It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.
The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.
I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.
Updated debt clock to show over $10,000,000,000,000 Sunday, October 05, 2008
Dear Adobe Monday, September 15, 2008
Some people don't like submitting bug reports about specific issues, but would rather just complain about general problems that bug the crap out of them. For those people there is the Dear Adobe site.
I don't particularly like the idea of smearing a company for no good reason, but if the people who are using the site have submitted bug tickets and feel like Adobe is ignoring them then I guess they have every right to complain.. or just use another product. That's part of how free market economics is supposed to work? If you find a better product then use it. And if the masses yell their complaints loud enough and the company is nimble enough then it'll fix the issues and keep the business.
Here's one I found: "please allow Flash's action window to stay visible when another app is in front, sometimes you need to compare code to something else." .. been an irritation for me for years and has been reported to Macromedia and Adobe many times. It's one of those "minor" issues that becomes major if you have to use the application a lot. I'm pretty sure I saw on one of the demos or heard through the grapevine that this has been changed in CS4.. so when you have the Actions panel open and switch over to another app the Actions panel remains visible. So maybe they did react and fix that. I'll keep my fingers crossed for code folding.
I don't particularly like the idea of smearing a company for no good reason, but if the people who are using the site have submitted bug tickets and feel like Adobe is ignoring them then I guess they have every right to complain.. or just use another product. That's part of how free market economics is supposed to work? If you find a better product then use it. And if the masses yell their complaints loud enough and the company is nimble enough then it'll fix the issues and keep the business.
Here's one I found: "please allow Flash's action window to stay visible when another app is in front, sometimes you need to compare code to something else." .. been an irritation for me for years and has been reported to Macromedia and Adobe many times. It's one of those "minor" issues that becomes major if you have to use the application a lot. I'm pretty sure I saw on one of the demos or heard through the grapevine that this has been changed in CS4.. so when you have the Actions panel open and switch over to another app the Actions panel remains visible. So maybe they did react and fix that. I'll keep my fingers crossed for code folding.
Had some time with Chumby Monday, February 04, 2008
I gave a chumby to one of my nephews and thought I’d report on it.. because it’s kind of an interesting case. He has SMA and so has limited mobility, has some trouble using a keyboard and mouse, etc. So the chumby is a good size that he can hold, he can use the touch screen to press big buttons, and the motion sensing and big buttons on the exterior of the chumby work well for him. He’s had fun with it, and overall it’s a very cool gadget for the price. The sound that comes out of it is surprisingly good, the video quality is good, and it was easy to set up.
A few minor things that weren’t as good as they could be… it had to be plugged into the wall at all times. It’s easy to hack together a battery pack for it though. Not a huge issue unless you aren’t technically up for that kind of thing. The screen gets hot…
I’m hoping to carve out some time in the next couple of months to make some apps for it, but I’m still covered up. We also tried putting a USB stick with pics and MP3s into the USB slot hoping to get it to do what a simple “photo frame” would do - just play the MP3s and show a slideshow of the pics.. but I couldn’t find a way to do it. Maybe there’s an app out there that does that, so I’ll have to dig around and find it… or maybe it was something weird with his USB stick.
Anyway, if you’re a Flash dev then the Chumby is worth tinkering with.
Making a secure online poll with Flash Wednesday, December 26, 2007
It's time for the primaries in the US and I've been seeing an incredible amount of enthusiasm coming from the Ron Paul supporters on Digg and elsewhere. Probably the root of the energy seems to be coming from a few things they believe:
1 - Ron Paul is being ignored by the "main stream media".
2 - The polls aren't accurately reflecting their numbers.
3 - Ron Paul
If you've been on Digg or YouTube at all in the last few weeks you've probably seen something related to Paul and then a freakin' slew of comments supporting him and a slew of comments from supporters of other candidates (or people just fed up with the enthusiasm) attacking the Paul supporters for being so over the top. The arguments usually go something like this:
"You morons! Paul doesn't stand a chance. He's only getting 4-5% in the polls"
... ... ... followed by the three Paul bots massively commenting (I'm kidding here..) things like:
"The polls don't include Paul - when they call us they only list giuliani, Huckabee, and McRomney and OTHER"
"The polls don't include people registered as independents or people who haven't voted in a long time"
"When we pressed the button to vote for Paul it registered it as a vote for Huckabee (or 'please take me off the list')"
"The polls target people who still use land lines.. that's not us"
"The polls are rigged by the media or other candidates"
"We vote in online polls and stomp the other candidates so bad everyone claims we're cheating so the poll isn't counted"
So being curious I decided to go see whether these Paul supporters had an honest claim on that last one.
You see there really is a huge number of traditional polls that say he's down in that "margin of error" territory where candidates who are ignored by the media dwell. Take a look at this graph and realize that each of those dots represents how a candidate did on a poll.. and Paul is in red.
If you go here (where that graph came from..) and scroll down just a bit you'll see a long list of polls where he hasn't done well AT ALL.
So when you look at the online polls, some with more than 100,000 votes, you'll find quite a few where Paul isn't just doing ok, but is actually winning by a decent margin. This means there's a huge disconnect. Either the traditional phone polls really aren't picking up on the Paul movement, the online polls are being gamed, or maybe a little of both.
Two of the online polls use Flash and I expected them to have some decent mechanisms in place to keep people from voting more than once. Nope. Just clear the old browser cookies and vote again. Dang. That kind of makes it easy for people to claim the online polls have been gamed, and rightfully so. But why would someone go through the effort of putting a poll online for something as important as this and leave it wide open to cheating? That's a question for the folks who try to make sense of politics. The question I had was what could they have done rather than relying on just a cookie to keep people from voting more than once.
I looked into this for a bit and thought it over. I really don't think it's possible to make a poll using Flash (or any other technology really) that would be 100% fraud proof. If someone is determined enough they'll find a way to vote more than once.
That said, there is one super simple way to keep the honest and lazy people from voting more than once. With Flash you can use a Local Shared Object in addition to the cookie. An LSO is not cleared when the user clears the cookies in their browser which will stop the casual poll cheater from voting more than once.
For the more hard core poll cheaters who may or may not be trying to use an automated bot you could do something with one or more of these (and hopefully some of your own tricks thrown in):
- Load a SWF containing a key and use that key in your POST request. If the keys are rotated periodically then it makes it much harder for someone to replay a POST request repeatedly since a valid request will be formed by the code in the application SWF which includes some bits from the loaded key SWF.
- Use AMF (AMFPHP for example) for transmitting the data.. if the data is transferred in binary format it'll take more effort to tinker with it. That.. and it's faster than sending your data in plain text.
- Require an e-mail address and send them a link they have to click to verify for their vote to count.
- Send them to a verification page with a captcha before their vote counts.
- Check the client that responds and make sure it's either a browser or someone who took enough time to spoof a browser when they formed their request
1 - Ron Paul is being ignored by the "main stream media".
2 - The polls aren't accurately reflecting their numbers.
3 - Ron Paul
If you've been on Digg or YouTube at all in the last few weeks you've probably seen something related to Paul and then a freakin' slew of comments supporting him and a slew of comments from supporters of other candidates (or people just fed up with the enthusiasm) attacking the Paul supporters for being so over the top. The arguments usually go something like this:
"You morons! Paul doesn't stand a chance. He's only getting 4-5% in the polls"
... ... ... followed by the three Paul bots massively commenting (I'm kidding here..) things like:
"The polls don't include Paul - when they call us they only list giuliani, Huckabee, and McRomney and OTHER"
"The polls don't include people registered as independents or people who haven't voted in a long time"
"When we pressed the button to vote for Paul it registered it as a vote for Huckabee (or 'please take me off the list')"
"The polls target people who still use land lines.. that's not us"
"The polls are rigged by the media or other candidates"
"We vote in online polls and stomp the other candidates so bad everyone claims we're cheating so the poll isn't counted"
So being curious I decided to go see whether these Paul supporters had an honest claim on that last one.
You see there really is a huge number of traditional polls that say he's down in that "margin of error" territory where candidates who are ignored by the media dwell. Take a look at this graph and realize that each of those dots represents how a candidate did on a poll.. and Paul is in red.
If you go here (where that graph came from..) and scroll down just a bit you'll see a long list of polls where he hasn't done well AT ALL.
So when you look at the online polls, some with more than 100,000 votes, you'll find quite a few where Paul isn't just doing ok, but is actually winning by a decent margin. This means there's a huge disconnect. Either the traditional phone polls really aren't picking up on the Paul movement, the online polls are being gamed, or maybe a little of both.
Two of the online polls use Flash and I expected them to have some decent mechanisms in place to keep people from voting more than once. Nope. Just clear the old browser cookies and vote again. Dang. That kind of makes it easy for people to claim the online polls have been gamed, and rightfully so. But why would someone go through the effort of putting a poll online for something as important as this and leave it wide open to cheating? That's a question for the folks who try to make sense of politics. The question I had was what could they have done rather than relying on just a cookie to keep people from voting more than once.
I looked into this for a bit and thought it over. I really don't think it's possible to make a poll using Flash (or any other technology really) that would be 100% fraud proof. If someone is determined enough they'll find a way to vote more than once.
That said, there is one super simple way to keep the honest and lazy people from voting more than once. With Flash you can use a Local Shared Object in addition to the cookie. An LSO is not cleared when the user clears the cookies in their browser which will stop the casual poll cheater from voting more than once.
For the more hard core poll cheaters who may or may not be trying to use an automated bot you could do something with one or more of these (and hopefully some of your own tricks thrown in):
- Load a SWF containing a key and use that key in your POST request. If the keys are rotated periodically then it makes it much harder for someone to replay a POST request repeatedly since a valid request will be formed by the code in the application SWF which includes some bits from the loaded key SWF.
- Use AMF (AMFPHP for example) for transmitting the data.. if the data is transferred in binary format it'll take more effort to tinker with it. That.. and it's faster than sending your data in plain text.
- Require an e-mail address and send them a link they have to click to verify for their vote to count.
- Send them to a verification page with a captcha before their vote counts.
- Check the client that responds and make sure it's either a browser or someone who took enough time to spoof a browser when they formed their request
