oddhammer

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.

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’m trying to put together an example of encrypting data with Flash before storing in the Shared Object..  but have run into a little trouble with ActionCrypt.  Basically what I’m seeing is that once the data is encrypted it can be de-crypted with ANY key..  not good.  Read about it here:  http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=859298&forum_id=273562

Another user has confirmed it, and at first look it appears that the wrong number of parameters are being sent into the methods. 

If you’ve successfully implemented a system that encrypts the data before storing to the LSO please let me know, or better yet write a tutorial on how you did it.  That would be groovy.

Ok..  I knew this was possible.. I did it last year..  but the trouble was I couldn’t remember how, and couldn’t find anything in my old files that showed the trick.



The SWT was destined for a server running JZOX, and it had to accept an “environment” variable that would tell it the name of an external file to load.  The external file contained all the data that needed to be injected in the SWF before it was to be published.  (I won’t go into why I have to publish a static SWF on the server containing the data.. it’s actually a good thing) I’m ready for Flex.. bring it on.



This is super easy in Flash 5.  You just pull down the Generator environment variable thing and enter the variable name.  So if I’m going to pass in the name of the file as “setenv2” I would enter {setenv2}.  But Flash MX doesn’t have that little “Generator Environment Variable” box to set the environment variables.  So I hunted around on the JZOX site.. nothing.



Here’s what I eventually found in one of my ancient FLA files:  There’s a component named SetEnvironment.  (see below).  All you do is drop that baby on the stage somewhere and set the component parameters.  Remember to put the Data Source name in {}’s if you’re going to pass a value in for it.

I couldn’t find the component anywhere on the web.  You can make your own..  it’s just an empty movieclip with some component parameters set (see below).