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.
Flash 5 and full ISO-8859 Latin-1 character set?? Wednesday, January 15, 2003
So I was wondering if the Flash 5 Player would support the full ISO-8859 Latin-1 character set…
So I was wondering if the Flash 5 Player would support the full ISO-8859 Latin-1 character set… so I grabbed the table of characters from Marin Ramsch’s page and pasted them into Flash 5 and published.. did it work? Does Flash5 support the Latin1 character set? See for yourself
64k string length limit in Flash? Thursday, December 26, 2002
So I ran into a little trouble with an application I was working on in Flash and after some testing it looks like theres a limit on the length of a string of 64k. That’s a pretty big string, but there was a reason that I needed it to be bigger.. oh well.
That led me to test a few other things. I found on this page a section on “Huge Scripts” about 3/4 of the way down the page.. where it says “it’s good practice to keep scripts smaller than 64k (compiled) per frame, it’s possible to get larger.” So.. how much larger? What’s the limit? hehe.. So I created a little test SWF to see how much I could fit on one frame. I created 5 strings, each 60k in length (that’s what? a 16 page document for each string?) on the same frame and a text field for each one. I published it as both Flash 5 and 6, and with fingers crossed pointed a browser at it. It worked. The text for all 5 strings showed up in the browser. So.. I tried 20 strings that were each 20k. That worked too.
