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 saw the recent post about the XSS vulnerability if a SWF was published from an old application (old news..).. here.. and it reminded me that a while back I was looking for a way to read the SWF metadata from within the SWF. I can't go into why.. but at the time I couldn't find a way to do it. I'm sure it could be hacked pretty easily but didn't see a direct and easy way to do it.

Metadata can be read from the SWF header by a web server serving up the SWF by using PHP, ColdFusion, .NET, etc.. , and you could also have some JavaScript that pokes at the meatadata in any SWFs coming from 3rd parties.. it can be handy. The metadata can also be set via JSFL..

So I looked at the docs on metadata and it looked promising..

but the metaData returned from the document when I checked it from JSFL was: "XML Metadata is :<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:Description rdf:about="" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><dc:title>my dinky little title</dc:title><dc:description>some super important description</rdf:Description>"

The examples in the docs also show CreateDate and CreatorTool.. hmm.
<xmp:CreateDate>2004-10-12T10:29-07:00</xmp:CreateDate>
<xmp:CreatorTool>Flash Authoring WIN 8,0,0,215</xmp:CreatorTool>

which might be of interest.. hmm.. I might have to spend some time looking into reading the header of a SWF again and see what turns up. Maybe somebody has already figured this one out and I just haven't searched around enough.

The other day (when I was finally getting out of a month or so of fog..) I wrote kind of (heh..) a rambling post and I got a couple of IMs from Phillip Kerman encouraging me to do "why" videos for a little therapy.

lol.. yep. I'd looked at his "why" vids a while ago and laughed so hard I almost stomped on my dog (you know.. laughing, stomping feet, dog right at my feet.. ah.. nm) and so I listened to him. I don't think I have the time each day to devote to making the vids like he did, but I had a few minutes to go and watch his and laugh a bit and it made me feel better.

He's poking some pretty good fun at/with Adobe with things like .. Why is the old Captivate logo gone? and Max Dates are set!. He's ended his "why flash" focused videos (for the moment I bet..) and started to focus on some more serious content. Here, go take a look at his latest ones from yesterday: Why SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? and stock photography.

He made me laugh.. and gave me something to blog about.. that's good therapy, yep. It ranks up there with watching sparks fly from grinding steel or maybe the smell of .. ah.. fresh Diesel.