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.
back from FlashForward SF Monday, March 08, 2004
I had a great time at FlashForward, and am finally getting my feet back on the ground and catching up. I didn't blog at all while I was out there, mostly because I was too busy..
If you're interested in the "ActionScript Performance Tricks" session that I gave, you can find the data all here: http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/
I'll probably release the rijndael encryption for Flash that I showed once I've optimized it a bit.. it's still fairly slow.
---------------------
Things I took away from the conference..
Bill Buxton gave a great keynote and tried to encourage the Flash crowd to think beyond the confines of the browser.. he made a prediction that in five years the cost of screen real estate will be $10/sq ft. for 100dpi monitors.. then at the end of his talk showed a nifty (and tiny) laser projection system for projecting 640 x 480 images. The cool thing is the technology doesn't just project, but could also read and be used to turn any surface into a "touch screen" since the technology is based on bar code scanners. So think about a cell phone that can project full color 1024 x 768 onto a wall and make it a touch screen.. drool.
Kevin Lynch had a lot of info to give about the future of Flash.. including an update release for the Flash MX2004 IDE this Spring and there will be a Flash Player 8 released in early 2005. He showed two very cool applications from the NYSE and the UN/WHO.. but I can't find links to them anywhere and can't find them on the web.. .sigh..
Loads of people gave me business cards.. and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.. the last FFSF I went to I think I came home with maybe 2 business cards.. this time I ended up with probably 20. The odd thing was the people weren't looking for jobs or trying to hire me.. it just seemed like everybody was trying harder to network with each other. odd..
Comcast is hiring Flash developers.. big time.. like in bulk (I heard rumour that they are hiring more than 100). The jobs are mostly in the Philadelphia, PA area.
I enjoyed meeting and hanging out with some great Flash folks.. in no particular order.. Chafic Kazoun, Keith Peters, Eric Dolecki, John Dowdell, Mike Chambers, Grant Skinner, Peter Hall, Philip Kerman, Vera Fleischer, and lots of others..
There was a very small group meeting on Friday afternoon with some of the Flash developers where some of us got to give our wish list for the future of Flash. I was a bit shocked that there were only about a dozen people who showed up to voice their opinions.
I don't have any pictures to show.. well.. except the one that I took of Eric Dolecki in front of the Macromedia headquarters that he's posted on his site... I took it right before we went in. It's a cool place.
If you're interested in the "ActionScript Performance Tricks" session that I gave, you can find the data all here: http://oddhammer.com/actionscriptperformance/
I'll probably release the rijndael encryption for Flash that I showed once I've optimized it a bit.. it's still fairly slow.
---------------------
Things I took away from the conference..
Bill Buxton gave a great keynote and tried to encourage the Flash crowd to think beyond the confines of the browser.. he made a prediction that in five years the cost of screen real estate will be $10/sq ft. for 100dpi monitors.. then at the end of his talk showed a nifty (and tiny) laser projection system for projecting 640 x 480 images. The cool thing is the technology doesn't just project, but could also read and be used to turn any surface into a "touch screen" since the technology is based on bar code scanners. So think about a cell phone that can project full color 1024 x 768 onto a wall and make it a touch screen.. drool.
Kevin Lynch had a lot of info to give about the future of Flash.. including an update release for the Flash MX2004 IDE this Spring and there will be a Flash Player 8 released in early 2005. He showed two very cool applications from the NYSE and the UN/WHO.. but I can't find links to them anywhere and can't find them on the web.. .sigh..
Loads of people gave me business cards.. and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.. the last FFSF I went to I think I came home with maybe 2 business cards.. this time I ended up with probably 20. The odd thing was the people weren't looking for jobs or trying to hire me.. it just seemed like everybody was trying harder to network with each other. odd..
Comcast is hiring Flash developers.. big time.. like in bulk (I heard rumour that they are hiring more than 100). The jobs are mostly in the Philadelphia, PA area.
I enjoyed meeting and hanging out with some great Flash folks.. in no particular order.. Chafic Kazoun, Keith Peters, Eric Dolecki, John Dowdell, Mike Chambers, Grant Skinner, Peter Hall, Philip Kerman, Vera Fleischer, and lots of others..
There was a very small group meeting on Friday afternoon with some of the Flash developers where some of us got to give our wish list for the future of Flash. I was a bit shocked that there were only about a dozen people who showed up to voice their opinions.
I don't have any pictures to show.. well.. except the one that I took of Eric Dolecki in front of the Macromedia headquarters that he's posted on his site... I took it right before we went in. It's a cool place.
ActionScript Optimizations tutorial Tuesday, February 17, 2004
I just came across this http://www.gotoandplay.it/_articles/2004/01/as_optimizations.php tutorial from Marco Lapi on ActionScript Optimizations. He has some good tips in there and it looks to be a great resource. I’ll be speaking at FlashForward (a little Ask the Experts session on ActionScript Performance Tricks) in a couple of weeks so I’ll be rolling out a new set of performance tests on my site soon. I’m focusing on the performance tricks you can use in MX04 that differ from the performance tricks used for MX..
Let me know if you have any suggestions for my ActionScript Performance test.. besides design suggestions.. I know it sucks and just haven’t had any time to make it more usable.
