[edited for clarity 1/25/2010:] Google’s tracking of everything you search — and like — on the internet is only marginally less scary than Facebook’s harvesting of your personal data for commercial use . It’s a bit like having someone following you around town from the moment you step out of your house in the morning, and taking notes on everything you look at, intract with, purchase, etc. At the of the day that person sells that information to the highest bidding advertisement/marketing agency, or straight to WalMart. They keep records of it too for data mining at a later date (up to 9 months). During that time there is no saying that the government cannot ask for full access to these archives. And much scarier in fact, there is no saying who might be able to hack their way into these archives.

And why not? I have nothing to hide. Still, better safe than sorry. What I don’t feel the need to hide today may become something worth keeping private tomorrow, if the political or social or economic landscape changes a lot. [added 1/25/2010: ] as recently written in a CNN opinion piece: “it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state” (or organized crime).

In short, I don’t believe one minute that Google has malevolent intentions, but I do very much say that they are reckless in aggregating and therefore exposing to misuse so much of our personal information. Similarly I don’t see today’s Western governments as major threats to my liberties, but (1) that could change and (2) other governments or movements could target my private info (c.f. China targets foreign supporters of civil liberties in China — just google “chinese government hacked gmail accounts” for more details..

So I say, let Google ask: Where have you been?

They don’t need to know. I’m going to try out this GoogleSharing.net thing.

If you want to do the same, log in to your facebook account and then go straight to http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account

It’s too bad because some of it was pretty useful indeed. I like the service, but I cannot use it in a way that I find satisfactory for my need for privacy.

Without saying so, Google is implying that the Chinese government may have been trying to hack the GMail accounts of human rights activists and their supporters in China and abroad. That, along with the censorship imposed by the post-communist government, is the moral high-ground on which Google stands.

Beyond the moral reasoning, there is a strong business motivation for Google to play hard ball with the Chinese government. Google’s core business model is compatible with neither censorship nor lack of privacy. Censorship undermines the perceived value of its search product, which it uses to collect data. And lack of privacy reminds people that Google holds a *lot* of their personal data in a form that can readily be mined, and that even if Google’s primary use of it is relatively benevolent (ad targeting), there still is a huge risk to the user: plain old Orwellian 1984-ism.

While these two reasons would not be strong enough motivation for most users to ditch Google and its brethren (in favor of what?), they might provide the basis for legal or government-level action in the US, Canada and the EU aimed at more strictly regulating Google’s main business activity — the aggregation of personal data for the purpose of targeting ads.

That could be the real threat perceived by Google.

you might set your x-axis labels (values, to be precise) to

<a href=”http://www.prototypejs.org”>jquery</a>

<a href=”http://www.jquery.com”>jquery</a>

<a href=”http://www.mootools.com”>jquery</a>

The links get rendered in a <div> outside the canvas, but you cannot click them because the chart’s canvas extends over them.

solve it this way (using jquery for example):

$(’.jqplot-xaxis-tick’).css(’z-index’, 1000);

That sets your labels above the canvas and they can now be clicked.

Also reported at http://groups.google.com/group/jqplot-users/browse_thread/thread/bd9b9c49e609167e

But. When it comes to inserting data into it via rake db:migrate or rake db:seed (the latter being the correct way of managing your data separately from your schema), you may encounter outright frustration: Rails will not let you set the id of the records!

For example, you write

Singer.find_or_create_by_id(:id => 100, :name => “Donna Summer”, :rating => 2)

but in your database, Dona’s id is just 1, or whatever the next available AUTO INCREMENT number was. I feel love — not.

There are at least two solutions, that hinge on getting around the fact the id is a protected attribute. First one:

singer.find_or_create_by_id (:id => 100, :name => “Dona Summers”, :rating => 2) {|record| record.id = 100}

or you can make use of the attributes= method of ActiveRecord::Base in the following way:

Singer.attributes=({ :name => ‘Donna Summer’, :rating => 2}, false)

The false passed as third parameter means “do not protect the protected attributes”. The RoR API documentation puts it this way:

attributes=(new_attributes, guard_protected_attributes = true)

Allows you to set all the attributes at once by passing in a hash with keys matching the attribute names (which again matches the column names).

If guard_protected_attributes is true (the default), then sensitive attributes can be protected from this form of mass-assignment by using the attr_protected macro. Or you can alternatively specify which attributes can be accessed with the attr_accessible macro. Then all the attributes not included in that won‘t be allowed to be mass-assigned.

Look it up on http://api.rubyonrails.org/

]]> http://www.bugzappy.com/2009/10/17/setting-the-id-of-new-database-records-in-ruby-on-rails/feed/ 0 http://www.bugzappy.com/2009/09/05/blink-in-style-using-jquery/ http://www.bugzappy.com/2009/09/05/blink-in-style-using-jquery/#comments Sat, 05 Sep 2009 23:01:39 +0000 bugzappy http://www.bugzappy.com/?p=328 Today I released the CyclicFade jQuery Plugin. It has its own dedicated page for details, demo, and download. It is listed in the jquery plugin repository.

There is a very similar initiative at Microsoft: websandbox at Microsoft livelabs. I have no idea if these are one and the same initiatives, or competitors, or somewhere in the middle.

My prediction is that beyond mashups and many other fantastic applications, this kind of technology will at last make the Semantic Web a reality. Why? because now data and its closely associated code (just like an object in OOP) can safely travel together from any source to any web application. The code is what gives the data some meaning even when the “mashup” does not know the semantics.  As long as we can apply this idea to as *small* a piece of data as we (architects and developers) want, we can build web 3.0.

As a result of this new technology, expect the start of a very dynamic phase of web 2.0 advances.

Read the OpenAjax Hub 2.0 Specification here.

It’s clear that nobody reads or understands terms-of-use and privacy agreements; so there’s something unfair in pretending that we freely gave up our provate information when we just can’t know how it will be used.

Expected show-time is about a year from now when either a consensus has been reached with the industry, or the Bureau of Consumer Protection has had enough and goes on a crusade.

Along with the overhaul of the patent system as it applies to software and business processes, this promises to bring order to the gold rush that the collection and trading of personal data has become.

A method of providing fixed computer-displayable content in response to a consumer request for content, the method comprising:obtaining a digital image corresponding to the requested content;selecting an advertisement to be included in an on-demand electronic content corresponding to the requested content;including the advertisement the digital image corresponding to the requested content;generating fixed computer-displayable content corresponding to the requested content; andproviding the computer-displayable content to the consumer.

from United States Patent Application 20090171750

see also United States Patent Application 20090171751

Nothing in there would be new in any way shape or form, if it were not for the word “fixed”. So basically the patent applications are on the idea that you have an electronic book with pre-allocated spaces for advertisement. When you order your e-book, the publisher (Amazon) plugs in ads-du-jour, tailored to your interests/profiles/secret-Amazon-file.

This idea is a hybrid between newspaper advertisement and adsense.  There are so many examples of publications that come so close to Amazon’s patent claims, that it is hard to imagine how they could get through the patent examiner’s net, especially given the current crack-down on “business method” patents. If all goes well, soon this kind of patent application will be a dying breed; and our children will laugh at us for letting this kind of thing happen in the first place.

Shame on Amazon for filing this literal piece of c**p. I hope none of their claims make it through; it will be such a waste of money and intelligence to challenge them — and yet surely win.

Shame on the inventors, Zhou; Hanning; (Seattle, WA) ; Liang; Jian; (Seattle, WA) ; Yacoub; Sherif M.; (Seattle, WA).

I personally would not write home about having “invented” anything here. The way it happened is probably something like this: 3 guys had a meeting, someone said “hey let’s make e-books with ads in them”, another one said “yeah right, just like AdSense but with books, and then we target users with ads based on their profiles, right?” and the third one said “let’s file a patent on it”.

I wonder if one of these guys has a tie that curls up in a funny way, another one is bald and wears square glasses, and the third one has pointed hair on each side of his head. Because this story might have been copyrighted by Scott Adams already. Or perhaps they licensed the rights.

We eagerly await further news.