Take back your search history from Google

You may have already noticed that if you are using a Google product like GMail, the next time you use Google Search you are 'logged in' to search as well. This means that your search queries are attached now with your Google user name. This fact is clearly described in Google's Privacy FAQ for Search History as follows;

"In order to provide the service, Search History saves information about your activity on Google including your search queries, the results you click on, and the date and time of your searches. Over time, the service may use additional information about your activity on Google or other information you provide us in order to deliver a better search experience."

Now, if you are like me, you will look upon this as a violation of your on line privacy. I do not recall signing up for such a 'service' and a clear procedure to get rid of this 'feature' is not indicated by Google. So I did some research and figured out a few things my self.

To turn off history recording and delete the already stored data about your searches go here. If for some reason you want them to start 'monitoring' you again go here. You can manage all your Google Accounts from this page as well. This is accessible through the "My Account" link on top of the Google Search page as described here.

Personally I agree that this is an innovative feature by Google. But they should have asked for my permission before recording my on line activity, with a clear indication of who will have access to this information and to what extent. I notice that Yahoo has followed this path as well. I think it is unfair that a service provider will opt to virtually 'steal' the user credentials stored in cookies from one application to be used in another application without the expressed permission of the user.

"If I gave GMail permission to remember me, then GMail should be the only application remembering me. If another application from the same domain wants to do the same, please ask for my permission first."


Still see your username on the search pages?

Although Google now claims to have stopped monitoring your web activity, you still see your username associated with the search page. Now what? You have 2 options (classic red pill blue pill scenario[1]);

a. Trust Google or
b. Use a service such as Scandoo, which gives you both anonymity AND a bunch of additional security features. They also have a nice set of Firefox and IE search plugins as well.

So there you have it. Google Search, it's been fun hanging out with you all these years. But till you re-visit the 'Don't Be Evil' motto, I'll stick with Scandoo. :)

---

[1]

Morpheus: I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice. Tumbling down the rabbit hole?
Neo: You could say that.
Morpheus: I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he's expecting to wake up. Ironically, this is not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?
Neo: No.
Morpheus: Why not?
Neo: 'Cause I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life.
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know, you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there. Like a splinter in your mind -- driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Neo: The Matrix?
Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?
(Neo nods his head.)
Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, or when go to church or when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind. (long pause, sighs) Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back.
(In his left hand, Morpheus shows a blue pill.)
Morpheus: You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. (a red pill is shown in his other hand) You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. (Long pause; Neo begins to reach for the red pill) Remember -- all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.
(Neo takes the red pill and swallows it with a glass of water)

The business value of SOA

A very informative talk by Anne Thomas Manes, highlighting some key user queries such as;

- What is SOA?
- What SOA is not?
- Where exactly are we as far as adoption is concerned?
- How to go about implementing SOA and some realistic time lines


I particularly liked how she de-hyped ESBs as a key part of a SOA implementation. I always felt that an ESB should be an enabler at the most but never a key to SOA. It's good to know my thoughts were not misguided :)

BabyTux Digest launched, in style ...

We are off the ground finally and the BabyTux Digest is 'officially' in circulation as an e-magazine.

A bunch of people gathered at the 'Commons' Last evening for the launch. The final draft of the digest was presented by Arunan and most of the articles were explained by some of the authors present. Bud and I mentioned a few things about how it all started and future plans for the digest. Hasmin had some interesting ideas on marketing Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in general, using popular idols as spokespersons. One of the best ideas I have heard in a while, which might work very well, if put to work.

Kudos to all the authors who contributed articles and reviewers for their feedback. We already have around 14 authors ready to submit articles. This means a lot, since the digest is driven by the Sri Lankan FOSS community, voluntarily, with no monetary rewards whatsoever, at the moment.

BabyTux digest is a free publication (Free as in 'Freedom' AND Free as in 'Beer') under the Creative Commons license.

Pics of the event are in Flickr

Download the digest and have a look. A dedicated site will be up shortly.

Ubuntu Dapper Launch @ Sri Lanka...

I had a great time at the Sri Lankan Dapper launch party last Saturday at The Excel World. I sincerely believe that 'Ubuntu' will be the Linux distribution that made Linux mainstream among the desktop users. With the Dapper release, they have improved so many things, which makes their moto "Linux for human beings" very realistic.

For example, one of the first things I noticed last Saturday was how 'transparent' networking has become in Dapper. I have an Ethernet at home and was working on that right before I packed my laptop and came to the launch party. On arrival and while booting my laptop, Ubuntu has managed to detect the wifi at Excel World, connected to it and changed my default gateway to 'eth2', which is my wireless card. The result ?? The moment I finished booting, I have connected to Yahoo Messenger (with Gaim) and GMail (with firefox) with no interaction on my part at all. That's not all. When I went home that evening, it did the same thing backwards, so that I was connected to my home Ethernet. Sweet !!!!



We managed to burn and give away quite a few Dapper CD's (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu).

Half way into the party, an effort was underway to build a RAID using USB Flash Drives and a Hub, which never saw completion due to our short attention span to anything other than Ubuntu Dapper.



Mahangu, who was the chief organizer of the event, has posted pictures in his flickr gallery.

@ the Honda Meet

Last Saturday I had the chance to get involved in the first Honda Meet in Sri Lanka and man there were some 'seriously' riced up hondas there. As a guy who is more into the 'clean' outlook as opposed to the 'ricey' look, I loved the elegant, black Honda S2000, which was there.

Our guys at autoLanka has done an excellent job in organizing, I must say. Pictures of the event are on the sites gallery. Great photography Preveen (our 'official' photo dude).

Gambas Tutorial from FOSS-ed for Hackers

The session I did on Linux GUI programming with Gambas, is available online now, along with most of the other sessions. This tutorial should help as a starting point for guys familiar with GUI development in VB to migrate to Linux programming.

Happy Hacking !!!

Kaffeinate yourselves

Bud, Arunan and I have decided to launch a GNU/Linux magazine for the Sri Lankan GNU/Linux newbie. My article on Kaffeine is available from yesterday.

The next article due by me is on amaroK. However, I need to do a dist-upgrade from my Ubuntu Breezy to Dapper to get the latest version of amaroK.

So.. Go Kaffeinate yourselves in the meantime... :)

FOSS-ed for Hackers

A very productive two days at the FOSS-ed ended yesterday.

The first day was graced by Professor Lawrence Lessig , a co-founder of Creative Commons who did an excellent presentation on the concept of 'commons' and the importance of 'freedom' for innovation.

This time I got the opportunity to conduct a session as well on Gambas. It was a good audience who were keen to learn. I guess FOSS in Sri Lanka is becoming mainstream. It's apparent by the large number of corporate participants along with the university students.

Google Web Toolkit :: First Impressions

Get it here

Just got the toolkit up and runing along with a project in Eclipse. I have been trying all sorts of javascript libraries trying to develop a satisfactory AJAX PoC for a while now. I was not very happy with the results.

With the Google Web Toolkit, I (mostly a java guy) was able to get a basic 'Hello World' AJAX application running in record time. Eclipse integration is simply great, which brings in the ability to debug AJAX applications in a 'civilized' manner, among other things.

The documentation and the samples were very helpful in ramping up. I'm now looking at the RPC and the surrounding architecture. I think this would be the toolkit that made AJAX 'usable' for a broader subset of developers.

Hope to see great things in the coming days ....

Installing CDAX on Linux

The text below applies for the CDAX version 5.4 (and will apply for past and future versions if the issues are not solved).

First and foremost, for the moron who developed the installer and hosted it at the site ... Thanks for nothing !!!. Go and;

a. Read the installer creator's manual before writing installers with it.
b. Learn Linux before pretending you know how to write installers for it.


For the rest of you guys here's how to clean up this mess and set up the CDAX software on your preferred Linux distro.

After downloading the .bin file and giving it execute permissions, don't even think about running it again and again. It's a bloody waste of time. Just go to step 1 below.

Before going to step 1, let's dissect what this guy has done. After running the installer and it dying out, there will be 2 log files generated in the same directory. These are named 'errors.log' and 'jinstall.log'. The most important information can be found on the latter. Going through it we can see what the 'wannabe' installer maestro has done.

First, he has turned 'off' the JVM search functionality, which means irrelevant of the fact that I already have an up-to-date JVM installed, the installer will install it's own JVM. (In case you were unfortunate enough to download that 30 MB installation using a dial-up connection, keep in mind that the bulk of that file was the JVM and not the actual CDAX software. He should have put two installers with/without the JVM included.)

Then after extracting his JVM to my hard drive, the installer tries to execute the 'java' executable inside it, without bothering to set execute permissions first. Obviously the installer goes south from that point on.

So that about sums it up for the dissection. I hope I wasn't too harsh on the guy. On second thoughts... No I don't hope so. If you are putting out a software (along with the image of your company at stake) on the line, you should spend time to find out whether the installer works on all platforms. I wonder what the story is with the Macintosh users.


Now let's see how I got this thing working in my Ubuntu Breezy.

Step 1: Run the installer with sudo (or as root, whatever fancies you ...)
Step 2: After the installation fails :) Go to the directory where the installer puts its JVM in. That would be /usr/local/bin/jvm/jre1.5
Step 3: Give the 'java' executable execute permissions, so that it can be executed by a normal user.
Step 4: Run the installer again as a normal user. Voila !!! The wizard starts and it's point and click time from there on..
Step 5: Now to get rid of this VM (if you already had one installed and this was force installed). Deleting this VM and creating a simlink to your original 'java' executable should cure that irritation.


Hope this helps ....