I was mucking about on about 4 or 5 different things at once and ended up back at
this post. I was really curious about what the "Godfathers" of Flash were up to when I read that post over a year ago, and it seems like the question has been answered and I apparently missed it.
So
here's what they've been up to..
"The Greenbox™ Home Energy Manager empowers homeowners to understand and manage their energy consumption. With knowledge of their energy use, consumers can take proactive steps to conserve energy, understand their impact on the environment, and save money.
Conveniently monitoring electricity, water, and/or gas usage in real-time, the Greenbox provides direct feedback to consumers about their homes performance. Studies have shown that households can reduce their utility bills by 10-20%, just by being aware of their ongoing usage.
The Greenbox presents easy to understand graphs, charts, historical data, and community comparisons to empower people to understand and make informed decisions about their energy and water usage. A personalized recommendation engine takes the mystery out of making your home more efficient by forecasting usage, cost, and emissions savings that can be created by implementing various efficiency improvements."
That's something that just might come in handy as a barrel of oil topped $123 today and other types of energy are slowly creeping up in cost.
Now I'm curious if they're using Flash for that device and if consumer devices like this are the reason Adobe moved to open (free) the licensing for the Flash Player recently. I figured it was for flashy fun things like set top boxes, handheld games (leapster), etc. and not necessarily for utilitarian devices like an energy management system. I guess I figured wrong.
wow.....
the announcement today from Adobe about opening the Flash Player up to the market to be placed on any imaginable device is just stunning. This is going to place even more demand on people with Flash skills as these companies begin to produce handheld devices using the Flash Player.
The only thing in the press release that set off my BS detector was this.. "“The Open Screen Project will make it simple for Verizon and our partners to deliver rich mobile experiences to more devices,”" .. yeah, and how big of a fee will they charge developers before they can develop for the Verizon network?
I also noticed that there was no mention of Apple in that press release.
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.
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
