If the world worked like Facebook

Dog vs. Man

Man. Dog. Synonyms.

Google Chrome app runs Internet Explorer

Finally, the end of Internet explorer!

If you're working at a prehistoric company like mine, you're forced to use Internet Explorer because web applications made by your ancient IT guys support only Internet Explorer 8 or worse. The same applies to any websites that only support Internet Explorer.

There's a solution: A Google Chrome app available called IETab, which opens a virtual Internet Explorer tab inside your Google Chrome tab.

This lets you run any of these dinosaur applications plaguing you - from the comfort of your Chrome browser.

Goodbye Internet Explorer. It's not me. It's you.

The world, as seen by South Africans

Hacktivists "Anonymous" take down child porn sites

Yesterday, the hacker group Anonymous hacked and crashed a web server containing a group of child porn websites. In the process, they also obtained a list of almost 1600 people who frequent the sites, and made those people's details available to law agencies.

After warning the server named Freedom Hosting to take down its content, Anonymous took down the sites for about five minutes. An administrator of the sites restored them promptly, but anonymous took down the sites again. They said: "We will continue to not only crash Freedom Hosting's server, but any other server we find to contain, promote, or support child pornography."


Anonymous are regarded as controversial cyber vigilantes. They have hacked Sony, in protest to Sony's moves against chipping Playstations. They have hacked Visa, Mastercard and Paypal for their lack of support to Wikileaks. A member claimed to plan to take down Facebook on 5 November 2011, but apparently the plan is not widely supported by the group.


Anonymous have been hunted by law agencies for some time now, but famously claim "You can't arrest an idea."


It's great to see they're using their skills for good now. 

[Source: PC Magazine]

[Image source: pilipinasatibapa]

Virtual monkeys (sort of) complete Shakespeare

... but they cheated.

BBC news reported on virtual monkeys almost writing the complete works of Shakespeare. 

The Infinite Monkey Theorem says that if you have enough monkeys bashing random buttons on keyboards, and you give them enough time, they will eventually produce any given text. I like to think that this is how the Twilight trilogy came to be.

Anderson, a US programmer, decided to test this theorem out on the entire works of Shakespeare. He programmed some virtual monkeys, and ran a few million of them tapping virtual keyboards on the Amazon servers. So far they're 99.990% complete with the works of Shakespeare. 

Anderson cheated, though.

The monkeys are supposed to type the entire Shakespeare collection in one coherent sequence. What Anderson did was record lots of 9 character long sequences from each monkey, and then see if they occurred anywhere in Shakespeare's writings. If that 9 character long sequence existed, he then ticked off that tiny part of the works of Shakespeare as "written." The monkeys therefore did very little of the actual writing, because an intelligent search performed the construction of the works.

Bummer. Shakespeare 1 - 0 Monkeys.

Infinite Monkey Theorem.. or Telkom customer support centre?

Enter the brogrammer

Until recently, society did a great job at compartmentalising different types of people. We had nerds. We had jocks. We had kugels.  We had good girls. We had sluts. Now why did people have to go and mess this all up? Hipsters. Justin Bieber. Just two examples of combinations that weren't meant to be. It gets worse. Enter the brogrammer.

Now how would you identify a brogrammer?


Tight polo shirt? Possibly. Popped collar? For sure.
Wearing sunglasses. Indoors. A second pair hooked on his collar, just in case? Give-away.
Several Apple products. Running Linux.
Consuming "brotein." In any form. Brotein shake, steak and eggs, it all goes straight to those brogramming guns.
Wearing noise cancelling headphones. Probably listening to dubstep.

Spotted at O.R. Tambo International Airport.
Dual sunglasses, iPad, tight shirt, sandals. 

For the aspiring brogrammer..


Hit the gym, boet. There's plenty of gym apps for your iPhone to keep tabs on your workout while you tweet about your brotein intake, bench improvement and the schweet honey on the treadmill.

Learn to multitask. Every brogrammer should be able to program while watching the rugby.

No weekend can be entirely devoted to programming. You need at least one visit to Tiger Tiger, Clapham Grand or any other bro-approved club.

Drink smart. Vodka, lime and water? Check. Castle Light? Check. Anything with carbs or sugar? Hell no. If the club is awesome enough to let you take your brotein shake inside, all the better.

Before programming, remember your flowcharts. You can't write anything without a flowchart.

Image from quora.com

The solution to BP's oil problem

Birds are nature's sponges. 
We know they're amazing at soaking up oil. Just ask any penguin you happen to know.

There's two species of birds we could do without - Feral Pigeons and Hadedas.

So lets gather thousands of pigeons and hadedas, and drop them in the oil spill. The ocean will be back to normal in no time.Two birds with one stone!

Fix your SA mirror flags!

What really happened to the Seacom cable