WebWalker 1.3

Let’s see, it’s Friday morning… haven’t posted in forever… must be time for WebWalker!

• The Quartet Project is built on the very cool idea of mixing multiple inputs – sound, movement, motion capture – into multiple outputs: virtual instruments, and even a projected virtual dancer. The cast of Quartet comprises of a dancer, a musician, a motion controlled robotic camera, and a 3D virtual dancer. It looks like a lot of custom development for this, tied together with MAX/MSP. The Project Outline section has more details on the performance.
• You won’t generally find these opensource advocates linking to Microsoft, but this is actually a cool project and they’ve got an API so you can plug into it for your own site. Asirra is an alternative to the widely-used CAPTCHAs involving wavy and distorted text that PETA’s blog described as being “torture devices for dyslexics“. MSR calls Asirra a “HIP” (Human Interactive Proof) and it involves quickly classifying pictures of pets as either dogs or cats – so easy a child could do it, but difficult for computers without some serious processing. Just another tool in the constant arms race against the spam bots…
• WordPress continues to make my life better: the team has just released (finally!) a central repository for plugins. What used to be a rather complicated process – “1. I know there must be a plugin for this… 2. What was that site again? 3. Man, how can I be sure this is the latest version? Who’s the original author? 4. Cross fingers and download.” – is now reduced to “1. Go get it from WordPress plugins.” Sweet.