Proof That God Does Exist – You Can Finally Block Those Insanely Annoying Facebook Quizzes For Good

Artem Russakovskii — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:45:00 +0000

WTF

I don't know about you, but I'm incredibly sick of Facebook quizzes. Yeah, shit like this which occupies 90% of my news feed:

And to make matters worse, Facebook provides no means to block these quizzes and rid your profile of them forever. The only thing you can do is block each individual quiz. But just like weeds in your backyard, when you block one, three more rise up in its place. I know I am not alone here – there are literally billions of people searching for a solution to the plague.

So, what does the tech community do when it is not happy?

Runs to mommy, crying.
Drinks heavily, passes out, and comes to work with a keyboard faceprint, dressed as Koolaid.
Ignores the problem and lives with it (pussy).
Takes the matters into its own hands and develops a solution.

The correct answers are:

1. 2. and 4.

Enter a true geek at heart by the name of Steeev with his Facebook Purity greasemonkey script that was created with the sole purpose of BLOCKING THE FUCKING QUIZZES. Go ~~Steeve~~ Steeev!

Solution

Installation is as easy as 1, 2, 3:

Install Firefox (you already have that, right?)
Install the Firefox greasemonkey extension
Install the Facebook Purity script

That's it. Now go to your Facebook page (make sure you access it via www.facebook.com or www.new.facebook.com and not YOURUNIVERSITY.facebook.com (like ucdavis.facebook.com)).

Check it out – all quizzes are gone, the script even tells you how many quizzes were blocked:

Pure bliss. Rest quizless now, everyone.

How Do I Get Both The Return Value And Text In Perl? Backticks vs. System() (Perl 5.10)

Artem Russakovskii — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:52:28 +0000

I'm sure most Perl coders have to face this annoying problem at one point or another: how do you consistently get the return value out of a system call, be at executed via backticks or system()? Backticks return the output of the program with no error code in sight, while system() returns the error code but prints the output instead of putting it into a variable.

The best solution I could find to this problem to date was posted at http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=19119 and involved opening a piped filehandle. It worked quite well but always felt like a hack (which it was). Having used the new Perl 5.10 for a few months, I was shocked today to find this new variable that I've been dreaming about for years:

1	${^CHILD_ERROR_NATIVE}

This variable gives the native status returned by the last pipe close, backtick command, successful call to wait() or waitpid(), or from the system() operator. See perlrun for details. (Contributed by Gisle Aas.)

http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.10.0/pod/perl5100delta.pod#New_internal_variables

I've just tested it and it works as described. Finally!.. what else can I say?

beer planet » annoying

Proof That God Does Exist – You Can Finally Block Those Insanely Annoying Facebook Quizzes For Good

WTF

Solution

How Do I Get Both The Return Value And Text In Perl? Backticks vs. System() (Perl 5.10)