Umpteen times I attempted to register for espn.com (after some overzealous data-nerd in their data warehouse deleted an account i had registered less than a year ago).

Umpteen times, the captcha was a gotcha:

Why, why why do the people working on these sites continue to follow the “keeping honest people honest” policy of more locks and heuristics? Even the “audio” version was a lot of noise and sample reversals, making it barely audible to a human ear—and finally it didn’t work either.

Look, ESPN and the lot: if you’re going to fight spammers and whatnot, there are better ways to do it than foisting all of the pain onto the registrant. Please pursue those! I don’t see twitter or facebook using these sort of things; my guess is they have slightly more user-friendly methods of dealing with fake registrations.

Just a note signed in frustration…

Edit: I was informed by a friend that this might be an issue with Safari/WebKit. The reason? Unknown…

Opera: Flash as a video container makes very little sense.

All I have to say is: HTML5!  HTML5!  HTML5!

I have heard zero noise about this one. Hm, maybe I should say I’ve heard no “buzz”…

For a few months now I’ve been using an application called Nimbuzz on my Blackberry as well as on my ASUS netbook. I just downloaded it to my Mac today, completing the hat trick of machine usage.

Multi-IM is kind of my “holy grail”. Like many people I have friends et al. scattered acrosss all four major networks (Windows Live, AIM, GTalk/Jabber, Yahoo!) and I would prefer to talk to them all with one client. On Windows I’ve used Miranda (good, but hardly shrink-wrapped) and Pidgin (an icon of stubborn open-source thinking if ever there was one). Yes I know about Trillian but I think it’s hideous and elegance, frankly, is a factor for me (both visual and UI). Which of course is where Miranda and Pidgin both fail—Pidgin is rigid to distraction, whereas Miranda is the opposite: so customizable as to be a nightmare to set up and upgrade coherently. Thus Nimbuzz was a great panacea on my XP netbook.

As for Blackberry? Well—it’s not exactly 100% integrated (messages don’t show up in your unified Inbox) but it’s free, and that is good enough for me.

For Macintosh, Adium is everything which Pidgin is not, but it’s been in a seemingly eternal beta for the latest version. Hence the decision to move over and take a look at Nimbuzz there, too. And the client does look a little “porty”, i.e. foreign, but hey—that’s something that can always change…

Bottom line: the company appears to be Dutch—but with a significant Argentine presence, which I find interesting; and the client is solid and connects to all the major networks as well as Facebook. So if you’re looking for a free multi-IM client for Windows OR Mac OR Blackberry, Nimbuzz is there—and you could do worse.

Oh, and for the record: it appears the client is promoting a Skype-like network. Until I know other people on Nimbuzz, however, that part is not of much use to me. So maybe this article will change that a little.