to me several times, each time I end up searching for the answer only to slap my head and go “Oh Yeah” when I find the same answer each time!

(I am pretty sure one of the operative definitions of insanity is repeating an action and expecting a different result.)

Anyway, in this case I had created a new Tab in the toolbox in preparation for adding the AJAX Control Toolkit controls. I right clicked inside the tab and selected “Choose Items…” Visual Studio promptly crashed. No warning, just the “Sorry, I exploded, do you want me to phone home about it” dialog box.

Turns out this is a known issue, and is present if you have installed the Power Commands for Visual Studio from Codeplex.

The solution is to uninstall the Power Commands pack and everything will work again when you are adding toolbox tabs.

UPDATE: I did not make it clear before but the entire text of this post below, is copied from the Roadshow, I did not write it, just rebroadcasting it.

Did you miss PDC? Want to see some of the latest content relating to Cloud Computing, Silverlight 2, and the future directions of ASP.NET 4? Links are below for your FREE invite!

Introducing the MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow:

The MSDN Southern Fried Roadshow is a ¾ day, free developer event with a southern flair where you will learn about some of the latest developments in Microsoft technologies. For this edition we will cover a broad range of the latest Microsoft Technologies:

· Take a tour of Microsoft’s cloud computing platform and the services that make it easy to give your applications the most compelling experiences and features. Explore the journey a developer takes, from writing a service to launching that service in the cloud. Learn about the cloud services that enable developers to easily create or extend their applications and services.

· Microsoft Silverlight provides a powerful platform for building the next generation of rich interactive applications on the Internet. In this session, we take a look at the programming model and tools that developers and designers can leverage to build these true next-generation experiences for consumers and business, and demonstrate building a rich interactive application (RIA) using Silverlight and Microsoft .NET.

· ASP.NET is evolving a very rapid pace, come explore all the latest features of ASP.Net such as Dynamic Data, MVC, and even take a sneak peak at the upcoming features in ASP.NET 4.0! We’ll look at some new features such as taking control of your Control IDs, using the DynamicImage control, and ViewState management options. We’ll spend plenty of time talking about MVC and creating applications based on this framework, so if you’re wondering how to leverage MVC in your web applications, this talk is for you!

Local Links below. Sign up now!

12/2/2008 - Charleston
12/3/2008 – Wilmington
12/4/2008 - Raleigh
12/5/2008 - Charlotte

Periodically I like to publish my opml file of the blogs I follow. Both for my own use for the thankfully infrequent times when I somehow loose every copy of it. And hopefully to have some of you find some benefit from the fact that I have already screened out most of the dead wood!

So here it is, in all it’s glory! Enjoy!

Cheers,

Robert Porter