I am pleased to announce The Lyrical Explorer, a website which searches for lyrics from around the Internet. It uses the results to expand its own database, which may be edited to improve future searches. All that you need to do is enter a song title and artist. What’s more, the site is very useful for developers as the API is simple and open, allowing programs to easily incorporate lyrics functionality.

Today is my birthday,  and I thought that I might take this opportunity to look at what’s happened over the past year.

Things started off nicely for me, as I was lucky enough to win Gold in the Australian Informatics Olympiad (I’m third in the intermediate section of the results). This meant that in December I was invited to attend a 10-day informatics course in Canberra, which was a lot of fun. More competitions followed, but when invited to participate in another course I decided not to attend.

School has been good, and the balance of 3 Year 12 subjects and 3 Year 11 subjects has been working out nicely this year. I set up a wiki to record various notes for my classes, and it has gathered quite a bit of content.

As far as music is concerned, I’ve been listening to Radiohead for most of the year, with some Smashing Pumpkins and lately a lot of Nine Inch Nails. My listening information is on Last.fm if you care to look.

Presents presented in my presence include:

• Altec Lansing BXR1121 speakers
• StarCraft
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV
• A dressing gown
• Some money

As far as productivenessness is concerned, here’s a list of stuff that I’ve done:

Sites

• Codaver
• AlgorithmSource

Coding

• Shroom

Anyway, I’ve probably taken enough of your time already. I hope that you have a nice day, and if you see me around give me a big smile.

Another site that I’ve made for physics:

Galileo’s Physics

I had the extreme misfortune of using Windows XP today, and my experience was not brilliant. Upon startup I was greeted with this dialog:

Sure, it is true that closing Explorer will make your system more secure, but why not shut down Windows all together if Microsoft are going down that road? As it was, explorer.exe wasn’t terminated until the dialog was dismissed, so whichever imaginary security threat that caused this message was probably still running anyway.

As an open source enthusiast, all forms of digital media that restrict rights get me upset. In particular I am referring to DRM, the piece of copyright protection which effectively restricts the usage of material which you pay for. Fortunately, there are some artists which see this as a problem and take it upon themselves to release music under free licenses. Many of these can be found on Jamendo, but here’s a list of my favourite Creative Commons and public domain albums:

• The Smashing Pumpkins – Machina II/The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music
• Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts I-IV
• Nine Inch Nails – The Slip
• Brad Sucks – I Don’t Know What I’m Doing
• Brad Sucks – Out of It
• Jonathan Coulton – Thing a Week
• pornophonique – 8-bit lagerfeuer

I have long been surprised by the fact that it is so difficult to raise events in Java. Adding listeners is easy, but as soon as you want your own event system, you’re out of luck. Through browsing the web I discovered that a commonly used “solution” is to piggy-back on existing Swing and AWT event queues. This isn’t good.

In order to fix this problem, I have started a small project called Javent. The Javent library is tiny (less than 20KiB), and makes event-raising code a lot cleaner. All of you Java developers should give it a try.

Inkscape source SVG [29.5 KiB]

The other day I came across DOS Museum, a website dedicated to the preservation of DOS games. I was instantly reminded of my childhood favourites like Hocus Pocus, Word Rescue, Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit… my eyes are beginning to glaze over already. I still have lots of respect for the old developers who had to optimize the hell out of their games to overcome hardware limitations, unlike modern developers and their GiB large products.

If you are a sad individual that never had the chance to experience pixellated madness, have a look through the catalogues and install a few games in DOSBox, an open source MS-DOS emulator. They are much better than a lot of Flash games!

This is a review of some of the most popular theories of what happens to a deceased human being. Each is rated according to its probability of happening and the desirability of the result.

Physicalism

These theories are coherent  in the context of physicalism – the philosophy that there is nothing apart from physical matter (ie no soul).

Complete Cessation of Being (aka Everything Rots)

Let’s start this review with something simple. The only thing that we can confirm that happens after death is that corpses rot. It is not much of a stretch to say that this is where a human being ultimately finishes.

Respawn!

This is an outlandish theory, although it may have some truth to it. It is based on the Infinite Monkey Theorem,  and consists of the core idea that given an infinite amount of time, a replica of your “self” will spontaneously come into being.

Cryonics

Cryonics is the system by which humans are preserved by storing them at a low temperature.

Dualism

Dualists believe that humans have a separate “soul”, which does not consist of matter. Most of these theories take a hit to their probability rating as there is no evidence to support dualism.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is when your spirit enters another creature after death, mysteriously lacking any memory.

Disembodied Spirit

Ghosts… oooooo…

Afterlife

The idea of an afterlife is certainly appealing – a paradise after death.

Conclusion

Cryonics is currently the way to go, with an even balance of desirability and actually being possible. Whilst many of the dualist theories are appealing, they all have a distinct lack of evidence to support them.

For Physics at school I put together a website about Russian nuclear history. You may find the use of Ajax interesting…
http://russiannuclear.uuuq.com/