You probably haven't noticed, but I've made some comment system changes in the last few days that are really effective at blocking spam. I got the ideas from this article. It looks like one of the changes had a bug that made comments unusable for a couple of days, but it's fixed now.

For the curious, the comments form now contains a hidden email field. Any human users won't see it, and thus won't fill out that field. But a spambot sees the field marked as an email field and fills in an email address, causing the comment system to instantly recognize the comment is spam. Also, there's now a timestamp so spambots can't resubmit the same forms with different information each time.

None of these changes should affect the way that regular users leave comments on this site, but there should be less or no spam. Let me know if you run into any issues via the contact link at the top of the page.

When you're about to debut a major website that you've spent a lot of time on, don't go spreading your website URL in your press releases if you don't own the domain.

The UK Film Council-backed social networking and community website, myfilms, has run into a hitch after it emerged it cannot use the .com version of its web address - despite using the name in publicity material.

Myfilms, which is backed by £3m of National Lottery funding, aims to be a "film-centric social network" that will boost the range of films cinemagoers decide to watch.

The website, which is to launch in mid-March, has been dubbed myfilms.com in press material. But myfilms.com is registered and hosted in Washington, in the US and cannot be used until it is moved to the UK. The site is currently using myfilms.co.uk as its web address.

Whoops.

Apparently Adobe is currently planning to release Adobe Photoshop online, with a free version that will be pretty basic. They're planning to release it in about 6 months.

The online service is part of a larger move to introduce ad-supported online services to complement its existing products and broaden the company reach into the consumer market, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com.

"That is new (for Adobe). It's something we are sensitive to because we are watching folks like Google do it in different categories, and we want to make sure that we are there before they are, in areas of our franchises," Chizen said.

Chizen said that although hosted Photoshop is meant to be a low-end product, the company intends to ensure that it is of a higher quality than free alternatives. As an online image-editing application, Adobe faces a challenge in providing a good experience for customers, he added. "You don't want (network) latency to be an issue for the user, so it's harder, in some ways, than a video Remix product," he said. "Even though bandwidth is increasing, the pipes are getting filled with video, so the user experience will likely stay the same for the next three to five years."

The company is also wary of not diluting the brand name of Photoshop, a program widely used by creative professionals such as designers and illustrators.

"If we offered a host-based version of Photoshop that's Photoshop-branded (and is) potentially better than Picasa, you'd probably go the Photoshop route because of your belief in the Photoshop brand and the quality associated with the brand," Chizen said.

Sounds like a lot of Google-slamming...Picasa's actually a pretty good product, so it'll be interesting to see how this does. Plus, I'm sure there will be more legitimate users of Photoshop when you don't have to cough up $500 or $600 just for the software.

A 9" pizza in just 2 minutes from a vending machine?!? This is crazy. I can't even microwave a pizza in that much time, so I'm guessing the vending machine houses about 5 Oompa-loompas with some heavy duty blowtorches.

Wonder Pizza of Italy will place America 's most popular food source in places never before available. The innovative machine holds, cooks and serves 9" whole pizza pies in just 2 minutes. There are 3 different pizzas available in each machine at one time. Delicious Connie’s Pizza of Chicago is featured in all WonderPizza Kiosks. 5 years and 6 million dollars of R&D went into this design and subsequent manufacture of WONDERPIZZA of Italy and the product is now beginning worldwide distribution.

If this is going to be anything like the Connie's Pizza available at sporting events, the 9" pizza will run you approximately $12,136.74 with tax. Also, the text on the vending machine says it cooks in 90 seconds. So which is it WonderPizza? Maybe it takes an additional 30 seconds to serve it or let it cool to prevent lawsuits about the pizza being served too hot. After all, if it cooks in 90 seconds, who knows what kind of hot lava bath they've put the thing through.

Label me naive if you want, but I really thought that when you have as much money as Paris Hilton does, you wouldn't:

• Drive yourself around, especially when your license is suspended. After all, you can afford a chauffeur.
• Drive a car that doesn't have automatic headlights (or turn them off if they are automatic).
• Face potential jail time.

And yet, she's doing/done all three.

Yahoo has had this feature for months, and even Google Mobile has had it! But finally, Google has added real-time traffic to Google Maps. According to their blog:

For more than 30 major U.S. cities, you can now see up-to-date traffic conditions to help you plan your schedule and route. If you're in San Francisco, New York , Chicago, Dallas, or any of the other cities we now include, just click on the traffic button to show current traffic speeds directly on the map. If your route shows red, you're looking at a stop-and-go commute; yellow, you could be a little late for dinner; green, you've got smooth sailing.

Sweet! Note that this won't work everywhere, as I emphasized in bold above.

This season has been totally crazy. Don't forget to check out the character countdown for last night's episode! I'm posting a story for each episode so we can discuss them here.

As of right now, the character countdown has not added this episode yet.

Click to see all This week in 24 stories.

From here:

This time it wasn’t Peter Pan whisking Wendy Darling away to Neverland. It was Peter Pan Peanut Butter confining Wendy Willett of Oak Harbor to bed for three miserable, nauseating days.

Thanks for that gem, Paul Boring.

Check it out...a mini-fridge that tosses you beers:


The Hole - video powered by Metacafe It's times like this that I consider allowing posts to fall under multiple topics...this could have also been categorized as Innovative or Freakin' Sweet!

Andy Richter, Tony Hale, and Conan O'Brien producing. Hooked yet? That's the cast of a new NBC show, "Andy Barker, P.I." starting March 15th (9:30/8:30c). The commercial is hilarious, and you can see hints of Tony Hale's Buster character from Arrested Development. NBC has uploaded several clips to YouTube, so you know they won't be getting taken down this time :)



What the hell? Is NBC on a roll or what? They already had The Office, Scrubs, Studio 60, 30 Rock...talk about a fresh comedy goldmine!