So happy to see The Decemberists are coming to Minneapolis! 🎶
“The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens Disrupts my reverie again” — The Decemberists
Model train clearing snow. Surprisingly awesome.
Question2Answer Number Captcha
I’ve been using Question2Answer for a number of years now to power Ask Planet Kubb. I like Question2Answer because it is simple to run, uses a standard PHP + MySQL setup and can even be used in a multi-site farm configuration easy enough. However, I’ve been frustrated by it’s ability to manage spam registrations.
Question2Answer has built in support for ReCaptcha and it has a plugin method to use other anti-spam measures. I’ve used ReCaptcha for a while, but it results in 4 to 10 spam registrations a day. I tried switching to the Q2A Logical Captcha by amiyasahu which uses Text Captcha. I even submitted a pull request to properly salt the captchas. But this resulted in 3-4 times the spam registrations as ReCaptcha! Ouch!
I decided to apply the same type of spam defense I’ve successfully used for MediaWiki and early results are great. It uses the Numbers_Words PHP package to spell out a number of nine digits and then ask the user to identify the number in a specific position. The question looks like this:
This works really well. You can grab
q2a-number-captcha and
git clone it for your own use.
Awesome to hear SPS Commerce won Tekne Awards this evening! Missing event due to AWS re:Invent. Shout out to #TeamSPS!
AWS re:Invent - Day 2
Excited for Werner Vogels AWS re:Invent keynote!
Great groove!
Excited to have @iamjacknovak spinning on stage before my keynote at #reinvent pic.twitter.com/QFSzZaHXOq
— Werner Vogels (@Werner) November 13, 2014
Awesome! AWS container service!
AWS is first cloud platform with container support. Yes?
Some CLI geekdom in the AWS re:Invent keynote. Nice!
Impressive Docker AWS container demo at re:Invent!
AWS Lambda announced! AWS Lambda has big potential for #TeamSPS!
Skrillex performing at re:Play!
Expecting a packed Lambda breakout session at re:Invent!
AWS #reinvent should hand out copies of Strucuture of Computer Programs to celebrate Lambda.
Love AWS Lambda bringing cloud scale to functional workloads. Opens up amazing potentials.
Lots of buzz in conversations about Lambda.
Wonder how long until social feeds like Gnip allow connecting AWS Lambda functions. Seems obvious.
Line for AWS ECS session is insane.
At the most in-demand re:Invent session of AWS Container Service. Packed!
Every session at re:Invent touching on containers or Docker have been completely full with lines out the door.
When did “fleet” overtake the term “farm”. Tertiary impact of all this container talk?
The Container Service slides seem to have gone without review from the AWS brand managers. 🙂 Refreshing actually.
“Server farm” v “server fleet”. Fleet sounds bigger. Better to be transportation system than farmers?
Very cool elastic container service demo.
AWS re:Invent - Day 1
Seated for AWS re:Invent keynote!
Andy Jassy “Cloud has become the new normal.” True for many!
“shower cycles”? New term to me.
Amazon Aurora looks compelling.
Impressed by first day keynote and all the work going on!
At the re:Invent Security Keynote. AWS capabilities for security has radically changed and improved in recent years. AWS has 5 to 7 thousand instances running continual security tests against internal systems constantly.
Lunch for 9,500.
You will not miss Michael Ducy. Very sparkly!
Nice demo of Datadog.
Attending impressive session on Key Management in AWS with Amy Patton. Wishing Milinda Rambel Stone, our security leader for #TeamSPS, was here too!
AWS re:Invent - Day 0
Looking forward to connecting with the rest of #TeamSPS at #reinvent!
68 °F and the cab driver had the heat on. Opened window. #vegas
Hotel is pretty full so got upgraded to a suite. Nice digs.
“These Days” by Foo Fighters really cannot be too loud.
Yard is ready for snow with 15 minutes of daylight to spare.
Being able to AirDrop from my iPhone to my MacBook is surprisingly useful.
Tyler (4) absolutely loves AC/DC “Hells Bells”. This doesn’t displease me. 😊
Trying Fentiman’s Ginger Beer. Wow. “It burns!”
I’ve been donating $1/day to various non-profits with Dollar a Day. Simple and easy thing to do.
Why can’t there be more Foo Fighters albums.
Please let The Decemberists have a tour stop in Minneapolis with the new album release.
Nice — #TeamSPS product and platform offsite today! #InfiniteRetailPower
👍 #TeamSPS assembling for product & platform event! Let’s do this!
👍 #TeamSPS tech ops on the job from event.
👍 #TeamSPS presentation from Shivani Stumpf and Mike Bjerkness!
Product design for #TeamSPS being continually improved and redefined by Chuck Mallott!
Love Chuck Mallott pursuit of bringing delight to B2B applications. Business users are people too! #TeamSPS
👍 #TeamSPS workshop day kicking off! Education, training and continuous learning are key to successful teams! Six sessions ranging from Agile, TDD, Platform overview, AWS, Git Workflow and Ansible!
If you are practicing agile methods, and haven’t revisited fundamentals in the last year, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Nice — #TeamSPS workshops continue with Mike Bjerkness presenting SPS CodeFlow.
Thank you to AWS Cloud for sending presenter to #TeamSPS workshop day!
Final session of #TeamSPS workshop day hosted by David Federlein giving depth on Ansible. SPS is starting to use Ansible for continuous deployment.