To Whom I May Concern

Revving Chrome for a Cause

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 07:53:00 +0000

Google's launched this great initiative/Chrome extension called "Chrome for a Cause," where for every tab opened (up to 250 tabs/day) Google will contribute towards charity. You can download the extension here:

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/

Now let's say you're in the mood to speedily log 250 tabs open, but your Ctrl+T muscles are sore. Several code solutions have popped up, including a full-on Chrome extension which automates the process.

My question: why can't this run in Javascript?

My response: Chrome for a Cause Fastest bookmarklet

Here's the code:

javascript:i=260;function addTab(){if(--i==0){clearInterval(j)}x=window.open('');x.close()}j=setInterval('addTab()',1000);void(0);

Just let it run for ~5 minutes, and you're done. You've helped provide a year's supply of clean drinking water for someone on earth.

"And now no oil nor cartel doth besmirch"

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sat, 29 May 2010 23:18:00 +0000

O, that this too too oily spill would thin
Spread and disperse itself into the Gulf!
Or that the Deepwater Horizon
Had not ignored all warnings! O BP!
How crude, slick, fine and most profitable,
Seems to you all the black gold of this world!
Fire on't! ah fire! 'tis an untamed leak,
That thrives to bleed; men rank and gross in nature
Extract it dearly. That it should come to this!
But six weeks gone: nay, not so much, not six:
So excellent a crop; we are, to this,
Unquenched addicts to a poison; so vital to my country
That it might not beteem the Saudi princes
Restrict its flow too harshly. Profits and greed!
Must we remember? Why, we are drunk on it,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and so, over the years--
We wish not think on't--Frailty, thy name is petrol!--
In little time, or ere that well was killed
From which there flow'd that darkest Texan tea,
Like Niobe*, no rest:--why she, even she--
O, God! a beast, that gushed by both day and night,
Would have run dry sooner--spew'd from the sea floor,
Our country's life-blood, but no more like our life-blood
Than curdled milk to cream: within the Gulf,
Ere yet the fisherman of most fresh shrimp
Had left their harbors for their season's catch,
Oil spread. O, most wicked speed, to wreck,
With such penetration, fragile wetlands!
The size of the spill is not understood:
But break, my drill, your blowout preventer.

*In Greek mythology, Niobe cried for her dead children so much that the gods turned her into a stone which continuously gushed water.

Oh, and BP? More matter, less art. Or rather, less matter, less art. Just kill the thing already.

Browser Bonanza

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Thu, 27 May 2010 00:07:00 +0000

I've noticed that a lot of my posts on here are simply reminders for myself, but really, does that matter at all?

First off, I'm trying to compile a list of my personal favorite Firefox add-ons, so I can simply come to this post on a new download of FF and install everything. I did a post on add-ons and stuff a while back, but in the 1.5 years (!) since that post my focus in add-ons has moved. Here is my new list.

Adblock Plus (and EasyList USA subscription)
Download Statusbar
Firebug
FireFTP
ReloadEvery
AutoPager
Pixlr Grabber
Resurrect Pages

Onwards, to bookmarks and bookmarklets. Things to have in a bookmarks bar:

jQuerify* (source)
pixlr
Note in Reader* (for Google Reader)
meebo
mibbit
whipplehill flash*
Show Hidden FB Content* (I made a Facebook page for this!)
Hide long FB Posts*
Grooveshark

*denotes bookmarklet.

Finally, Chrome 5 is here, so get it, right now.

Excellent, Dr. W̶a̶t̶s̶o̶n̶ Yahoo.

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sat, 15 May 2010 20:08:00 +0000

Yahoo! remains one of my favorite places for incredibly late internet news. I can just imagine all those old people loading the page, fighting back the page-covering advertisements ("ABP? Is that a heart condition?"), only to see some video of some British kid named Charlie biting his brother's finger. Stay topical, Yahoo.

Anyway, I saw this HEADLINE STORY and couldn't not fix up the page quickly with a little Firebug. Enjoy.

(By the way, if you don't get it, go here, right now.)

Manhattan Scavenger Hunt

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 18:58:00 +0000

Yesterday, we had a scavenger hunt across Manhattan. The prize was a ton of Pocky, so we called our group Pockystan. There were like 140 things on the list, so we licked street signs and got Starbucks baristas to sign coffee cups and proposed to strangers and pole-danced on street poles and rapped with strangers and got an egg from an old lady in a townhouse and yelled through central park until we found a guy named Steve and played limbo with kids and futterwacked at the Alice in Wonderland statue and argued with crazy Jesus people and raped a church and burned a woman and sang Disney songs in a drugstore and high fived cops and Mr. Softee truck guys and a guy with an awesome mustache and staged public breakups and rode the carousel and walked piggyback into a parking garage making cars noises asking for the cost to park for a day and serenaded with Shakespeare and sang the prince of bel air theme with a guy on the street and beatboxed with strangers and got free macarons and impersonated elvis in grand central station and screamed "STELLAAAA!" in a subway car and hugged another crazy Jesus person who smelled like manure. Then we did kareoke.

In other words, yesterday was awesome.

An Open Suggestion to Wolfram|Alpha

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:16:00 +0000

It's just a suggestion, really: nested queries. This feature is partially implemented currently, as you can search things like "weather Chicago the day Barack Obama was born", but there's no reserved character system to input queries in queries and use the sub-queries results as arguments in the main query.

Example of possible use: "max({{life expectancy USA {{USA median age male}} male}}, {{life expectancy USA {{USA median age female}} female}})", where {{query}} denotes a subquery.

That particular example finds the life expectancy of American men and women of the median American age for their gender and returns the larger of the two. Normally this would take five queries:

USA male median age --> 35.4 years
USA female median age --> 38.1 years
life expectancy USA male 35.4 years --> 77.35 years
life expectancy USA female 38.1 years --> 81.76 years
max(77.35, 81.76) --> 81.76

With subqueries, however, we get a single mega-query which returns our answer (81.76 years) without several queries and copy and paste.

Just my two cents.

iPads for Obama!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:28:00 +0000

It's the latest trend in the world of online scammers. Someone makes a group on Facebook promising free merchandise/hidden Facebook features/true love if you join and invite all your friends. Of course, these pages restrict viewing of their Walls, so people must join before they find out that it's fake.

The second step is to connect some external website to the Facebook group, which you must visit after you join and invite everyone you know to the group. This web page is where the group creators may collect usernames/passwords with a fake Facebook authentication page, or collect names and addresses, or even credit card info. Whatever their motives, the group spreads too fast for the original adopters to warn those they've already invited about the site. And so, like a virus, the group grows and spreads.

Earlier today, I saw on my Facebook wall that someone I vaguely knew had joined a group entitled "Get a FREE Apple iPad Test Unit!" The group followed the usual procedure of adding all your friends and clicking a link. This time, however, I was curious. Without joining or spamming my friends, I clicked the link. I was greeted with this friendly page:

http://cpalead.com/adblock.php

As a rule, any site douche-y enough to restrict access based on an add-on doesn't really deserve your attention anyway. Still I pressed on. I discovered that cpalead.com (which is completely blocked by the EasyListUSA subscription list in Adblock Plus) was noticing that I was restricting the execution of its stuff and therefore redirected me from the original page to let me know that I was a bad person.

After fishing around for a few minutes, I discovered what .js file on cpalead.com was causing the matter and exempted it from screening. The site then loaded, Adblock Plus filter ignored.

That filter, for those of you who may encounter this in the future, is:
@@|*cpalead.com/mygateway.php?* UPDATE: This code wasn't covering all cases, so I had to tweak it. Use the current version.

---------

After finally accessing the web page, I was greeting with a page-covering DIV and a notice which said that I had to fill out a survey before I could enter my info, "to verify that I'm not a bot". Back on the Facebook group page, they did apologize for the system, but all I can think is, why not be like EVERY OTHER website and use, oh, I don't know, a CAPTCHA? I looked int he lower-left corner of the giveaway page, where a "HACKER-PROOF" logo made the non-https site look very secure. HACKER-PROOF? We'll see about that.

At first, I tried removing the div and just accessing the form directly. That triggered some hidden JS file and promptly warned that I had been "reported" for trying to "hack" the site. Excuse me, but editing local HTML source code for a loaded web page is NOT hacking. I could go on my YouTube channel page and locally edit the HTML to make it look like I have 9001 subscribers. That's still not hacking, because if I refresh, my hard work is gone. Still, at this point I didn't feel like bothering with the annoying .js file, so I decided to do as I was told.

I BS'd my way through one of their dumb surveys (which then started spamming me with product requests, so I'm glad I did not put a real email address. Unless "wmnbd1@a0l.com" is a real address, in which case, please forgive me.) Thankfully, the giveaway page at this point removed the blocking DIV, allowing me to submit my details in order to (potentially) receive a FREE iPad!

But then I noticed something. The form was in a frame. And I could load the frame in my browser independantly of the main giveaway page. And the frame was just the relevant form field which submitted my info, nothing more, especially no hidden JS files.

So wait a minute. I have to "disable" Adblock, not tamper with the HTML source code, and take a spam survey designed to steal my details, but you don't even bother to put security on the actual FORM?

For those of you not familiar with how these kinds of security measures interact, it's kinda like this:

So now I have unrestricted access to the form. The thing is totally unsecured. Hell, I could probably just re-send this form over and over--

It doesn't take long for me to complete a simple form submission page which uses GET variables from the URL to choose the name, address, and email you'd like to submit, and automatically on page load submits the form for you. Embed the form page half a dozen times on another page, set an auto-refresh system up on the meta-form page, and you've got a submission system.

Now all you need is a name, an address, and an email.

At this point, I think back to the State of the Union on Wednesday. Obama had said that "our economic growth increasingly depends on our ability to sell American goods and crops and services all over the world." Perhaps, then, Obama would know of some good places to put to use a few hundred iPads?

Name: Barack Obama
Address: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Email: potus@whitehouse.gov (I doubt this is a real email address, but it sounded cool.)

I let the program run for around fifteen minutes, watching the giveaway's "Thank you!" page for successful submissions appear briefly before each refresh. So much for "hacker-proof".

------------------

I come back after a little while and notice that something had changed on my little form submitter: the "Thank you!" pages now read "403 Forbidden".

I had submitted at most 300 forms in that time-span. Surely that wasn't enough to take down the website in that time.

I did a little checking and discovered that the website was still online, but the owners had clumsily restricted the main directory, completely destroying the website's layout.

So what have I done? I've broken a scammer website, and I've requested 300 iPads for the President of the United States. That's a good day in my book.

-----------

UPDATE (2/21/10):
Their site's up and seems to have been back up for a while now. However, they have yet to fix the frame issue. Go figure. Also, as you'll note above, I fixed an issue in the ABP code to work around the ABP-blocker.

The Holiday Season

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:03:00 +0000

[The following was written back in late November, but I forgot about it. Enjoy it, mid-January. -scikidus]

It's finally here.

The sun sets early over New Jersey, the trees are stuck in post-peak, so the yellow sunlight illuminates the yellow leaves.

Today's Thanksgiving, and it certainly feels like it.

For the first time in years we're making a large chunk of the feast, so the house is filled with the aromas of pumpkin, nutmeg, ginger, and cinnamon.

I'm sitting on my windowsill, and the cool crisp air of fall, air of the season, is lightly blowing in.

It's hardly 2:30, but already the afternoon shadows are long. Trace leaves litter the streets as pedestrians slowly amble down the West Side's characteristic wide sidewalks. The sky is a pure, lightened blue, with one or two faint, wispy clouds added in as an afterthought. The air also carries the faint scent of pine, wafting from the Christmas tree vendors from Canada setting up shop down the block.

Unlike most days in the City, quiet is noticeably more common today, instead of the norm of din. Relatives of strangers arrive, bearing flowers, bags of food, and the occasional headache. For a brief moment in a hectic city, NY license plates are less common.

People are walking slowly, cars are driving slowly.

I'm glad I'm not the only one absorbing the magic of the day.

YouTube PM Trolling Fails

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:07:00 +0000

This is here to record a conversation between a creationist troll and 24 other YouTubers (the troll spammed us all).

Sent November 21, 2009 by Eye2EyeIIIV:

Think about it...
WHERE DO CARING AND MERCY COME FROM?

While many evolutionists cry out that a loving God is inconsistent with this world of cruelty we inhabit, they conveniently overlook other things. For example, how does evolution explain charity, and caring? If evolution is true, the driving force of nature is "survival of the fittest". Those less able to compete are destined to die. Any attempt to rescue these "less competitive" people would be to work AGAINST the most fundamental force of nature. The existence of doctors, hospitals, charitable organizations, and even police force is contrary to raw evolutionary forces.
The evolutionist has no basis for moral judgments. If man is just the result of millions of years of evolution, our behavior is based on random chemical reactions. There is no ultimate moral code. All morality is relative. So if a person needs money, why is it wrong to rob someone or a bank? According to evolution, the stronger person should succeed. Might makes right. So in the evolutionary view, such violence is a natural, and necessary, part of the world.
Those who have a worldview based on the Bible have a consistent basis for acts of kindness, charity, or caring. We are commanded in Scripture to love our neighbors as ourselves, to perform acts of mercy, and to care for the widows and orphans. If we take evolution to its logical conclusion, we will conclude that these widows and orphans should die because they are a drain on the resources of nature.
Only true Christians ultimately offer the world a basis to make moral judgments. Those who reject the Bible have no basis for morality.

Hit the jump for the responses.

Sent November 21, 2009 by tiggster13:

Evolution certainly does have a basis for moral judgments. Let me illustrate:

Suppose there was a competition involving a huge obstacle course. The winner of this competition would receive all of the food, water, and shelter he could possibly want. The four contestants include a large, powerful body builder, a sleek and graceful track star, a physicist with an IQ of 200 and a normal guy who had 5 close friends committed to helping him succeed. It should be obvious that 6 people working together will always be more successful than anyone working alone (no matter how fit they might be). But success comes with a price; the rewards would have to split up or the team will fall apart.

This can be seen in the wild as well. Wolves, for example, often hunt caribou, animals that are much larger, much stronger and much faster than wolves. The wolves' advantage is that they work together as a pack and they achieve that advantage by making sure that everyone in the pack gets fed and cared for. Even the slow and the weak can contribute when you get your power from numbers. And its not just wolves; meerkats, monkeys, dolphins, geese, ants etc. etc. all have learned to rely on others for their survival.

Morality, then, is our instinctive recognition that we are fittest when we are not alone and the best way to ensure that we are not alone is to be as concerned about the health and well being of others as we are about ourselves. Its natural and we do it because we evolved in this way. (And no, evolution is not based on random chemical reactions. Why would you think that anyone is going to listen to what you say if you won't take the time to actually learn about the topics you wish to discuss?)

Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that sin is an innate feature we all have and that moral laws are followed not for the betterment of others but for our own personal rewards (or to avoid personal punishment). It also teaches that, one day, god will segregate all of humanity up into two groups - the people he likes and those he is prejudiced against. Fear, hate, bigotry, selfishness and irresponsibility are the lessons of christianity.

You don't care about widows and orphans because they are needy, you care because, if you help them, you are that much closer to having your own private mansion in heaven where you'll never have to care about anyone or anything ever again.

Finally, according to your "ultimate moral code", slavery, rape, child abuse and genocide are all morally acceptable as were the crusades, holy wars, inquisitions, witch hunts and the dishonesty rampant within the creationist community today. There is not, nor has there ever been, a single, comprehensive definition for what is moral and what is immoral that all christians have universally agreed to. You are just as subjective and just as arbitrary as everyone else.

Sent November 21, 2009 by thelastholdout:

Although Tiggster already gave a damn good response to you, allow me to put my two cents in.

Your first mistake is interchanging "evolutionists" with "atheists," as there are many people who recognize the facts of evolution who still believe in God. Acknowledgement of evolution as a valid explanation for the diversity of life and recognizing that there's no reason to believe in any supernatural deity are mutually exclusive stances; in other words, a given person who takes one of these stances may not necessarily take the other.

Secondly, Tiggster is right; groups working together do have an evolutionary advantage in many ways over individuals. Allow me to give a hypothetical example: say there's a group of our primitive ancestors sitting around when a saber toothed tiger attacks one of them. If they all work together to save the victim, not only will the victim live to reproduce, but now the group has access to food, material for clothing, tools, etc. However, if they all sit there and let the victim get devoured, and display such apathy each time the tiger attacks, soon there will be no ancestors left to reproduce. In a modern setting, factories, offices, restaurants, etc. (all of the facilities which help provide our comfortable standard of living) work better with a group of people working together than with one person working alone. Hospitals, etc., help ensure the survival of the SPECIES. See, "survival of the fit" (not fittest, necessarily) is about survival of the species. Even if I die saving a school bus filled with children, the species will live on through the reproductive efforts of those children when they grow up, even if I will never rear children of my own.

In summary, there are plenty of practical reasons for people to work together and help each other, while your Scripture is simply an argument from authority. The argument you advance is "God commands it." Well, great. God commands plenty of things that aren't so nice, according to your religion and plenty of others. Your particular religion argues that man is a depraved creature by nature, born into sin because curiosity overpowered the arbitrary command of a jealous and irrational God at the dawn of mankind. The tree which caused our "downfall" was the tree of the KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL. If this is what Adam and Eve gained when they ate of it, this means that beforehand they had no understanding of morality. They had no idea what right and wrong are. They did not know that it was indeed a "sin" to disobey God. Here's an analogy: A man travels to a foreign country. He is absolutely ignorant of all the laws and customs of that country. He sees a tree with delicious looking fruit hanging off its branches. There's a sign nearby that in the native language gives a warning with a skull and crossbones, but the man does not understand the language, and sees a bird pecking at the fruit, so it's obviously safe to eat.. He grabs a fruit off the tree and bites into it. Immediately he's surrounded by police who beat him savagely and throw him in jail, because apparently the tree's fruit is considered sacred by the locals. The man spends the rest of his life rotting in the jail due to this "crime."

Next, any chemical reactions which contribute to the life process are NOT random. If you understood evolution at all you'd know this.

Next, only an arrogant, sexist ass would consider widows and orphans as "drains on the resources of nature" by default. Being deprived of your husband or your parents does not make you any less capable as a person of fending for yourself. You may have to work harder, but it's still possible. And orphans can still grow up to be perfectly healthy members of society. If we're going to follow your logic, religious leaders should all die because they ARE leeches on society. All they do is stand behind their pulpits and demand that you worship the deity they claim to represent while taking all of your money and time. Those who actually do anything good for the people around them are the exceptions to the rule.

And let's test your statement that there's no such thing as morality in the absence of God or the bible. Let's say, hypothetically, that you were to be convinced that God does not exist. Would you immediately drop every shred of the rules you live by? Would you go out and rape, murder and steal? If you answered yes, you are one of the most monstrously immoral people who's ever lived, because you only act moral when "someone's watching."

Anyway, that's the sum of my thoughts for now.

Sent November 21, 2009 by scikidus:

Since I didn't realize other people were goign to hit Reply All, I wrote a direct response. Here's mine.

Although responding to mass e-mails is not particularly enjoyable, perhaps I can clarify a point or two.

Homo sapiens have evolved in groups, and therefore we have developed group morality. On a very basic level, it may indeed seem more beneficial for an individual to murder others for their own gain, however this is not beneficial to the group overall, reducing the chances fo survival of the group. A basic scenario might help illuminate this point. Suppose that you're in a group of 2 other males and 3 females. Each of you males wishes to reproduce with the other females, and therefore you compete. Competition is fine: what's not fine is taking the actions too far and murdering each other. Why? Because it dissolves trust in the group, making the 6 of you much more vulnerable to attack. If you know the other group members want to kill you, why are you going to work with them to fight off the angry lion which is trying to kill you?

On the other hand, helping others in the group is extremely beneficial to the group overall. Our sense of compassion probably evolved out of mothering instincts towards children, which themselves evolved so we wouldn't abandon our offspring and our genes. Because we now have the mantle of group morality, "survival of the fittest" does not apply to individual members of a group, but to groups and populations overall, and by extension to the entire human race. Helping others lets them help you in return. Even selfless acts gain reward and favor from others, and so are beneficial to you should your individual person ever be in trouble.

-------------

You then go on to speak of the Bible as a firm basis for morality. I must ask you: how exactly do you select which parts of the Bible constitute your moral code and which parts do not? For instance, the Golden Rule first appears in Leviticus 19:18. But what lets us decide that this verse is part of a moral code, while in the very next chapter, Leviticus 20:27, we are told to stone to death any man whom we believe to be a wizard? How can we reject certain lines but not others? If there is a Biblical foundation for ignoring certain verses or chapters of the Bible, please let me know. Otherwise, you must have chosen which verses to follow yourself. And if you can choose which verses to follow yourself, what's to stop you from deriving those morals on your own? You have effectively derived a moral code on your own by picking certain morals out of a book filled with moral and amoral rules.

I look forward to continuing this conversation.

Sincerely,
scikidus

Sent November 21, 2009 by lucidatheist:

Sorry that my response will not be as long, or thought out as the others but stop spamming me with religious propaganda.

Anyone who uses the Bible for their ethics and morals should not be taken seriously considering all of the absurdities and impossibilities in it such as saying the Earth is flat and immovable.

Sent November 21, 2009 by Underlings:

The responses of the others to your incorrect claim should suffice, but I'll toss in a bit more:

EVERY social species has behavior that allows them to coexist with others of their species. Piranha, wolves, ants, etc. don't tear each other to shreds; instead, they cooperate to improve their odds of survival. Any mutations that may appear in a social species that increase the odds of survival for the species will spread throughout the species. The same thing happened (and happens) with humans, which is why we have evolved to become moral beings. Morality is the behavior we evolved to help our species coexist with other people in close societies, and it has made our species very successful indeed. All it takes is behavioral change that improves social cohesion appearing in a population, and natural selection will do the rest. We even see the result in computer simulations of natural selection of behavior.

So evolution very easily explains altruism, charity, kindness, etc., and it very clearly has a basis for moral judgements. That doesn't mean morality isn't relative--it is, because one can envision social behavior quite different from ours that could also be successful--but humans evolved morality, which is evidently a successful approach, and within our own societies a lot of morality isn't very relative.

But I'll bet even YOU believe that morality is relative. After all, God says don't commit murder...yet he commits murder throughout the Bible. Is he exempt from his own moral code? If so, then you believe morality is relative. If not, then you must accept that God is immoral.

And be aware that MOST people who accept evolution are ALSO Christians, and that MOST Christians accept evolution. Don't forget, there are a billion Catholics alone, and the Pope has accepted evolution as not being in conflict with scripture. And don't forget that there are literally THOUSANDS of additional religions, sects and cults in the world, most of which are NOT Christian, yet they also almost universally have integrated moral codes. So Christianity isn't any different.

Well, that's not entirely true...Christianity actually PROMOTES some evil behavior. Don't forget, the one character in the whole Bible who commits, condones or orders murder, genocide, slavery, torture, child abuse, rape, lying and theft is NOT Satan...it's God. And since God is supposedly the source of morality in Christian mythology, it's pretty hard to make the claim that Christianity promotes a GOOD moral code. But I will agree that it has A moral code, even if it is full of hypocrisy and ignores many behaviors any sane, rational person knows is evil.

Sent November 21, 2009 by stemcgolf:

Not interested in your christian babble and nonsense. You can come to me when you have a published peer reviewed paper on the subject. Until then, keep your fairytales to yourself. And educate yourself while you are at it.

You guys kick so much ass.

whistles

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 02:24:00 +0000

Have I really not posted in two months? Wow. In case you're thinking that this blog is dead, you're wrong. From the very beginning I was dedicated NOT to try to follow a schedule, and instead post only when I felt like posting. And I haven't felt like posting. Much.

OK, I forgot. Sue me.

I've got Rocky Road ice cream melting int he kitchen. I'll post when I feel like it, OK?

Thanks again, internet.

Your friend,
scikidus

K-Mart Fail!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:28:00 +0000

Epic K-Mart fail! (taken in downtown New York City by yours truly)

YouTube's New Userpages: Crashing!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:38:00 +0000

I need as many people as possible to check this.

1. Make sure you're not doing anything else in your browser (besides viewing this, of course).

2. Go to a user page on YouTube of someone who has the new YouTube layout and has a lot of videos. I know this happens on the vlogbrothers channel.

3. Scroll down in the user's list of uploaded videos, and click something from a while ago.

4. Watch in horror as your browser crashes.

5. If step 4 didn't happen to you, then you're lucky (or using Chrome, where Flash can't crash the browser). But in every browser I've used, YouTube's new flash program has caused an epic browser fail.

YouTube, you're going to force this crap onto us? Really?

Firefox 3.5's New Logo

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:55:00 +0000

So I've downloaded FF 3.5, and I've decided to run a quick run-down of what you get. (Yeah, it's been a while since I've posted here. Sorry.)

Most of Firefox 3.5's changes are under-the-hood, but there are a few changes, including much faster Javascript and Private Browsing mode. There are also some visual changes, including a + tab button in the tab bar, and, excitingly, a refresh on the logo!

It's really rather beautiful.

TwitterRep Bookmarklet

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:40:00 +0000

In support of the Iranian people, I've decided to help distinguish between the trustable users on Twitter and the non-trustable users. I built a bookmarklet to aide in this process.

FindTheRats, this one's for you.

TwitterRep <-- drag to bookmark bar

This code looks at a user's follower count, following count, and update count and alerts back a number. No saying how reliable it is (won't work for users with more than a million of any of those values, BTW), but it seems to do a good enough job of picking apart the wheat from the chaff.

Example time!

Good users:
mousavi1388 -- 712174233
iran09 -- 681975
TehranBereau -- 371922
persiankiwi -- 82745541
StopAhmadi -- 8964349
Change_for_Iran -- 149722592

Bad users:
simonjake -- 19
tahria -- 27
giti456789 -- 1
Toby1776 -- 18
iranianlecturer -- 174
serv_ -- 3898
Karmuk -- 89

----------

As you can see, the users you should follow have TwitterReps several orders of magnitude larger than those you shouldn't follow.

And by the way, I've got a TwitterRep of 46. Stop laughing.

Note: Just because you have a low TwitterRep does NOT automatically mean that you are un-trustworthy, as my account is an example. Just follow th converse: you CAN trust the sources with TwitterReps over, say, 50000.

~~Oh, and for the curious: aplusk has the highest TwitterRep (calculated manually) of 105,292,837,174.~~
Sorry, this is wrong. Both TheEllenShow and CNNBRK have higher TwitterReps, CNNBRK winning with a TwitterRep of 638,462,456,808, over 6 TIMES aplusk.

Also for the curious: the calculation scheme I use is:

b = # of following
a = # of followers
u = # of updates

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Ask Your Doctor! Do it! Do it NOW!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:21:00 +0000

I've decided that I should take other people's advice more. And whom should I trust more than the people I see on TV in those advertisements for various drugs? They all tell me to "talk to my doctor" about their poison.

So I will. I'm going to make a list of every drug they advise me about. I don't care if the drug isn't meant for me; if the ad says "talk to your doctor" then I will.

Manhattanhenge 5.31.09!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 02:03:00 +0000

Well, I'm back from 42nd street and 2nd. Tonight was Manhattanhenge, the magical day twice a year when the sun sets on the median of the Manhattan cross-streets, illuminating the length of the street with golden light.

Last year, we only had about a dozen people. But check out the turnout this year!

A police car stopped by to see what the commotion was about, and they ended up taking pictures along with everyone else. A lot of people simply showed up because they saw the crowd, and they walked away with a new tidbit of trivia about New York. Hooray!

Here are some pictures by yours truly:

See you all June 11!

The Onion is Funny

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:38:00 +0000

The title of this post is a tautology. Here's is the proof:

Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!

I…I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and—oh, no! For the love of God, no! It's thoughtfully mulling things over!

Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!

Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one flawed point to the next!

All together now! Put every bit of secondhand conjecture into it you've got!

Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for it. C'mon…c'mon…yes, it's going for it! Now hit it with the thing that one guy told us once while it's distracted by our ludicrous rationalizations!

Gah! It's calmly and evenhandedly deflecting everything we're throwing at it. Our deductive fallacies are only making it stronger! Wait…what on earth is it doing now? Oh, no, it has sources! My God, it's defending itself with ironclad sources! Someone stop the citing! Please, please stop the citing!

The language is impenetrable! For all that is good and holy, backpedal with all your might!

Where are the children? Someone overprotect the children! They cannot be exposed to this kind of illuminative reasoning. Their young, open minds are much too vulnerable to independent thought. We have to shield them behind our unshakeable intolerance for critical thinking.

What?!? Noooooooooo! Richard! For the love of God, it's convinced Richard!

No time for tears now. Richard's mind has been changed forever. But we mustn't let it weaken our resolve. Mark my words, our ignorance will hold, no matter the cost. Now, more than ever, we have to keep floundering ahead with blind faith in our increasingly fallacious worldview.

For Richard's sake.

What's that? Now it's making an appeal to reason? Never! Do you hear me, you eloquent, well-read behemoth? Never! We'll die before we recognize what we secretly know to be true! The cognitive dissonance only makes our denial stronger!

We have but one hope left: passive-aggressive slights disguised as impersonal discourse.† Okay, everyone, careful now…careful…if this is going to work, we have to arrogantly assume that it won't be smart enough to catch on to our attempt to salvage some feeling of superiority and—oh, God, it's calling us out! Quick, avoid eye contact and stammer an apology! Tell it we were just joking! Tell it we were joking!

Arrgh! Our pride! Oh, Lord, our pride! It burns!

All is lost. We don't stand a chance against its relentless onslaught of exhaustive research and immaculate rhetoric. We may as well lie down and—Christ, how it pains me to say it—admit that it's right. My friends, I would like to take these last few moments of stubborn close-mindedness to say that it's been an honor to dig myself into this hole with you.

Unless…wait, of course! Why didn't we think of it before? Volume! Sheer volume! It's so simple. Quickly now, we don't have much time! Don't let it get a word in edgewise! Derisively cut it off mid-sentence! Now, launch the sophomoric personal attacks! Louder, yes, that's it, louder! Be repetitive, juvenile, and obstinate! It's working! It's working!

We've done it! It's walking away and shaking its head in disgust! Huzzah! Finally—defeated with a single three-minute volley of irrelevant, off-topic shouting!

Ironic, really, isn't it?

Fun with Kings

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:12:00 +0000

"Kings", after only one season, is being canceled. The complex plot of the corrupt world behind a absolute monarchy actually makes for a great narrative. I'v eben watching the season on Hulu, and I've caught two things so far:

1. Kings runs Windows

Apparently, the press uses the Windows Logon screen and Windows Media Player 10 to take notes on the escalation of war with Gath.

2. Gossip website!
In Episode 3, the princess clicks on a link to 200meters.com and sees Captain Shepherd kissing outside a nightclub.

As it turns out, someone at NBC actually registered 200meters.com, and set it up for Kings. That's actually rather cool.

EDIT: But did I mention that she opens 200meters.com in INTERNET EXPLORER 7? No wonder there are so many problems!

Atheists and Kiva

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:22:00 +0000

You know what warms my heart? This warms my heart.

Atheists are FIRST TO DONATE TO KIVA.ORG.

wimp.com Download Bookmarklets

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:08:00 +0000

More fun with bookmarklets! This one lets you download videos (.flv format) from wimp.com.

wimp.com download

Yay!

Wolfram|Alpha: Hope you liked your soul.

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Sat, 16 May 2009 17:27:00 +0000

Yesterday ~~Skynet 0.1~~ Wolfram|Alpha went online. I have been trying out different searches, and it's very cool. It was cool, at least, until I saw this:

WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE

Interesting combination

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:53:00 +0000

emo + hemophilia = emophilia?

I'm terrible.

Sweet, a Proxy -- Bookmarklet!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Wed, 06 May 2009 16:02:00 +0000

I wanted one, so here is a bookmarklet which will automatically change your links to redirecting through 6a.nl:

6a.nl proxy!

You're welcome, world. I also made a program which gets around my school's idiotic nanny system, but since it won't work for 99.9% of nannified users, don't bother to use it.

Sweet, a Proxy!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:34:00 +0000

My current favorite proxy: "*.6a.nl/*". Basically, take the URL:

www.google.com/voice

and add the ".6a.nl" after the .com suffix but before the /whatever subdomains:

www.google.com.6a.nl/voice

Hooray!

Come Explore the Future with Me!

noreply@blogger.com (scikidus) — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:30:00 +0000

I recently read that our Local Group of galaxies is moving towards the Virgo Supercluster at 375 miles per second. That's very fast. After doing the calculations, I came to the conclusion that due to time dilation, every day on earth we move 0.7 seconds in the future relative to the rest of the universe. That means in the 4.6 billion years the earth has been around, it has catapulted itself a whopping 37283 years into the future.

That's not all. Universal Time was defined by the International Meridian Conference on October 20, 1884 as GMT. However, in the 45,487 days between October 20, 1884 and now, the earth has jumped 8 hours, 50 minutes, and 53 seconds into the future ahead of actual universal time! Therefore, at time of posting (10:30 PM EST) UT should actually be Monday, May 4, 2009 at 6:39:07 PM.