Year: 2007

Face about

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 29, 2007

I watched with some interest the fooflah about Facebook’s Beacon.

On the one hand, I think the application serves a useful purpose–it provides a dose of reality for those who have been extolling the virtues of the ‘social graph’ in all dewey eyed innocence. It’s hard to ignore that purchase of Depends showing up for all your friends to see. Hard for your friends to miss, too. Yes, it’s nice to actually see the snooping that’s happening without having to indulge in guesswork: am I, or am I not, a commodity. Now we know for sure: just stick us on the shelf between the sardines and the peanut butter.

On the other hand, how rude.

Now Facebook has come out with a new plan: the stores will still track you, still send your purchase information to Facebook, but you have to actively OK the first story for the site. This still means that the information is sent to Facebook. As proud as you are buying that new Nikon D300, how do you feel about information being sent to Facebook about the good deal on that…oh oh.

Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.

(emph. mine)

Uh huh.

Of course, I expect those people who signed the petition and protested such an invasion of their privacy and trust to quit the service. Why else would people get so uptight but still continue? Unless, like the young lady quoted in the New York Times, they also feel they don’t have a right to privacy.

Indeed.

Am I quitting Facebook? Well, one doesn’t quit Facebook. One deactivates, leaves, never to return, and hopefully hunts down and eradicates every Facebook cookie stored on any and all machines, promising to never, ever, buy into the hype on Techmeme, ever again. It’s not quitting, per se, as much as throwing up barricades. After all, when I go shopping for … it’s none of your damn business.

updated

Oh, look, the Manz R sayin de same thing. Well, that’s a relief. I wouldn’t want people to have to rely on the opinion of a girl.

SVG

Comments line graph

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 29, 2007

I had promised a WordPress pluggable version of the comments line graph and here it is. The line graph application is in two pieces: one to place in your theme directory and include in your page template; and a plug-in that will create the cached comment count file.

File one is graphcomments.php, which is installed in your theme. You’ll include the following in your web page template where you want the graph positioned:

<object style="width: 810px" data="/wp/theme/graphcomments.php" type="image/svg+xml" ></object>

Change the location for your environment. The element needs to be styled to fit the preferred width. The number of comments remains the same, but the graph resizes based on this width. The following is the same graph, but the containing element is set to 500 pixels wide.

[object removed]

In addition, the graphcomments.php has a style section with three values that you can change: line width (stroke-width), color (stroke), and opacity (stroke-opacity, a value between 0 and 1, with 0 being transparent, 1 being fully opaque).

The second piece is the plug-in, store_comments.php, which needs to be added to your plug-in directory. Both of the files require access to a single file, called comments.csv. This is a file that must be writable by the world, stored wherever you want. You can make it by creating an empty text file, and then use “chmod 766” to make it writable. If you don’t make this file, the application will attempt to create the file, which means the whole directory has to be world writable.

Both store_comments.php and graphcomments.php have a constant, FILENAME, which needs to be altered to fit the location of where the comments.csv file is stored.

How the comment graph line works is that whenever a new comment is saved, the comments.csv is updated to reflect the comment counts from the most recent 100 posts. The application that generates the SVG reads this file for the comma-separated values, and then creates the line graph.

At this time, the comments line graph is restricted to 100 comments or less, so, be forewarned if you get those 130+ comment days, the peak will be truncated.

The graphcomments.php application can be used on any data that is located in the file, each value separated by a comma. You can use it for category counts, unique visitor counts, anything that has simple totals over time.

Version 1.0 beta:

graphcomments.php store_comments.php

Steps:

Click the links and save the files, changing the extension to php from phps.
Place the graphcomments.php in your theme.
Place the store_comments.php in your plug-ins directory.
Create an empty text file named comments.csv, and place it in a directory. The directory does not have to be web accessible.
Change the file permissions to world writable, chmod 766.
Change the FILENAME value in both graphcomments.php and store_comments.php to the location of comments.csv file.
Add the line graph object element, example given above, to wherever your want the line graph to display.
Style the object element and the line graph.

The line graph is created using SVG. You don’t have to serve your pages as XHTML when you include SVG via an object element, as this application does. The line graph should work in IE if the person has the Adobe SVG plug-in installed, but no promises. Or you can set a container DIV element in which the object is installed to not display for IE. Check my header to see how to create IE specific style sheets.

I tried to center the line graph so that the tips aren’t truncated until after the 100 comment mark. There is white space at the top and bottom, but using negative margins for the top and bottom should eliminate most of it.

NOTE:

Safari fills in the background with white, by default, for the object container. I’m exploring how to change this, but I don’t expect to have a lot of luck. It looks like this behavior is a bug (or as planned, but not wanted). Feel free to use, but the graph won’t have a transparent background like the graph in my header, which is inline SVG. Of course, you can also copy my inline SVG, but then you’ll have to serve your pages as XHTML.

Even the mistakes are fun

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 25, 2007

Anne Van Kesteren:

A new survey reveals that at least Microsoft and IBM think the HTML charter does not cover the canvas element.

I have to wonder, when reading the survey results, how much the people who voted actually used either SVG or the Canvas element. I covered both SVG and the Canvas Element in the book, but I focused more on SVG. Comparing the two–SVG and Canvas–is like comparing the old FONT element with CSS.

The Canvas element requires scripting. The SVG element doesn’t, even for animation if you use the animate elements. In addition, mistakes in SVG can be fun, as I found when I missed a parameter value in mistaken animation. A couple lines of markup. No script. Both Opera and Safari do an excellent job with the animation elements. I’m expecting Firefox to join this group in the next year.

If you use scripting, you can access each element in the SVG document as a separate element. You can’t do that with Canvas.

I still don’t think the Canvas element should be part of a new HTML 5, whatever the grand plans. However, since all but IE supports the Canvas element, it would be foolish to drop it. A better option would be to consider the Canvas element a bitmapped version of SVG and create a separate group to ensure it grows in a standard manner.

I did like what David Dailey wrote in the survey results:

I have considerable ambivalence about <canvas> as I have noted previously. If we were designing HTML 5 from the ground up , SVG and canvas ought to share syntax and ought not to duplicate so much functionality. <canvas> brings a few needed things with it, though it seems rather a bit of poor planning on the part of the advocates of <canvas> that has gotten us to this point. Those historically frustrated with W3C chose to ignore SVG and now seem to want W3C to ignore SVG in favor of a lesser technology. At the same time, <canvas> does enable client-side image analysis by giving the developer access to pixel values, and that alone allows for some tolerance of what otherwise seems to be a curious decoupling of reason from politics. Does it re-invent the wheel? — only about 95% of it is redundant with 20% of SVG.

As for all the discussion about semantic API…years ago I, and others, made a fight for a model and associated XML vocabulary, RDF, we said would stand the test of time and hold up under use. The road’s been rough, and few people are going to defend reification, but RDF fuels the only truly open social graph in existence. Five years ago. That was about the time when everyone believed that all we’d need for semantics was RSS. Including Microsoft.

Critters

Squid Scandal

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date November 16, 2007

It’s not often that I can report a scandal for Squid Friday.

Wednesday night, the History channel aired a program from its new series, Monster Quest, about a supposed ‘giant’ Humboldt squid, and whether it could be the famed Kraken of the past. Though the Humboldt typically are no more than a couple of meters long, they are aggressive, a closer match for Kraken behavior than other, larger squid.

Now, Monster Quest is a pure cryptozoology show, though they do engage scientists, or least seem to engage scientists. This particular show tried something I’ve never seen tried previously: attaching a ‘squid cam’ to a Humboldt squid, and then filming what it uncovers as it dives to deeper depths.

The squid sank down, down, down. Along the way, Humboldts would ‘mouth’ the camera, whether as attack or curiosity is open to interpretation. It was at a 1000 feet that we caught a glimpse that, frankly, had me sitting up and out of my chair.

It was a beautiful, graceful, and large, squid, barely seen in the murky water. How big is hard to say, but you knew as soon as you looked at it, that it was significantly larger than the Humboldt carrying the camera. Here’s a portion of the video, though it doesn’t do justice to the larger squid image.

I immediately located a Tonmo thread on the film and have been following the debate associated with this film. It especially got interesting when Scott Cassell, who assisted with the show, left a note debunking most of the supposed facts, including the squid measurements.

The original size proposed by the show writers was that this squid was 108 feet long. They came up with this value by measuring distances based on what they decided was an eye reflection. Well, few people in the Tonmo thread bought into this, including Scott, but he did propose that it could be a 25 foot, or more, Architeuthis. That’s Latin for my favorite, Giant Squid.

If the squid was an Architeuthis, then this is still a very exciting discovery. The only other film of a live Architeuthis was hooked on a fishing line, which is an unnatural environment for the creature. This film would show the squid in very realistic surroundings. In addition, show it in waters that I didn’t think had evidence of Architeuthis.

Dr. O’Shea is attempting to get a better copy of the video, and I imagine he’ll have excellent input into what the squid is. In the meantime, the cryptos are having fun.

update

A better video.