Warning! Anna Karenina plot spoilers!

I’m reading Anna Karenina right now, just a few pages every night. I’m a little past half-way through, and I can’t but be touched with Tolstoy’s description of how a career ends:

Almost at the same time that his wife had left Karenin, the most painful thing that can befall an official - the cessation of his ascent in the Service - had befallen him. That cessation was an accomplished fact, clearly visible to everyone, though Karenin himself had no yet realized that his career was at an end…He still held an important post, was member of many Commissions and Committees, but he was finished, and from him nothing further was to be looked for. Whatever he might say, whatever he might propose, he was listened to as if all he was proposing had long been known and was what no one wanted. But Karenin was not sensible of this…

A shameful state to end up in. Hopefully I’ll know when my career ends, and hopefully I will not end so disgracefully.

I’ve been working on a second version of my Color Tool. I want to move it to JavaScript and AJAX, instead of using flash. Here’s what I have so far. Some of the information boxes will overlap on smaller screen resolutions, but those are just there for debugging purposes. Eventually I’d like to display more color variations and add tons of extra features. My time to work on this project is limited though, because of school. I’ve tried to do a good job to comment the code. Also the RGB to HSL and HSL to RGB conversions were done with the help of formulas I found at easyrgb.com. I’m also using the prototype and script.aculo.us libraries for small things here and there. They have some great tools there. Let me know what you think or if you have any comments.

JavaScript closures allow your anonymous functions to remember variables they ‘knew’ within the function scope they were created in. Closures are a powerful tool that are a must have for any large JavaScript application or project.

I’m creating a new version of my ColorTool. Last time I used Flash ActionScript + PHP, this time I’m going to use AJAX. I have found that knowing about closures is incredibly useful. I think anyone doing a lot of work with JavaScript can benefit from knowing about them.

Got images turned off for emails by default to protect yourself from spam? If you’re using webmail, that might not be enough.

I use webmail for email: I’ve been using Yahoo! mail for a long time now, but recently I’ve switched to Gmail. Both of these two email services have a feature that lets you turn images off in email by default. This protects your privacy. If you load an image that came with your email, it lets the spammers know that your email works and they will add you to their list of working emails. If they find your working email address you’ll be spammed massively.

The ‘images off’ feature works most of the time, but recently I’ve noticed that some emails still manage to show images! I’ve seen these types of emails both on Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. How do they circumvent Gmail and Yahoo? Here’s the code that shows the images:

src\u003d\"/mail/?view\u003datt&disp\u003demb&attid\
u003d0.1&th\u003d10a31a3e38ec6da1\"
align\u003d\"baseline\" border\u003d\"0\">

By placing encoded unicode characters, they’ve circumvented Gmail’s ability to recognize what is in the email body. Your browser however will be able to understand the code, show the image, and destroy your privacy. As of this moment, I know of no way to prevent this from happening, other than ‘don’t open emails from people you don’t know.’ I don’t know if email clients like Outlook fail to not show images as well.

EDIT:
Here’s a screenshot -

Here’s the source for the entire body of the email.

Here’s a CNN slide show explaining how China censors the web for its millions of internet users.

Every Chinese person who signs up for Internet service must register with his or her local police department within 30 days.

Integral to China’s capability to perform these activities, according to this CNN slide show, is Cisco’s hardware. Sound great! I’m sure if the US ever turned totalitarian, Cisco, Google, Yahoo, and MSN will jump right up, without any moral compunction, and provide all the necessary equipment to enslave us. I thank god for ALA’s code of ethics everyday. We fight the good fight.

I’ve been playing with some JavaScript libraries like prototype, moo.fx and, script.aculo.us. They all use the MIT license, which is free. It’s all very cross-browser compliant and each comes with nice AJAX tools and create some nice dynamic effects. Both moo.fx and script.aculo.us require the prototype library, but they include that in their source.

Here’s a little toy I made playing around with script.alicio.us.