Solipsism - What if this whole world is not real?

I was fascinated by the concept of solipsism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism) and started reading more about it. Eventually a related thought struck me. How do you really know that things like other people, trees, table etc exist in this world? How do you experience them? Only through your 5 senses - You see that table, You hear I speak, You smell that rose, You taste that Pizza, You touch that hot stove. Imagine for a moment that all these things do not exist and only YOU exist in this world. Is that a possibility? It is if you can also imagine the existence of an invisible force that can take control of all your 5 senses, "create" this world and feed it through the 5 senses! In fact it does not need to create the whole world, just enough things that you experience at any moment. This is very similar to the way you experience virtual worlds when you play virtual reality games. I can hear you say "ooh, ooh, wait a second..." But the questions is, how can we really prove that such an invisible force does not exist?

What do you think?

Real Life Example of Leaky Abstractions

I thought this is a great real life example of "leaky abstractions" as it applies to software development. In author's own words:

"And you can't drive as fast when it's raining, even though your car has windshield wipers and headlights and a roof and a heater, all of which protect you from caring about the fact that it's raining (they abstract away the weather), but lo, you have to worry about hydroplaning (or aquaplaning in England) and sometimes the rain is so strong you can't see very far ahead so you go slower in the rain, because the weather can never be completely abstracted away, because of the law of leaky abstractions."

You can read the complete article here:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/printerFriendly/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html

Native Spellcheck in Firefox

If you have not made the switch to the latest Firefox (version 2), please do so. There are several useful features but the killer feature for me is the ability to do spell check natively without having to depend on any third party utility/plugin. I can now confidently enter text in any web form - including the single line text boxes - with the assurance that Firefox will silently point out the misspellings and help me correct them. Amazing new feature!

Append to Clipboard

I use Google Notebook heavily. I maintain a huge collection of both professional and personal information that are collected from all over the web. I realized that I am doing lot of copy+paste and I was looking for a simple utility that can be used to append text to the clipboard (instead of replacing the clipboard text) so that after multiple copy operations, I can do just one paste operation to get all the texts that I had copied.

You would think it should be easy to find this feature in any one of those so called Clipboard Manager utilities. But no, it took me almost an hour of searching all over the web (I was almost about to give up and write a Firefox extension myself) and finally what I found was a software called "Yankee Clipper" and though I am not completely satisfied with it, it is the closest I came across. Let me know if any of you had used a better software to do this simple task.

Now I know why finding things online is so difficult and time consuming!

Flash Based Human Detector

We have all come across the annoying "enter the code" text box that most web sites use to separate humans and machines. Some times the code on the image is so skewered that even humans can not read it!. Here is one Flash based code that is easy to read for humans. Cool!

http://www.snappages.com/feedback.php

Don't know why they made the letters go up and down. Since it is Flash based, even if the letters stay still, machines can not read them, don't you agree?