Friday, September 14, 2012

Everyday life at the Southern Hemisphere

People often ask me, how long it takes me to draw a cartoon. I cannot really provide a right answer here as it heavily depends. For this cartoon it took me only about 1 hour. This is very fast and also the number of drafts (only 2) is surprisingly low.  Usually, even though I am not a perfectionist, it takes much longer, probably 2 hours, but I've also worked on cartoons which took me 3 hours. I have stopped coloring my cartoons because this is an extra challenge at which I don't really excel. I mean, I have to spend a lot of time and the outcome is chilling. I think I do much better on some kind of grey scale. 
My daughter askmed me whether I drew the Orca straight out of my head. Of course, NOT. I cannot draw an orca just like this out of my head. I googled the web to understand the most important characteristics, then did two drafts and this is what came out. If I didn't do that, I'd definitly missed the white spots and put the eye at the wrong place. Below you see the "final" before I scan it into the computer and the very first draft.

Final version before scanning into computer
 
 
 Very first draft

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Captcha #1

CAPTCHAs are used to prevent automated software from performing actions which degrade the quality of service of a given system and/or to protect the service from attackers trying to hack login credentials using brute-force attacks.

Until now, I never had to test CAPTCHAs but thinking about it, testing CAPTCHAs automatically is impossible if testability isn't considered at all. Testability here could mean for the roboter to offer a backdoor which contains the correct clear-text. Of course such information should only be available to the script and de-activated when deployed live. Sometimes, even I struggle to identify the clear-text of the CAPTCHA, and I am NOT a roboter...