General Musing

I like YouTube, and often subscribe to new channels and unsubscribe after a while. There is a lot of good stuff on YouTube, and a lot of rubbish. YouTube has been smart in making it possible to easily add channels, and in my opinion they have put less thought into making it easy to leave the channels. In the case of multiple channels I would either need to go to each of the channels and remove them one by one, or I would go to My Feeds / My Subscriptions and remove them one by one from there. In both cases I need to modify the subscription settings shown below.

Editing the YouTube channel subscription

My issue with this is not that it takes a long time, although that is certainly a small factor. Or that having subscription management for a channel is overkill when I just want to leave a channel. Personally I believe that it should be manageable from one page, just push of a button, like subscribing. And it wasn’t, until today.

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I hate programming UIs in browsers, I’m sure everybody does. With Google’s Chrome browser another headache is born. Chrome’s JavaScript Engine V8 implements ECMAScript-262, but not with some of the features that come in JavaScript v1.6 and are implemented by FireFox. One example is the “for each in,” not that this is implemented correctly in Internet Explorer.

var query = "plaap=poekoe&hi=hello";
var valPairs = query.split('&');

for each (var pair in valPairs) {
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected identifier
        var tempPair = pair.split('=');
}

There is a solution for this I found on the Mozilla Developers Center: forEach, with this you are able to implement a callback that cycles throught the Element.

if (!Array.prototype.forEach){
  Array.prototype.forEach = function(fun /*, thisp*/) {
    var len = this.length;
    if (typeof fun != "function")
      throw new TypeError();

    var thisp = arguments[1];
    for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
      if (i in this)
        fun.call(thisp, this[i], i, this);
    }
  };
}

technorati tags: javascript, ecma, chrome, firefox, internet, explorer, ie, ff

I was trying to think about what to say about SlideShare, so I was browsing the site to give me inspiration, it didn’t work.

What I did find was Clipperz, Clipperz makes it possible to login with one click. The username and password for the site is stored encrypted at Clipperz and is decrypted and posted to the site. I’ll use the example of /., the bookmarklet provided extracts the form and uses that to populate the login form.

{
  "page": {"title": "Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters"},
  "form": {
    "attributes": {"action": "http://slashdot.org/login.pl", "method": "post"},
    "inputs":[
      {"type": "text",     "name": "unickname",   "value": "username"},
      {"type": "hidden",   "name": "returnto",    "value": "//slashdot.org/"},
      {"type": "hidden",   "name": "op", "value": "userlogin"},
      {"type": "password", "name": "upasswd",     "value": "password"},
      {"type": "checkbox", "name": "login_temp",  "value": "yes"},
      {"type": "submit",   "name": "userlogin",   "value": "Log in"}]
    },
  "version": "0.2.3"
}

To be entirely portable you can access the websites from a sidebar in your browser. Naturally this is a nice proof of concept for the real product they are selling: zero-knowledge web applications.

Zero-knowledge web applications is about making web applications more secure. Do you trust Google Documents with your confidential documents? You shouldn’t unless the data is stored without the knowledge of the SaaS provider. Clipperz password manager is the first zero-knowledge web application. This means that Clipperz knows nothing about its users and their data. They do this using a JavaScript library, based on Ajax and browser-based cryptography, which can be used to build applications that users can can use to manage their private data.

technorati tags: saas, business, javascript, security, authentication, identity

For whatever reason one of my FireFox bookmarklets to toggle checkboxes stopped working, so I wrote a new one. ( I can’t post it as a link as Yahoo! 360° doesn’t allow javascript links. )

javascript:(function(){ var i,t,x=document.getElementsByTagName("INPUT"); for( i=0; i < x.length; i++) {if(x[i].type == "checkbox") { t = x[i].onchange; x[i].onchange=null; x[i].checked=!x[i].checked; x[i].onchange=t;}}})();

You have to copy this code, all on one line and paste it into a new bookmark location field.

technorati tags: bookmarklet, javascript