All your google are belong to us

I'm a google-whore. I freely admit this. I use a ton of their tools. Gmail. Calendar. The personalized search home page complete with widgets (or whatever google calls them, probably googets). Yahoo has the same tools and Ask.com is catching up with some neat stuff but still, google rules. Their tools are just dead simple to use. However, today I realized that their Search History tool is now saving my data for all of the following searches:

• Web
• Images
• News
• Froogle
• Video
• Maps
• Music

That concerns me. Not so much the web stuff because I routinely go in there and clean up the search history. I do this not because I'm searching things that I don't want anyone to know about, but more because I like my search history to revolve around my professional searching on programming and whatnot. It's easier and faster to find things in there that way (note to google, should let users tag their searched and clicked items). What concerns me though is the map history. I've already become anal enough that I don't use my exact address when looking to get driving directions somewhere. I use my neighbors down the street. But now my neighbors address is stored in there. And now when I bring up my contacts in gmail, I can get a map to my friends and relatives houses, but of course then their addresses are in the search history too. I worry about this being some kind of junk mail magnet in the future. Or worse, some kind of google as big brother scenario where they know everything about you and everywhere you go. I may have to rethink my life as a google-whore and my utter addiction to their tools.

How to create and use multiple profiles using the Profile Manager of Firefox

What's cool about this is that you can use one profile with all your nice web developer extensions set up and another for quick browsing with no extensions installed.  I find using a few extensions tends to bog Firefox down (even still today) so doing without some when I'm just cruising around killing time is quite nice.

The following was lifted from the mozilla site if memory serves me.

In order to create a new profile, you use the Profile Manager.

To start the Profile Manager in Windows, follow these steps:

1. Close Firefox completely (select File > Exit from the main menu of Firefox).
2. Select Start > Run... from the Windows Start menu.
3. Enter firefox.exe -ProfileManager and press OK.

On Linux or Mac, start Firefox with the -ProfileManager switch, e.g. ./firefox -ProfileManager (this assumes that you're in the firefox directory)

// end lift

DB2 Creating (faking) a Boolean datatype

When creating a table in DB2, to create a Boolean datatype column (since DB2 doesn’t have this natively) you have to use a check constraint on a smallint column. So if you have a column named “ACTIVE” that you want to be Boolean, you would create the that col like so: ACTIVE SMALLINT NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT CCACTIVE1 CHECK (ACTIVE in(0,1)) Then obviously, when you use that field, you can only insert/update using 1 and 0 respectively for your true and false values.

DB2 Creating Sequences to use with Primary Key ID fields

Well, another job and another database system to learn. I've got practically all of them under my belt now ;-) I finished reading this article on sequences vs key managers vs identity columns and decided I needed to go with a sequence. To create a new sequence called “USERS_SEQ” for a schema named “TEST” CREATE SEQUENCE TEST.USERS_SEQ AS BIGINT START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY 1 NO MAXVALUE NO CYCLE; To use that sequence to generate unique, incremented, primary key IDs for a table: INSERT INTO TEST.USERS (id, name_first) VALUES (NEXTVAL FOR TEST.USERS_SEQ, 'Rich'); To use that generated id value, you can use PREVVAL to get it back