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.
Updated debt clock to show over $10,000,000,000,000 Sunday, October 05, 2008
Dear Adobe Monday, September 15, 2008
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 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.
Port forwarding on a Linksys router Monday, May 12, 2003
I have a little Linksys BEFSR41 firewall/router that I use at home.. and have a few machines behind that. One of the neat features of the Linksys is that it can do port forwarding. So if a request comes in on say port 80 you can forward that request on to a particular machine behind the firewall. The limitation I’ve found on this is that it only forwards to one IP address.
I have a little Linksys BEFSR41 firewall/router that I use at home.. and have a few machines behind that. One of the neat features of the Linksys is that it can do port forwarding. So if a request comes in on say port 80 you can forward that request on to a particular machine behind the firewall. The limitation I’ve found on this is that it only forwards to one IP address. So if I’m running a Windows 2000 server and want to run a bunch of web sites off of that server I have to use the “Host Header” technique to determine which web site the server should serve up for each request (requests for all of the web sites come in on the same IP address).
Now Win2k server can disntinguish which web server should handle each request three ways: IP address, Host Header, or Port. Since the Linksys will only forward one port to one IP address the only solution I’ve been able to find is to have the different domains for the different web servers mapped to unique ports. So if you send a request to ABCDEF.com your request would be forwarded to 192.168.145.12:80 (port 80)but if you send a request to FEDCBA.com your request would be forwarded to 192.168.145.12:84 (port 84).
Obviously if you have access to your own DNS server you can handle this yourself.. but if you need a DNS service here’s one that is capable of converting that domain name you have around into an IP address AND a port number:
http://www.dynu.com/
http://www.no-ip.com/
The only catch.. you’ll be paying each year for the service..
Report from FlashForward 2003 SF Friday, March 28, 2003
I’m out at the Flash Forward 2003 film festival and conference and sat through the keynote address by Kevin Lynch yesterday morning. He gave a sneak peek of a new product named Central they’ll be releasing “this summer”.
I’m out at the Flash Forward 2003 film festival and conference and sat through the keynote address by Kevin Lynch yesterday morning. He gave a sneak peek of a new product named Central they’ll be releasing “this summer”. Macromedia put out a press release on the web about it here and have a new section on their site about it here.
My reaction? it’s a paradigm shift. the applications he demonstrated included a financial forcasting app that could be used offline to view complex charts and data. When the user reconnected to the Net the data was updated. He also showed a “hot spot” locater being created by Intel that will give you specific locations of wi-fi points. It can be used either offline, or if you are online the locations listed link to a map so you can see where the addresses are. Lynch also announced that Macromedia has released a Flash 6 player for the PocketPC2002 and showed it playing back video in a Flash clip.. and the video looked good.. very cool.
