Category: Technology

I’m sure you’ve seen those images that display a changing value in them, something that you have to read and then type into a field so that you verify that you’re human (the assumption being that a machine couldn’t read the image to extract the text). They’re everywhere.

Do you need one? That’s a question I can’t answer for you. But I can tell you how to create the image. I am working on another bit to tell you how to actually use the image for verification, but since I can’t quite get it working myself, I’m going to leave that part out. This just shows you how to create the image itself.

I’m sure everyone else already knows this stuff, but since I use my blog for reference when I don’t feel like trying to look things up, I’m going to do another piece on SQL. Specifically, another piece on SQL subselects.

During some conversations today, I found out that neither my experimental site nor my regular site was rendering in Mozilla. The culprit is not a new one. I had added some formatting to the page and forgot to close my tags.

I often have to change the location of web pages, and try to make sure nothing breaks in the process. Ideally, you won’t see any changes at all, and clients won’t lose any functionality whatsoever.

I had to use more SQL than usual the other day. It had been a while since I had much call to use SQL in my job for something more than a simple query, however. I needed to use it to update some records in a file as I really just didn’t want to write a program to do the work. SQL should have been much faster, had I a clue what I needed to do. Eventually, I struggled my way through it and it was much faster – assuming you didn’t count the time spent on the learning curve to get to where I could actually use it!

I came across a post by someone who found something I wrote to be useful. That’s cool. I’m glad someone is reading.

One thing that this post reminded me of, that I didn’t mention previously, is the MIME type of the document being served. In the case of HTML, the longstanding tradition has been to serve the document as text/html. This is what we’ve always done, and this is what most people continue to do now.