Greasemonkey Reddit Filter

I've been learning a bit of JavaScript - and this is one of the things I've come up with, so far.
Reddit Filter is fairly simple; it allows you to filter out submissions from certain URLs using a regular expression. Want to give it a shot? Follow these brief instructions:

Install GreaseMonkey - this is a neat […]

Adobe Flash has been poorly implemented into the Internet

Adobe Flash is an incredible tool, and over the past ten years the increasing number of innovations achieved with it have been astounding. Adobe claims that more than 99% of internet users have Flash installed, and with the high proportion of websites which make use of it, it's not difficult to see why.

Flash, however, in a similar manner to Adobe Acrobat, has a tendency to make me seeth with frustration - not because of its own shortcomings, but the decisions of those who use it to create applications, games and websites. Its problem is not one there is an easy solution to - and that is the lack of standards set by the aforementioned creators of .swf files.

Cloning, the mind, and immortality.

Something which has been running around in my head of late.

Firstly, I asked myself, if I was given the choice of living indefinitely would I take it? Certainly I would.

In popular media immortality is presented as a double edged sword - the allure of everlasting life, versus the inability to end it when life becomes a pain. I would have to think more carefully about that; but if humanity is to develop a means to indefinite life, it will most likely be without that second clause. So yes, I would do it.

But how? What conceivable ways could a human retain life forever?

A number of possibilities present themselves. The first is simply medicine and lifestyle; in the last millenium - even in the last two hundred years, the expected human lifespan in developed countries has skyrocketed, mainly due to increased knowledge of health, wellbeing, and the ability to target diseases with increasingly complex medical ideas and technology. Some would say this is only a temporary solution - nothing can stop the mind from deteriorating, the body's organs from failing after so many years. But what about when science is able to synthetically replicate organs, or when nanotechnology is able to repair and replace broken neurons in the brain? Once the human body is fully understood (and there is no natural law to prevent this) such procedures will enable humans to far surpass their current lifespans.

Copyright Infringement Survey

Thanks, Facebook!

Finally. A way to get rid of all of those masses of damned requests.

Google, also an impressive calculator, apparently

Google has surprised me again. I've always known you can search for 'Speed of Light' and before the results google will give you the answer. But it turns out you can enter pretty much any equation and be given the result straight off:

It gets better: if you use Firefox 2 or have the Google toolbar, […]

Please, Celebrities, Stop Exposing Yourselves …

I moderate a forum on a different site, and lately we've been having a spam problem. Each new captcha or human verification we add just triggers whoever writes these bots to work around it, sometimes in a matter of days. It's an incredibly popular site to begin with, so adding admin verification would be impractical.

There […]

Beginning programming with C#

You've read Daniel's article on becoming a coder, you've had a look at PHP/Python, and maybe even written some programs. Now you've decided to move on and create some nifty code that uses a GUI, with menus, buttons, and all the other things that users expect. Using Python or PHP this can be done, but with rather a lot of difficulty.

In my opinion, a much better solution, especially for Windows developers, is to use Microsoft's C# (pronounced as C-Sharp) language. You can download Visual Studio Express 2008 C# edition for free, a complete C# Integrated Development Environment, with an easy-to-use form editor and a nice code editor. Also in the install program is the option to install SQL Server Express, a database server that works well with C#. SQL Server is a nice addition to have, if you decide to do some programs with databases, but be wary that it is an additional ~30mb to download.

The Nine Billion names of God

Arthur C. Clarke wrote a classic SF short story in the 1950s called The Nine Billion names of God, in which he discusses a computer designed and built for a Buddhist monastery to calculate the billions of possible names possible for God, using the entirety of the possible combinations of available characters.
"We use a special […]

Using Eventscripts to mod CS Source

 
My last article detailed how to write a very simple mod for Counter Strike Source servers; here, I plan to go into more detail. I will assume basic knowledge of Python, and an understanding of how to create a simple addon on your source server - essentially I plan to discuss Eventscripts' API and features.
Userids
Each […]