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.

.Net? Java? No Thanks, We’ll Take Macromedia Instead
An article on Internetweek.com gives the reasons Mitem Corp chose to use Flash MX rather than .NET or Java as a solution for a large scale internet application. 

.Net? Java? No Thanks, We’ll Take Macromedia Instead
An article on Internetweek.com gives the reasons Mitem Corp chose to use Flash MX rather than .NET or Java as a solution for a large scale internet application. The interesting thing is they were traditionally a .NET and Java shop and had to learn Flash.. i.e. they converted development over to Flash rather than using what they already knew.

It’s an interesting read if you’re trying to decide whether to use .NET, Java, or Flash for a web app.
read the whole article

I found a minor bug (sort of..) in the public release of Flash Player 7..  release 7,0,14,0
(( I found out on 10/2/03 that this bug was fixed.. and that the fix would be in the next release of the player which will be out “later this year"))

I found a minor bug (sort of..) in the public release of Flash Player 7..  release 7,0,14,0

((this bug was fixed in Flash Player 7.0.19.0 12/16/03 but I’m leaving this info here because there will still be people using 7,0,14,0 for some time..))

The example above shows sorting by length of the string in the array.. it works in both Flash Player 6 and 7.

However.. if I change

if (a.length >= b.length){
to
if (a.length > b.length){

It will crash Flash Player 7 dramatically.. giving the script timeout error, and sometimes closing the browser without any warning. Yet the same code will compile just fine in Flash MX and will display without incident in Flash Player 6.  I know it’s bad coding..  it showed up on my radar because it was in an old project I did where I ported some ASP code over to ActionScript and didn’t double check the logic used in the original code.

What’s happening is one or more array elements fail the sort method because the order(a,b) function does not return the expected “1” or “-1”. Apparently Flash Player 6 is not strict about this.. and Flash Player 7 is???

To see an the example of the "invalid" code that will display in Flash Player
6 but will crash Flash Player 7 --> click here.

suggestionArray = new Array("apple","bug","frog","dog","pineapple"); mytext = main(); function main(){     wordArray.sort(order);      wordString = wordArray[0];      for (var q = 1; q<5; q++) {           wordString += "r"+wordArray[q];      }      return wordString; } function order(a, b) {      if (a.length >= b.length){           return -1;      } else {           return 1;      } }