cum grano salis — nobody likes a clever bastard

Oh no. Someone just realized that after agreeing to a contract allowing it, information willingly given to a company essentially gives that company the right to do whatever they want with that information. Drrr. That someone is Harriet Jacobs, ultra-victim.

I’m approving this after deleting hundreds of comments like this, since I’ve addressed this a few times already

This explains why the comments are basically an extension of the yawnfest, where it’s all, “Oh, your situation is so bad. SUE THEM!” I giggled when I read that she should get a cease and desist order, with all of the white knights chiming in.

I opted out of Buzz when it arrived, but it still auto-followed.

Hm, what is the law that protects someone in this case? I’m more than guessing that there isn’t one, since it’s probably stipulated in the contract that services may or may not work properly and data you give them still belongs to them. You opted in to just about everything when you decided to use Google services. Read the not-so-fine print. Or, hey, since you are an ultra-victim, maybe you should not make anything public in the first place.

So! All future comments about, “Turn Buzz off,” “Make your stuff private,” “Don’t approve contacts,” “Make your profile private,” “You shouldn’t have approved Buzz in the first place” are to be deleted, because I DID ALL THOSE THINGS.

Google is not in the business of protecting anyone’s privacy. Haven’t you read the news since they started business? Do you know anything about the people you gave your “private” information to? Did you gamble with your life (!) and incorrectly expect them to be in that business? Google sucks for a lot of reasons, but not because you still live up to your history of misplacing trust.

I have finally had some time to sit down and figure out why submitted form data was disappearing when there were form validation errors. I tracked it down to facelets.BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE, yet another one of Facelets completely undocumented features.

You may be wondering why I had it enabled in the first place, since I didn’t read the documentation that doesn’t exist. Well, I’m dealing with a few sizable forms and a pretty small heap, and according to this Facelets enhancement, I would get a magical 30-60% memory savings. Great, except it breaks everything.

BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE seems to go back to 2006, when it was added to save on saved state size. 10k down to 600 bytes sure sounds like a big deal, except it breaks everything.

I’m not the first to notice this, and people have been having problems with it ever since:

• net.java.dev.facelets.users [Facelets] BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE failure
• net.java.dev.facelets.dev CACHE_VEW_ROOT=false and BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE=true
• facelets.BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE breaks h:commandButton in seam
• No saved view state

Similar behavior was noted and fixed in MyFaces, but it was related to UIInput. Maybe the mechanism is similar.

So, I went back and took out the web.xml mods. Mojarra didn’t like this. It didn’t break, but it felt it necessary to recommend that I break it back to where it was:

WARNING: facelets.RECREATE_VALUE_EXPRESSION_ON_BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE is set to 'true' but facelets.BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE is set to 'false' or unset. To use facelets.RECREATE_VALUE_EXPRESSION_ON_BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE you must also set facelets.BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE to 'true'!

Sweet. facelets.RECREATE_VALUE_EXPRESSION_ON_BUILD_BEFORE_RESTORE is true by default, so you need to go back into your web.xml and disable it if you don’t want to see this nagging message all of the time. If you work in a team, you almost certainly want to squelch this message so someone who isn’t in the know doesn’t go in and break everything because the machine told them to.

Being TopLink’s mutant flipper baby, it’s no surprise that EclipseLink’s (2.0.0) support of MySQL is substandard. If you have been using the two of them together, you may have noticed that LOBs don’t really work quite right. Some of the blame is probably for MySQL, with its multiple length-specific LOB column types, but it at least handles specified lengths and does the work for you. So, if you have been getting exceptions when you’re trying to insert a bunch of data, you’re using EL’s DDL generation, and you have been lazy about fixing it yourself, read on…

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Possibly a testament to why people hate the JCP, that style of bureaucracy, and why almost everything that isn’t touched by it actually gets things done, I ran into what I would consider a blocker when it was requested that I have the currency symbol and percent signs optional for form inputs using f:convertNumber and found that it was impossible with Mojarra. I can’t see any reason why they would be absolutely required. There isn’t even an option to make them optional with some listed caveats or “we don’t think you should do this, but here’s the gun.”

After about ten seconds of research, I found this enhancement request:

Have f:convertNumber add currency symbol if not present for type=currency

This issue has been rotting there since 2008? It was marked for consideration, its priority reduced, and then rescheduled four times, not even for JSF 1.2? Who puts these retards at the helm?

So, in typical fashion, we have to shoehorn business processes into the framework. Well, not this time. I have decided to abuse AOP once again and patch around it.

[Read the rest of this entry...]

Cable bills rising in 2010, how to lock your rate in today
http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/01/13/cable-bills-rising-in-2010-how-to-lock-your-rate-in-today/
Josh Smith – Jan 13th 2010 at 12:30PM

The next cable bill that comes in your mail could contain a belated bad start to 2010 in the form of higher prices. Not only are new offerings, like 3-D programming…

I stopped reading right there. Of course, following my instincts, I composed an inflammatory response. “Lock it in at $0. TV is bad for you. It destroys lives, families, and is destroying our country.” This was enough to get at least one TV apologist to come out of the woodwork and try to justify a mass of cancer by the little fetus in fetu inside because it’s still a life!

The news media is destroying our country, I can agree with that. Not all of TV, but most of it. What about the cooking shows? I see you guys watching those from time to time! ha. If anything push the FCC for a la carte TV subscriptions where you get to pay for the channels you want. If that were the case I would probably have about 10 channels and be set.

Good points, but not good enough.

I would rather rent or buy quality shows. The rest, even the crap I’ve watched, is easy to give up. The cooking shows are even shit almost all of the time. It’s just Real World all over again or some fat chick trying to show off. The occasional gem like Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations are just cynical, nihilistic, and/or hedonistic fluff making fun of how stupid everyone is and the intended audience already understands. It’s just passing the time until Rachel Ray comes on and ruins your life. It’s purely optional, and I would rather sit in silence while I eat, since reading while eating is too difficult. Other shows that involve science and nature are on the borderline of expendable entertainment, like Good Eats where you may learn some technique or science behind cooking. Shows like Planet Earth just make you want to kill, so they can be very inspiring and help get you through the day. They’re all available in other forms, though.

All of the aforementioned shows are available off of TV:

• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 1
• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 2
• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 3
• Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations – Collection 4
• Planet Earth: The Complete BBC Series [Blu-ray]
• Good Eats: Vol. 5-7 Super Sweets, Breakfast Eats 2 & 3

… and so on.

It’s also not the news media. It’s the people who watch it. People have been taught that news is actually news and not entertainment. The lines blurred over time and now there’s almost nothing left of “news”. The only way to change it is to stop watching altogether, since they aren’t responsible enough or smart enough to be able to determine which is which. They sit, eat more garbage, get fatter, and are entertained, thinking that this is the only time they get to themselves in their day after getting raped on both ends by their employers, the government, and any purveyor they deal with cutting new holes to rape them, too, so they’re going to be entertained. All other forms of entertainment are practically dead and you can’t even go to the park without the threat of being mugged, perceived or real, or having the park not be covered with graffiti and McDonald’s trash. You can’t even talk to people in public without them suing you. People have lost their imaginations and are too jaded to come up with and enjoy any form of constructive entertainment because TV does it all for them. Watching a cooking show does not make you a chef, watching Friends does not make you funny or cool, and watching MTV does not make you black.

It really boils down to stupid people being irresponsible with their time and lives and TV the catalyst, drug, or whatever that enables it instead of people, I don’t know, educating themselves.

Oh, American Gladiators is on…