Editors' Choice Article

Simple animation using JQuery
By julianH

This article was inspired by an EE question on how to make a page show some balloons animate up a page. It seemed like a fun exercise so I cobbled something together. It turned out to be surprisingly simple so I thought it might be beneficial to post it here.

The Basics
The problem to solve is to randomly create different coloured balloons at different intervals at different locations on the screen and have them rise up at different speeds to disappear off the top of the screen.

To do this we need some resources:
Read more...

Nata's Corner

You know who you are... you have 34 days left.

I'm pretty sure I don't like the idea of BYOI (bring your own identity). There have been too many breaches of security lately. I'm sure that people like the fact that they can use one username and password to log into lots of different sites, but it makes me nervous to think that Facebook and Google -- the two biggest forces behind the single log-in -- are keeping all of the information -- what sites I go to, what I search for, what I send and receive emails and posts about. I know they're keeping track of it so they can send me more "relevant" advertising, and I know they think that makes a "better experience". But what really worries me is two things: that they get asked for information all the time (and sometimes they even comply with the requests without anyone knowing about it), and that as the people who shopped at Target found out, it's not impossible to hack anyone. Maybe I'm just being a little paranoid, but even if you try to keep your personal life your own, someone out there is trying to find something they can exploit.

And just so you know, there were 822 million records lost in data breaches in 2013 in over 2,100 incidents.

A couple of months ago, we were in a city an hour or so from home, and pulled into a gas station where the pumps had a monitor-like screen showing news briefs and, of course, inducements to come into the C-store and buy a big soda and a hamburger that had been sitting under a heat lamp for four hours. Apparently, those two or three minutes you spend watching the numbers go by (instead... ahem... of cleaning your windshield) are pretty valuable, because you're going to start seeing that more often.

That nasty malware family known as either Zbot or Zeus is getting a lot nastier. Most of the time, it arrives as a zip file that looks like it's an invoice for something you didn't buy; when you open the file, it downloads a compressed file that is unique to your computer and is mostly undetectable. It then injects itself into other processes and starts looking for data to steal. You can't stop the process, either, because it's a rootkit. Oh, and all you iPhone fans? You're not much better off when it comes to security problems.

Finally, for all of you Firefox users, by now you're used to seeing the tiles when you open a new tab that show the pages you go to fairly frequently. Well, get used to the idea of them being advertising, because Mozilla is going to start pushing "sponsored Directory Tiles", and yes, they'll be geolocated, so you'll get ads based in part on your location.

Soft Currency

ericpete is a former newspaper editor, occasional low-level Expert and basketball junkie who has spent over 14 years at Experts Exchange, and has spent much of the last decade editing the EE newsletter.

One of the less-frequently noted observations in Karl Marx's body of work is the lesson of the evolution of the medium of exchange; exchanging goods and services for other goods and services became exchanging an accepted medium -- precious metals and stones -- for goods and services, which later became exchanging a more transportable medium that represented those metals and stones -- that which we all call money. That "alienation", to use his term, of the person who produces something from the fruits of it is at the core of his economic philosophy.

Historically, that means that it more convenient to set the value of a donkey to a quantity of gold, and set the value of a bushel of peaches to a quantity of gold, and use the gold to facilitate transactions. But gold -- especially under circumstances requiring relatively large quantities -- became just as inconvenient over time, so media were created by those who had the gold to represent it. Governments began to issue first coins and then paper to represent that gold they had on hand (or were owed). Being owed money isn't such a bad thing; the entire financial services industry is based on letting someone borrow money, as long as it's paid back with interest: credit.

And while gold was no longer necessarily the commodity that backed the paper that backed whatever the money was being borrowed for on a dollar for dollar basis, there has always been something somewhere that did, at least until the Depression, when -- as Marx predicted -- the focus of economic policy became the creation of wealth and not necessarily goods and services. Money -- which started life as the representation of value -- became its own reason for existing and growing. It is, to use Marx' term, the ultimate in alienation.

And then came the Bitcoin. If ever there was something (besides stock in MySpace Facebook) that was built for these economic times, it's a currency with the backing of only the faith of the people who use it. People are pouring billions into companies they think will eventually turn a profit; most won't, and the value of the paper they're paying for will be about $5 a ream -- just as the paper that various banks and insurance companies bought six or seven years ago turned into so much confetti. When the largest Bitcoin exchange shut its doors last week, hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it paid for with real money, suddenly became simply unavailable. That Mt. Gox might have been the victim of a massive theft only adds to the currency's problems; the theft represents about 75 per cent of the Bitcoins traded on that exchange and nominally six per cent of the total. It's inevitable that the number will continue to grow.

To be certain, other exchanges have stayed open, but that doesn't change the fact that everything Bitcoin represents is nothing more than ones and zeros and people's trust that there's someone out there willing to pay real money for them (which says a lot about what Kings tickets are worth) -- especially if it's more money than you paid for them. That's a lot to take on faith... and it doesn't make one feel any more secure to know that even drug traffic enablers get ripped off.

On the other hand... if you can find a Kings fan who wants good seats...

In Brief

We'd still like to know if they caught the guy: A few issues back we wrote about the guy whose one-letter Twitter handle was hijacked; he now has it back. In a related story, you can read why Nata's concerns about single log-ins aren't unfounded.

That's what you get for thinking: A woman who makes a living writing about tech in the Bay Area, where there's been a decent amount of controversy over first, tech company buses and then company ferries, walks into a bar in the Haight on a Friday night, announces she's wearing Google Glass, and is surprised at the reception. Not that anyone approves of her being physically attacked or robbed -- but c'mon folks. The iPhone would have been just fine; Glass still creeps people out.

The final frontier: Long-time readers know we're fans of the US space program; the story of a plan to rescue Columbia's crew is a reminder of why.

NIMBY: Just down the street from our home, it looks like we'll be getting a mysterious new neighbor. If and when it gets here, we'll see if we can get pictures.

No truth to the rumor that EE will be sending these to Experts: The good news: the First Amendment is alive and well.

The ANY key: We could have so much fun with our friend from West Virginia. His US Senator wants to ban Bitcoins.

If you can't beat 'em... imitate 'em.

Rumors and allegations: There's an app out there that, if you and people you know are using it, will let you share those secret posts they make anonymously with other friends.

See? We're protecting our customers! No, really! AT&T got over 300,000 requests for data from the federal government last year, and actually rejected 3,756 of them.

Strange bedfellows: Given the number of takedown requests filed by the movie industry with Google and YouTube over copyright issues, one would expect them to support actress Cindy Lee Garcia, who appears -- with her lines dubbed over so they vilify Muslims -- in the anti-Islamic film Innocense of Muslims, when she sued after Google declined to remove clips from the movie. She won on appeal, and Google will keep pushing the issue, citing the First Amendment. What's missing from all the hand-wringing by Hollywood, Google and the press is that Ms. Garcia apparently never signed the standard release that, among other things, relinquishes her copyright.

In the red corner: Apple and Samsung will face off in court at the end of the month.

You know you want to watch: How Sports Illustrated shot swimsuit model Kate Upton in zero gravity. Also, courtesy of xkcd, Frequency. Also not among last weekend's Oscar nominees: Dead Parrot's reconstructions of YouTube comment threads.

Apparently, they never heard about Rule 34: Of the millions of Yahoo webcam chats intercepted by the GCHQ and the NSA, seven per cent have been burned to disk and shared around the offices. (Not really, but you know they would have liked to.)

Signs of the Apocalypse: The FCC will try -- for the third time -- to write net neutrality rules. The only other thing you'll need to make you feel like you're in a bar is a beer. In our college days (the early 1970s), a professor used the Church of the Latter Day Saints as an example of an organization that kept a lot of data on its members, so we're a little perplexed at the bubbling controversy in Utah over the NSA's primary datacenter.

Milestones

New Savant: Our old friend, jkr, is the latest member of Experts Exchange to reach the Savant level, having earned 10,000,000 points in C++ Programming. He also gets credit for one of our all-time favorite solutions; it's not so much that it is spectacular programming, but rather that jkr's profile prompted the Asker to donate $1,100 to Hurricane Katrina relief back in 2005. He joins only 14 other members of EE to reach the Savant rank in a single topic area.

New Ace:: Merete has earned her first Ace certificate in MultiMedia Applications.

New Geniuses:

leakim971 earned his seventh Genius certificate in ASP.NET; he is only the sixth member of Experts Exchange to reach that level. Two EE members earned their second Genius rankings: JamesBurger in VB.NET and thinkpads_user in Outlook. Sandeshdubey has earned his first, in Active Directory.

My First Million: Reaching the 1,000,000 point level in February were Rgonzo1971, aadih, The_Big_Daddy, asavener, rpalmeira22, robhenson, and last, but hardly least, former Word MVP Dreamboat -- a huge boon to those seeking assistance in the Excel and especially Word topic areas.

Milestones:

• Somewhere along the line, we failed to take note that capricorn1 had earned his fifth Genius certificate, in Visual Basic.
• Idle_Mind has earned 3,000,000 points or more in each of three topic areas.
• zorvek's second Genius certificate is in Visual Basic.
• acperkins has earned 11,000,000 points since joining EE.
• mbizup reached the 7,000,000 point level in Microsoft Access.
• Mikal613 has earned four Genius certificates.