Bugzappy's Blog

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.

Yesterday (august 31, 2009) the OpenAjax Alliance announced in a press release the immediate availability of javascript technology for securely integrating javascript code (widgets) from untrusted sources into your own web pages (and javascript code). It’s called OpenAjax Hub 2.0 and it is touted as the enabler of secure mashups.

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.

Read on slashdot: the New York Times on August 5 ran a long interview with David Vladeck, the new head of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the US Federal Trade Commission. In it, Vladeck explains that his organization is going to focus on what happens to your data that you were hoping would not when you give it to a website.

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.

Read on slashdot: how Amazon is still filing patents on the obvious, hoping to get a last few into the USPTO before the patent officers are finally told to reject this kind of “fluff”:

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.

Mike Nachbaur, who is a PhoneGap developer and contributor, made some significant inroads with the App Store review process, as it applies to code written on the PhoneGap framework. Thanks to his work and to the diligence of one of the application reviewers at Apple, one could say that PhoneGap has a solid, if informal, contact with Apple. If you have an interest in PhoneGap, read Mike’s blog post.

We eagerly await further news.