Just putting in a last minute pitch for a good thing:
There’s a FREE Web conference going on this weekend in Raleigh, NC that covers Flex, ColdFusion, AIR, JavaScript, CSS, Ajax, and other web goodness. The schedule looks good, there’s a networking party Saturday evening, and the hotel rate is decent. So go.
And bring your business cards… the next time I’m asked if I know any web gurus looking for work I need some names and numbers.
My Mac Pro is starting to get kind of dated and I've been lusting after some of the newer/faster systems out there. I'm ambO/Sdextrous and spend my day working back and forth between a pc and a mac and had started to get tired of the minor issues I have working between the two systems so I had considered a tricked out pc with Windows 7. I wasn't too happy with Apple when they decided to change their licensing agreement and shaft Flash developers... that wasn't very cool of them.. Then I saw that Keith Peters went back to the dark side... and now.. well.. let's just say Steve's little rant sealed the deal for me.
I figure it might be Christmas before I slow down enough to go through the hassle of switching files and everything over to a new system, but when I do get that time I'll probably be getting a nice high end gaming system. One that can play Crysis.
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.
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.
