JD on MX

2003-02-28T13:48:00.000-08:00

I'VE MOVED! Thanks to Josh Dura for design, and Mike Chambers for implementation. RSS is available, but Haloscan comments did not come across. (That Macromedia "go" address should switch over soon... if it brings you back here to Blogspot, then try http://www.markme.com/jd/ The markme.com addresses will change to macromedia.com addresses in the near future, so the "go" shortcut is the best long-term address.) Thanks for visiting, and I hope you enjoy my new digs!

2003-02-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

Scoble on corporate blogging: Bob Scoble works for NEC, and he has contacts among the Microsoft bloggers -- he and I first "met" in the Dreamweaver newsgroup. He's got some of the good guidelines here, although it's a post-Cluetrain document... lots of these principles were known before the web or usenet got popular.

2003-02-27T12:27:00.000-08:00

Downside of site registration: Steve Poynter points out how the Rhode Island newspaper Providence Journal had the primary news on the recent loss of life in the nightclub fire, but was inaccessible to the world because many articles were in the site's main publishing system, behind a registration screen. (Their site does offer some of this news to non-subscribers.) It's an unusual situation, but is a strong example of the costs of not being linkable.
[via Doc Searls]

2003-02-27T12:20:00.000-08:00

Art Directors Anonymous: This is a group-portfolio piece, heavy on a video-like style sense, but it's also a good example of combining multiple pieces into a single interface. Give it some load time.
[via Jeffrey Zeldman]

2003-02-27T10:08:00.000-08:00

Word burst implemented: Last week there was theoretical discussion about measuring frequency changes of particular words in blogs to reveal hot trends. This week Dan Chan of Daypop has already implemented it. I think this is signficant work, because one of the big tasks businesses have these days is extracting info from data, of pulling signal from noise. This wordburst implementation, like the general Daypop and Blogdex link-popularity engines, works on weblogs-as-a-whole... useful because you can scan a range of rated news from left to right (both links are from today's Top 40). But we also need to implement this on a filtered-source basis, so you can tell discussion trends in a given community or business... both the server and the client have roles to play in this type of work. Still, I'm amazed that Dan pulled off this existence proof so quickly, two thumbs up.

2003-02-26T17:51:00.000-08:00

Blog offline for a bit: I'll be migrating existing entries to a system on a Macromedia server, so this blog may look wonky for a little bit, but should return to normalcy soon. Best address across changes will be http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd... this address will always bring you to the current site.

2003-02-26T16:36:00.000-08:00

Pioneer 10 last contact: It has been running out of power, and missed its last message... launched 30 years ago, passing through the asteroid belt, investigating Jupiter, it's now 20 years outside Pluto's orbit, half-a-day's travel at the speed of light.

2003-02-26T16:12:00.000-08:00

Stewart Alsop on smart mobiles: There's a new class of phones which can do more than just let you talk: "...the experience of getting the phone was very similar to the experience of getting an Apple II computer with the VisiCalc program in 1981... it let me do something with the first electronic spreadsheet that wasn't possible with pen and paper: It allowed me to rapidly try out different business ideas and test the outcomes. The Motorola T720 and its ilk also inspire me because they promise a new world of usefulness as personal assistants. With these new-generation cellphones, I'll still be able to talk to people, but I can also entertain myself between calls, find help in locating stores and even people when I'm traveling, and get a different kind of information than computers have been delivering to me so far." The World Wide Web helped people link documents, but there's more to the internet than just the web.

2003-02-26T15:53:00.000-08:00

Better traffic detection: This CNET article discusses how someone is post-processing raw sensor information to enable better prediction of upcoming traffic jams. There's that key pattern again of a rapid increase in throughput of realworld sensing devices, and the need for pattern recognition and discrimination on a single dedicated server, which then feeds a single tight stream of useful conclusions to many portable devices. You wouldn't want all that client software to each pull raw data themselves... the server needs to turn bulky data into useful info, before sending it to each subscriber. Client-side interface and server-side preferences are both key elements in this equation.

2003-02-26T15:05:00.000-08:00

New Lasso Studio for Dreamweaver: Even if you use ColdFusion, it's good to keep note of options like this, because you can't always control what server, database, application server you use. Knowing how to connect the pieces is key.

2003-02-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

In San Francisco? CFUG tomorrow: The Bay Area ColdFusion UserGroup meets the fourth Thursday of the month. The speaker schedule suddenly changed for this month, but fortunately Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers are both in town, and will be doing a joint Q&A session. Should be fun... if you're in the area it could well be worth your while. (To find a group in your area for face-to-face contacts, check here.)

2003-02-26T14:35:00.000-08:00

Find a Director developer: I see lots of people on Flash boards trying to handle projects which get too complex for Flash... they say "I know Director can do this, but I don't know Director". Use the job board at Director Online, or the Macromedia Developer Locator to find someone in your area. (Tip: The earlier in the process you contact them, the easier it is to avoid designing yourself into a corner... some projects can be hosted in a new environment as-is, but if you know the destination ahead of time you've usually got a smoother path.)

2003-02-26T13:22:00.000-08:00

Future drivers for mobile use: Russell Beattie writes of "Things To Do While You're Waiting"... how the social drivers for pocket devices differ from what we're used to with big computers. He discusses the necessity of offline functionality, the difficulty of locating trustworthy applications, and the difficulty of current business models for development. I came across this while reading his thoughts on the Flash/DoCoMo announcement... he's got lots more good stuff about mobile use, about disposable software, phone aggregators, news links, etc.

2003-02-26T11:35:00.000-08:00

New Max-to-Shockwave export: People who work in Discreet's 3DS Max can now export directly to Shockwave format. You can set up physics behaviors from Havok and it will translate across... skin, bones and other character features from Max or Character Studio will also come across. This can be instantly seen by half of all consumers tested.

2003-02-25T17:10:00.000-08:00

Poynter on DoCoMo Flash: Not much meat here, but they already see some of the opportunities for their clients: "News publishers might want to start planning for the arrival of this technology in mobile phones. It means they'll be able to deliver content to phones that's much, much more than a few characters of text."

2003-02-25T16:40:00.000-08:00

Bacardi DJ SoundStudio: Okay, I'm blown away. Build and store up to seven tracks of many audio types. Built by 2advanced for Bacardi, who will sponsor a contest on it later this year. Really good piece of work here.
[via Mat Bastian]

2003-02-25T16:09:00.000-08:00

Roundup of free Flash components: Scott Manning at ActionScript.com draws together a number of resources for configurable UI widgets. I know that ColdFusion folks have been particularly interested in these, because they drive down the cost of development. But if you're a high-end Flash coder these are also useful for comparative purposes: examine how they handle interface decisions, inspect or extend the functionality, etc.

Sometimes people balk at using a readymade component because you're downloading generalized functionality which you may not need for that specific app. Yes, custom code tuned for a particular instance can be smaller than a generic component... it's your choice whether to use generic functionality or custom functionality, assuming you can cover the development costs. But what's really interesting here is that over the last year the Flash community has been developing a grammar of UI componentry -- we've been finding what works, and what works better. At some point you might be able to count on component code already being available clientside, so that just your instructions for configuring the component need to be downloaded....

2003-02-25T15:41:00.000-08:00

Comments down, moving soon: Many blogs use HaloScan, and their servers are probably overloaded from other blogs arguing about UN inspections. I'll be moving HTML, RSS and comments to a Macromedia server this week. The best address will be through a redirect at http://www.macromedia.com/go/blog_jd.

2003-02-25T15:37:00.000-08:00

Designer phones: Wacky Hollywood stars... I'd pick up a disposable from the 7-11 myself. Still, it's signficant how they're using a mobile as a voice-interface service device, rather than just a phone... check out how the concierge changes the experience. For them, a phone is no longer a commodity, but an experience of increased service and status. Vertu's site is interesting for what it attempts, although the frequent screen-refreshes don't quite seem to match the ticket price.
[via Boing Boing]

2003-02-25T15:10:00.000-08:00

7 ecommerce failures: Short checklists are fun to read... maybe you know it all already, but the structure provides new value. "E-Commerce Times" lists these seven classic problems as: (1) not paying enough attention to delivery & fulfillment; (2) offering only online, without catalogues, phone or stores; (3) using outdated technology; (4) having no personality (commodity vs experience); (5) forgetting customer preferences; (6) stale content; (7) not bringing existing customers into the website.

2003-02-25T14:47:00.000-08:00

Browser wars, round two: Rafe Needleman discusses connectivity on portable devices. Browsing hypertext documents isn't the only way to use connections between machines.Unlike a full computer, many portables can only receive instruction updates from the device manufacturer. Yet what really drives adoption is wild innovation from unexpected places. The dynamics are different than on desktop machines....

2003-02-25T13:58:00.000-08:00

'Answers Panel' misconnects: Recently some were reporting problems getting updates to the Answers Panel within MX applications... they were seeing timeouts when trying to freshen the list of recent technotes and other resources. With the site revamp we have been moving some servers, and certain connections had increased latency. This should be squared away now. If you have any problems with the Answers Panel yourself, or if you see a conversation online where someone is reporting problems after today, then could you drop a comment here please? Thanks!

2003-02-25T13:52:00.000-08:00

Prescriptive specs vs descriptive specs: This CNET article notes that many W3C sites don't validate to latest specs. I guess this link will rise high on Daypop, but I'm not sure there's much of a real issue here.

Documents like a W3C Recommendation are prescriptive specifications -- they describe how things should be ideally, how future software should act. Something like the SWF SDK is more of a descriptive spec -- it describes how something actually does work today. With the latter you're concerned about completeness and accuracy. With the former there are all the arguments inherent in "should" statements, and it can take awhile for the real world to match the platonic ideal set up for it.

For the tools aspect, the expertise of WASP members has been valuable, and I hope it will continue. But saying the W3C is "leading by fiat, not by example" seems quite harsh -- a prescriptive spec can be a worthy goal, no need to get so judgmental about it.

2003-02-25T13:40:00.000-08:00

Seeking financial applications: The Macromedia Showcase already has a special section for finance applications, but there will be an upcoming focus on Rich Internet Applications which use both the client and the server together to do financial work. If you're working on such a project, please drop a note to Showcase folks at the above link -- there's no commitment, and they'd really like to learn of what you're working on. If you've instead visited an existing financial RIA without creating it yourself, then please drop a note in Comments here so I can alert Showcase staff myself. (Hey, I'm also interested in any finances-on-the-web work you've seen, regardless of whether it uses anything Macromedia-ish... I'm also interested in hearing of any financial website you've been impressed with.) Thanks!

2003-02-24T17:46:00.000-08:00

Get Lucky at Google: This link here can be saved into your bookmarks or installed on the browser toolbar. When you invoke it you'll get a JavaScript prompt for a search term, and you'll then go directly to the top hit for that term at Google. It works in Mozilla, and I haven't tested the JS for other browsers. (I search Google in my locater bar quite a bit, and got tired of the two-step process in reaching a site.)

2003-02-24T15:58:00.000-08:00

"Gold record" economics: The New York Daily News traces the music-biz money flow for a quartet which achieved success: a debut record which goes gold. The result? Each bandmember gets about US$40K, pretax... for a $16 disc each gets about thirty-four cents. Maybe the future of digital distribution would have taken a different shape if the initial questions were not framed in the context of such a controversial industry....
[via Jenny Levine]

2003-02-24T15:38:00.000-08:00

Two business styles: This isn't directly about technology... more about how different groups of people go about doing something with technology. First I came across Bob Scoble ripping apart a new CEO weblog, and the next article I happened across was Harvard Business School on corporate vision. This line in particular struck me: "Whole Foods Market, for example, does not have a myopic focus on the bottom line or share price, but it is committed to a vision that emphasizes more far-reaching aspirations. They actually want to change a part of the world in which they operate." I skimmed each article, and didn't absorb everything, but was struck by the difference between "I do it all, it's all for me" and "there are lots of us who want to make this a better place, and we see a way to do so, and are working on it day by day". Maybe I'm saccharine or over-dramatizing, it was just a jarring juxtaposition.

2003-02-24T13:44:00.000-08:00

Scripters vs programmers: This old debate still has legs. I think that both short-form and long-form work have value. Chad Dickerson of InfoWorld uses a hiking metaphor, and it generates 500 comments on Slashdot, one of which points to John Ousterhout's "advantages of scripting" article.

2003-02-24T13:11:00.000-08:00

Streaming Magazine If you use Flash Communications Server or related streaming technology then this magazine may be of interest... full of tidbits like expected curve for home media deployments and such. The title link is to a "Readers Choice" award for streaming technology in 2003... if you found value in the technologies behind the RIA presentation, the original Presedia presentation, or some of the other sites which use these techniques, then there's a place to vote for what works for you, thanks.

2003-02-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

Hebrew and Arabic in Dreamweaver: English reads left-to-right... Japanese can read top-to-bottom... in Herbrew and Arabic most sentence parts are read right-to-left ("RTL"). It's hard to get this across operating systems and applications... it's a specific capability which must be built in for each platform. If you're creating HTML, then this extension from Ofir Ben Natan will process the page so it will display as desired. He has info on the site (above), and it has a 5-out-of-5 rating at the Macromedia Exchange for Dreamweaver.

2003-02-24T11:41:00.000-08:00

Server licensing info: Christian has more info on the uses of the servers included in a DevNet Professional subscription. Like the other software included in a subscription, this is a single-user installation. Other people can test on your machine, but a single subscription can't be installed on all the machines in a testing lab, for instance. (These folks are welcome to download the trial versions, which often include a single-user option.) Rule-of-thumb: Unless explicitly stated otherwise, a license is usually for use by a single person.

2003-02-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

Macromedia Breeze: This is the other big news of the day... Presedia Express has been reworked into a pair of Macromedia packages, Breeze Presentation and Breeze Training. (Why the name? Because it makes presentations and training a breeze, I guess. ;-) Both help ordinary people deliver voiceover Microsoft Powerpoint presentations through the web, no hassle. Breeze Training is a superset of Breeze Presentation, adding quizzes and student tracking abilities. If you work in Authorware or CourseBuilder then you'll see that there's still a need for elearning development environments, but like Macromedia Contribute there's now a higher level of accomplishment possible by the lay public. The FAQ for Breeze Training has more info. Breeze benefits businesses rather than individuals (as you can tell from the price), but there are some interesting implications for developers now that you know that anyone in a group can create the content for SWF-based presentation and training.....

2003-02-24T11:17:00.000-08:00

Flash in DoCoMo i-mode: This is big news, as you can tell by the press coverage, but I don't have details yet on release dates, channels, or technical specifics. The central place to find information is this page for Device Support for Flash, and this is where to link into more info as we get closer to public release. In the meantime, it's more important than ever to keep thinking about what types of tasks can be well-served by portable interactive multimedia... it's coming! 8)

2003-02-21T17:03:00.000-08:00

Social hacking techniques: WIRED writes how people use psychological ruses on AOL staff to gain access. If a client pesters you about security in something you're building, then have they already taken care of cases like these...?

2003-02-21T16:56:00.000-08:00

Audio ads: Advertisers say "it gets results", because they can measure an uptick in clickthrough. But they're not measuring how many people get disgusted with the product or the site (or the poor innocent technology abused in such a fashion). I know I'm dreaming, but suppose the Flash Player context menu had a "Complain about this site..." link in it to send an email to the administrator, so that they could do a job of completing their feedback loop...? ;-) (Me, I keep sound off on my computers, and only turn it up or put in earplugs if there's actually something I want to hear.)

2003-02-21T16:46:00.000-08:00

SWF Searching: These "Webmaster Guidelines", part of Google's info for webmasters, may help. I've seen multiple discussions this week about searching for sites which use SWF, probably as a result of that SearchDay article I linked to last week. Part of the confusion is because I can't say the exact algorithm each of the various search engines uses internally. I do know they can extract text and links from SWFs, and I know that many use it, but I don't know how they use it... that's why I'm vague here. But for Google, Teoma and other link-evaluating engines, one of the key ideas in getting good placement is to make sure you have good links pointing at you. The engines know SWF, so they won't assume it's just a talentless hack, but it's more important to clearly let the spider know what the content is than to feed them every little word or outgoing link within it.

2003-02-21T16:30:00.000-08:00

Macromedia to buy Microsoft: For what it's worth, I haven't seen any indications of this myself. I do not know what evidence the writer is basing his conclusion upon.... ;-)

2003-02-21T16:01:00.000-08:00

Open source and Flash: David Vogeleer has an essay on FlashMagazine about the blend of for-free and for-pay that we're all morphing towards. Providing more opportunities on each side of that balance seems like the way to go.

2003-02-21T15:50:00.000-08:00

Do you own your email? This is a long, yet readable, lawblog entry of someone who found their email forwarded without their consent. Once you create digital content, do you implicitly control it, or can anyone who sees it reuse it and recopy it in any way they wish? Towards the bottom he draws parallels with the music industry... we've got the same issues with site design, applet design, any type of delivered code. For Rich Internet Applications some of the guts remain on your own server, but then we've got reuse of web services to think about as well....

2003-02-21T15:40:00.000-08:00

"Dogfood and showstoppers" Scott Guthrie from Microsoft has another interesting post about software release. "Eating our own dogfood" means relying on the same software customers rely on... a "showstopper" is a problem found during release-candidate stages which prevents shipment... making sure the software works is a different task than making sure it works in all conditions and uses... the first step in addressing an intermittent problem is to find a way to reliably reproduce it... some of these problems and processes you'd recognize from any site/project release, but there's an additional layer atop that when the release can be used to make other releases.

2003-02-21T15:23:00.000-08:00

Technology blogs: Jon Udell searched Google on phrases "microsoft blogs" (46 hits), "apple blogs" (105 hits) and "linux blogs" (691 hits). I got curious about the phrase "macromedia blogs"... found 781 hits. The term "flash blogs" got a ridiculously high number, but I suspect this included a lot of repeat citations and irrelevant false hits.

2003-02-21T14:37:00.000-08:00

A monster, not a robot: Ben Hammersley started a conversation on new RSS reader NewsMonster, and the comments sparked a lengthy debate on whether such new ways of consuming web content should follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol which tells search engines which pages to ignore. If you put information on a website, you would not expect someone to copy your design or text. But suppose they scrape the text out of your HTML and link to you -- is that okay? Or suppose they download your graphics and stylesheets in case someone wanted to read your source presentation offline -- is that okay? Suppose this drives up your own bandwidth costs -- is that okay? The music industry has already been forced to deal with rights to digital content, but I think we've all got a lot more to think through here still....

2003-02-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

Jon Udell on MS Office XML: This article is a sneak-peek at Microsoft InfoPath (formerly XDocs, or NetDocs), but also contains detail about the types of XML the Office applications use for communication. I'm assuming there will not be barriers to creating non-Microsoft applications which access and create such data-sources... assuming we'll eventually be able to create alternate views into business processes.

2003-02-21T13:18:00.000-08:00

On2 video reporting: This isn't directly germane to what we do, but I think it's a good indicator of the general trend. ABC News has licensed from On2 Technologies the "Laptop News Gathering (LNG) system--technology that compresses video files at high bit rates to achieve broadcast-quality playback... [to help] TV correspondents to report live from a location using only a small camera, a laptop and a satellite phone". TV-quality video is encoded at a rate of 750KB/second, and I'm assuming the source material is something like 16-bit NTSC 544x372@24fps, or just about 10M/minute... maybe a 6:1 ratio of compression-to-action, if I didn't miss a decimal somewhere.... ;-)

2003-02-21T13:06:00.000-08:00

Map of digital theft: This Forbes infographic by Nina Gould brings together data for the International Intellectual Property Alliance, the Business Software Alliance, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Mousing over a country gives 2001-2002 data on uncompensated use of software, films and music (they don't yet include stolen site design however). The theft proportions seem to follow the same curve as environmental damage... percentarge rises in developing countries, then lowers as more become enfranchised. Anyway, Nina's graph is a good example of combining several text sources into one visual display can increase accessibility.

2003-02-21T12:39:00.000-08:00

Media molds thoughts: The recent Guardian article about how PowerPoint shapes ideas got a lot of play, as people discussed how the nature of the medium itself can shape the ideas which get expressed. I hadn't seen Aaron Swartz's translations of Robert Frost and Martin Luther King text until just today, though. He also cites Peter Norvig's Gettysburg Address translation to Powerpointese. Graphics, animation, audio and video can expand expression beyond just text, but each medium can also influence the thoughts themselves as well....

2003-02-21T12:33:00.000-08:00

Blog notes: Sorry for the absence this week... spent time writing, handling a number of things. I'll be moving soon to an internal blogging system, like Mike Chambers and the rest of the gang... for the HTML blog macromedia.com/go/blog_jd will get you to the right place regardless. (I'll have the RSS address when it goes live.) The commenting system will function more reliably then too.

2003-02-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

"Persuasive Design": This interview at User Interface Engineering goes a step beyond "usable design" ("Can the visitor use the site successfully?") and focuses on ways to help achieve the site's goals. A key tactic is to make sure that the visitor can get the information they want, rather than just making the information you wish to provide more usable. "Professional services, such as doctors and lawyers, tend to be the sites that miss the persuasive design boat the most. They often just provide basic office information without emphasizing why someone should choose them as a service provider." Related articles: John Rhodes interviews Jesse James Garrett, and Persuasive Architecture.
[via WebWord]

2003-02-19T12:50:00.000-08:00

NewsMonster: Looks great -- a clientside aggregator built atop the Mozilla platform. Fast download. I can't get it to work, though... keeps saying it can't find its .JNLP file, and it doesn't display Help contents to send out a problem report. I'm in Mac OS 9.x... I don't see that they tested there. Will play with it more later. But I was impressed at how easy it was to install something built atop a platform... don't know if I'd do this all the time, because Mozilla's sandbox isn't as restrictive as a plugin's sandbox, but it's really nice to be able to quickly install just the instructions to give new abilities to software I already installed.

2003-02-19T10:11:00.000-08:00

Camphone problems: CNN describes the "unusually high demand" for mobile phones with cameras, with the result that early models are being rushed to market -- too many buttons and knobs, networks which don't interoperate, lack of standard interfaces. "... despite the problems, 8.4 million such phones were sold worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2002, compared with 5.2 million in the third quarter -- a rise of 62 percent... 'It's no secret that multimedia interoperability is not there yet. Any new technology is complicated because there are many different vendors trying to make it work together. However, we should have all the major problems solved by the end of the year....'"

2003-02-19T09:59:00.000-08:00

Social aspects of mobile phones: Lots of fascinating stuff in this BBC article about a 3-year university study... biggest angle was how mobile connectivity let people exercise more control over their own environment... phones with cameras may result in people having to visually prove what they say... they see "increasing acceptance of pushed content" (spam? you're kiddin' me!)... voice is seen as richer and, in some cases more desirable, than text... "Losing your mobile seems to equate to losing control". My favorite line: "Children used their mobile phones to ask their friends for advice. They also tended to have strict views on the use of mobile, seeing parents using text messaging as inappropriate."

2003-02-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

Consumer-level SWF presentations: Show.Kit is an approachable tool which uses themes and a tree-view of presentation slides to plug text, image and audio content into Flash files. (There are preview presentations available.) I haven't installed the authoring tool, but from the results it looks like content that could also be displayed in HTML, but with higher production values and a nicer feel than you might get from markup. Not for everyone, but if you have a client that wants to "update my own files", then this might be just the ticket.
[via Simon Barber]

2003-02-19T09:24:00.000-08:00

Macromedia tools, blog improvements: Kevin Lynch is soliciting comment on how Macromedia tools can change to help in creating, navigating, and displaying weblogs. If you've got an idea of how things can be different, please drop by and leave a note, thanks.

2003-02-18T16:30:00.000-08:00

Google Client: This is an old article from John Rhodes at WebWord (Sept01), but I didn't realize that before I got fascinated."What if Google built something that was very much like a browser but was mainly used for searching for information. What if they built a tool that was focused on searching for answers to your questions first, and looking at web pages second. Wrap your head around that. You have search needs. You also have unique search patterns. You have ways of looking for information that are very interesting and personal. Where are the tools that help you search? You are probably thinking of search engines, like Google. But search engines are server based. Why not bring the power of the server to the desktop?" Right now we navigate among web pages, in a document browser. Suppose you just wanted to find information, without the hassle of someone else's presentation and additional messages?
[via Anil Dash]

2003-02-18T15:58:00.000-08:00

Drag images in Mozilla: This bookmarklet from Simon Willison sounds dorky, but if you're running a Mozilla-based browser it can be lots of fun. Once you drag this link to your toolbar it can rewrite HTML pages to make the JPGs and GIFs draggable. No practical purpose, but it makes reading the news a lot more creative, and April Fool's Day is right around the corner.... ;-)
[via WebGraphics]

2003-02-18T15:35:00.000-08:00

Flash to phone: The upshot of this FlashCoders thread was "aww, that's old hat", but I bet consumers would be surprised to send a Flash widget in a browser page automatically send a message to a phone like this....

2003-02-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

AMF in PHP? Stewart Butterfield writes here about an opensource project to reproduce the binary client/server ActionScript Message Format within a PHP backend. I had seen threads about this on FlashCoders but didn't have any additional legal or technical info myself. I'm highlighting this discussion here in case any Macromedia lurkers can provide additional info in comments. (Sidenote: I know that writing a format for others to use, and then documenting it and handling whatever questions arise, is a significantly more complex task than just doing something which works... if you've commented code for a tutorial you know the difference.)

2003-02-18T13:52:00.000-08:00

Real on digital media: Rob Glaser of Real Networks lays out his ideas on the copying of digital content. Things that jumped out at me were how he took an anti-prohibition approach on filesharing ("if you try to outlaw it, then it will just come back in some other form"), and how he seemed to suggest towards the end that the way to insure compensation to the creators is to make it more convenient for people to use (presentations tailored for devices, highlights, etc). I'm still not sure why the publisher chosen by the creators could not get edged aside by publishers who purloin the creators' content, however.

2003-02-18T13:13:00.000-08:00

AOL-TV goes dark: This could mean that it's another example of people using their TV time for either multi-tasking or vegging-out instead of interacting. Or it could mean that, with its massive financial losses, AOL/Warner/Time/Turner is focusing tightly on areas where it knows it can provide services of value. I can't read the tea-leaves beyond the obvious, that they don't see money in it this quarter.

2003-02-18T13:07:00.000-08:00

Web blackout: This is actually somewhat on-topic. I've been thinking lately about what I'd do if the web, and all electronics, were suddenly fried in the San Francisco Bay Area. Perish the thought, of course, but the changes in North Korea force a recalculation... a missle exploding a few hundred miles above the Bay could destroy electronics the same way that Hawaii was affected in 1962. I'd lose my MIDI accordion, but could still play the acoustic ones. I could also catch up on technical reading on paper. Not sure what else I would do. If you suddenly lost all electronic circuitry, what would you do...?

2003-02-18T12:06:00.000-08:00

Globe & Mail on Contribute: I usually don't flag reviews here, but this one was actually written from the author's perspective instead of just recycling product info. If you're evaluating implementing a solution with Contribute then this could be a novel and useful perspective.He sees it as Dreamweaver graduated out of the "novices welcome" category with the MX release, but Contribute takes up the slack, and he'd like to see it become more of a general authoring tool than just content contribution. (fwiw, the Contribute team has been hard at work at integrating early feedback, but I'm not sure yet what changes will go public when.)

2003-02-18T11:58:00.000-08:00

David Weinberger on protocols vs formats: As David Stutz pointed out earlier this week, we're moving towards a place where there are multiple "black boxes" on multiple machines, which speak through agreed-upon protocols. Special file formats and in-house apps are giving way to being able to interoperate with any other application on the network. There are still particular uses for special formats (think Flash Communications Server, for instance), but as we get more and more of a backlog of programming solutions, the value in working freely with other components increases more quickly. David's one of the Cluetrain gang, and the topic of "decentralization" brought up at the recent Supernova conference is starting to spread into "empower the edges", but there's still a ways to go into realizing the implications of this (see London crime trends, eg). David also compares his experience of using the Flash and Acrobat web players, noting that Flash feels less intrusive because there's less lock-out, but the download and hassle factor may be a larger issue in such a difference in experience. Worth a read.

2003-02-18T09:57:00.000-08:00

Threedegrees: CNET describes an upcoming Microsoft communications project. They're apparently considering the social aspects before the technical aspects, which seems promising. The technology is apparently based on Windows XP, so I'm not sure when they plan to go mobile. The ability to narrowcast image and audio files implies that someone in the group can dump data onto other machines. I'll be interested in hearing how they handle security and other unanticipated uses.

2003-02-18T09:16:00.000-08:00

"This means war!!" Long unreadable posts, some willful ignorance, plenty of misrepresentations and ad-hominems, but this thread on a stock board does contain useful arguments from people who are actually invested in communications servers. If you initiate projects with Flash Communications Server, then this discussion could be useful in understanding objections and sharpening the fit of project to task. People at risk of actually losing something can often get emotional and off-track, but they also bring up useful points more than recreational arguers do.

2003-02-17T15:18:00.000-08:00

DEMO 2003 sessions: Want a quick overview of new technologies that investors and technologists consider interesting? This list from the annual show is a handy checklist. (I haven't gone through all these myself yet, but will be browsing them over the next week.)
Update: CNET has an overview of this year's presenters.
Update: More overview from Dan Gillmor.

2003-02-17T15:16:00.000-08:00

Shrinkwrap development cycle: Scott Guthrie of Microsoft opened up a new blog this week, and in this entry discusses the different stages of a typical development cycle. This isn't exactly the same as the cycles used inside Macromedia, but gives a good idea of what's involved. Note the need for automation of testing on core functionality -- there's an entire set of tasks which, because of the multiple versions delivered, are best tested automatically. (This is particularly true when delivering each language to different platforms.) One addition I'd make is that external beta testing is particularly helpful in finding problems which could not be predicted for automatic testing -- new releases need to accommodate a range of existing workflows; it's not just features that need testing. Another set of internal tests, particularly for web players, is going through a wide range of external files in-house. His description isn't an exact match, but it's a good read if you're interested in such things.
Update: Corrected the URL... sorry folks, thanks Ian!

2003-02-14T17:18:00.000-08:00

President's Day Monday: Offices in the US are mostly closed on the third Monday of February to honor those who have served as Presidents of the United States. This weekend we'll also likely be doing some load-testing of the new site, and there's a chance that web forums, store and exchange will have some downtime. If you see things look odd, it's because they probably are. ;-) I'll be online in light duty throughout, but I won't have details on any changes to the site until everybody's in the offices again on Tuesday.

2003-02-14T14:48:00.000-08:00

OBJECT tag in current browsers: Last November Drew McLellan had an article in A List Apart on getting a SWF to appear in some browsers while also satisfying the W3C's request to not use the EMBED tag. But I didn't know about Arun Ranganathan's article in Netscape DevEdge... despite words like "obtainment mechanism", it's actually a pretty straightforward read. If I could risk a summary:

if your audience is entirely in IE/Win, use Microsoft's prior implementation of the OBJECT tag
if your audience is only in IE/Win and Mozilla-based browsers, read up here on how to reconcile their handlings of the OBJECT tag
if your audience includes older browsers, or IE/Mac, or rarer browsers, then you'll probably want to continue with the nested OBJECT/EMBED tag structure and use the W3C's validation as an adivsory rather than as a pass/fail grade
if you've got browser-dependent features beyond just plugin appearance (such as passing variable data to the plugin through either HTML or URL, or using JavaScript/plugin intercommunication, or doing other tricky browser-related things) then it would be good to check any unusual tagging use in the range of audience browsers before implementation

2003-02-14T14:31:00.000-08:00

Gary Rosenzweig on speech synthesis: I usually don't list the twice-monthly DevNet articles here, because there are so many really good ones, and because you can get each issue's contents as an XML feed or email. But if you don't use Director, I'd urge you to spend two minutes with Gary's article here, on the new programmatic control over dynamic text which works across operating systems, and which does not require screen-reading software. Half of consumers tested by Media Metrix in December already had the Shockwave 8.5 Player, and this new cross-platform speech synthesis requires just a component download, rather than a full plugin download. It can speak text you pull from databases in response to user activity... even just a small plugin instance on the page can give you dynamic voiceovers at very low bandwidth cost, without requiring special hardware on the user. Not all situations require dynamic text-to-speech, but if you do need it, then Shockwave's installed base makes this the strongest way to get it.

2003-02-14T13:48:00.000-08:00

Ad hoc directory? Reversible.org is an odd idea, but may be useful to us, and definitely has precedents. As in a Wiki, pages can be created automatically simply by making a reference to a page. Where a Wiki uses hypertext links to automatically create a page, Reversible instead uses HTTP Referrers and Trackbacks -- if you link into an as-yet non-existent page in reversible.org it will (a) create that page and (b) populate that page with either your referring link or, if you have a trackback system, your referring page and some text that you send along. I don't have a trackback system yet, and am not sure I can correctly construct one manually, but will try to set up a page where people reading this can bring together links to their own pages. If you add a link to http://reversible.org/blogGroups/flashBlogs on your blog or website and click on it, do you see your own page listed here...?
[via Jason Kottke]

2003-02-14T13:27:00.000-08:00

Peter Hall's Drawing Class: Look at his editable, skewing, and distortion examples to get an idea of what he's doing. If I'm understanding the process correctly, he's using an upcoming version of the Action Script Viewer from Burak Kalayci to extract a vector drawing from a SWF file as a logical array of coordinates. He then applies Branden Hall's transform class (correct version here?) to this data, before using Flash's Drawing API (or some bytecodes?) to write this altered array to screen. He's considering converting a parsed SVG file into a similar coordinate array, either for transforms and drawing or just straight drawing. Excellent stuff... virtual burrito is on its way to you, Peter.... ;-)

2003-02-14T12:54:00.000-08:00

Keynote Schema: Apple's new presentation program called "Keynote" stores its data in an XML file. This Apple technote describes the permissible structure of such a document. I'm not sure yet what type of use we'd be able to make of it (in Flash, Director, or even Dreamweaver or ColdFusion), but I've got it printed out for the bus ride home. If you've got bandwidth to explore this and have comments then I'd love to hear them, thanks.

2003-02-14T12:11:00.000-08:00

Quiz on interface experience: Bruce Tognazzini has a ten-question quiz on UI details... feels almost like a job interview. I'm not sure I agree with all of this (his text interface has some ambiguities for me ;-), but at the very least, if you're familiar with this material then you'll have some protection when one of your own designs is criticized by the inevitable office "interface expert". (Branden Hall pointed out that this article is three years old, which may explain why Tog's "big is better" advice doesn't seem to make much sense for handhelds.... ;-)
[via Josh Dura]

2003-02-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

Flash Mind Reader: This is just a trifle, but it's the top-ranked link among blogs at Daypop right now. Those of you whose education included Joseph Leeming magic books will recognize the principle (.lacitnedi si lobmys htnin yreve dna ,enin fo elpitlum a sevael syawla rebmun eht morf stigid owt fo mus eht gnitcartbuS) There are lots of other Flash magic tricks on the web, but regular magicians like Max Maven put a little more pizzaz around it.

2003-02-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

Server commodification: Martin LaMonica at CNET describes the downward pressure on prices for Java and J2EE application servers. A fixed feature set usually means that competition eventually centers on price alone. This idea made a strong impression on me when Jeremy Allaire and group joined Macromedia, and why they focused on improving the experience of using an application server by making ColdFusion the fastest and cheapest way to create such applications. J2EE servers are now feeling this pressure -- PHP is already free for the download, and ASP is already bundled right in to the Microsoft offerings. The same principle holds for individual development as well as group development -- the cost of basic features eventually drops to zero, and the edge in value remains in optimizing the particular audience's actual experience in using that feature set.

2003-02-14T08:41:00.000-08:00

Google privacy concerns: Dave also links to this article at Google Watch, which I saw yesterday from another source. I'm not sure I buy all the conclusions of these observations (aggregate viewing data is not necessarily tied to an individual; most of those trying to deal with Washington regulation do hire insiders; the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is an odd court and I'm not certain I buy their opinion on caching, etc), but along with cookies from advertisers I routinely block cookies from search engines too. Technorati has links to comment... I'm not sure whether any Google staffers maintain blogs...?
Update: Aaron Swartz is not a Google staffer, but he maintains what is probably the definitive external Google blog.

2003-02-14T08:34:00.000-08:00

Software of inclusion: Dave Winer has a good paragraph here: "It's not just open source developers that Microsoft must learn to work with. They often are just as arrogant and hell-bent on world domination as Microsoft itself. Better to partner with those who accept everyone's right to exist, who assume there will be no world domination, and try to make users more powerful by offering choice everywhere. This is the philosophy of inclusion." He writes it in response to an article by David Stutz, and the feeling summarizes a lot of the drivers behind the multi-tier Macromedia MX strategy, as well as my own feelings on a lot of non-software issues. (I'd leave out that "arrogant" part, but hey.... ;-) An upcoming issue of the Designer & Developer Center will focus on working with .NET and PHP, and I'll try to expand on this for a column in that issue.

2003-02-14T08:19:00.000-08:00

ThinkSecret on platforms: This is a rumor site which has caused extra work for me in the past, but they have a useful article today. It discusses how some software makers are (or may be) considering building atop Apple's new WebCore HTML renderer within their Safari browser. Essentially, client machines can now be assumed to have increased functionality, allowing developers to build at a higher level of abstraction and power, similar to ideas I was trying to get to in the "Information Convenience" section of a recent column. Strengthening the edges can open new opportunities for those in the center of development. (For WebCore, Macromedia Contribute for Macintosh has already been in development for awhile, so its arrival likely won't change things here. I don't have a data for Mac clients for Contribute, but it's in the pipeline now.)

2003-02-14T08:01:00.000-08:00

Online banking doubles: Ipsos-Reid interviewed 6600 adults in 12 countries, 2900 of which were "active internet users": "Nearly two-thirds (62%) of Internet users have purchased a product or service online, up dramatically from 36% of respondents in 2000... 38% played a video game online... Online banking has also experienced a dramatic increase between 2000 and 2002, almost doubling to 37% from 20%. Online banking is most prevalent in Canada, the U.K., Germany and the U.S., where more than 40% of Internet users had banked online." There's also a chart showing changes in "Internet use within last 30 days" during 1999, 2000 and 2002 within USA, Canada, South Korea, UK, Japan, Germany, France, and urban areas within Mexico, China, Brazil, India, and Russia.
[via CNET]

2003-02-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

Borking the Borg: Okay, this is small of me, but I do get a kick out of corporations with a sense of humor. Opera Software says: "Two weeks ago it was revealed that Microsoft's MSN portal targeted Opera users, by purposely provided them with a broken page. As a reply to MSN's treatment of its users, Opera Software today released a very special Bork edition of its Opera 7 for Windows browser. The Bork edition behaves differently on one Web site: MSN. Users accessing the MSN site will see the page transformed into the language of the famous Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork! " (By the way, you can turn any site into funny stuff by various preprocessors... juvenile, I know, but I still can't help laughing.... ;-)
[via Slashdot]

2003-02-14T07:29:00.000-08:00

Valentine "Flash Virus" You may get "I heard this on the net" from clients or colleagues... here's a link to source info. "The program that AdwareDropper installs is a Macromedia Flash 'card' and three Adware DLL files that are Internet Explorer browser helper objects. According to AVERT, these files are 'designed to display advertisements, track the URLs visited on the system, capture typed search strings, and alter the browser's default start page.' Once installed, the trojan spams your friends with a message purporting to be a Valentine." Just as many online political messages use SWF these days, people trying to install malware on your computer find SWF attractive and compelling too. (Nobody seems to blame Anna Kournikova, though.... ;-) The key thing to pass to people who mention this is the usual "You've got to trust the instructions you execute".

2003-02-13T16:28:00.000-08:00

Odd SearchDay article: This piece at SearchEngineWatch saw place somewhere else in 2002... I remember reading those quotes, but don't remember the original place. The author was out-of-date then, and is a bit more out-of-date now. "I believe the Macromedia Flash SDK, though implemented by FAST, does very little to help Flash sites be found for any keywords base outside the site title tags, which 9 out of 10 times are STILL lacking in purpose!" The SDK helps engines remove text and links... they're accessible. What they do with that material is a different issue. Maybe if I was face-to-face with these folks I could figure out what they're really trying to say, and confirm what theyre currently unaware of.
[via Poynter Online, where Larry Larsen already supplies missing info]

2003-02-13T14:10:00.000-08:00

Mac speed for Flash Player: With the Safari new beta yesterday I've seen a couple of iterations of "Why is Flash playback slower on the Mac", along with "Macromedia never says anything about this", which is a little frustrating considering the evidence to the contrary. It's fast to type "slower on Mac", but it takes more time to type out a reply, even if you've had lots of practice.... ;-)

First, get out of the browser. If you're comparing two machines then do it with standalone engines rather than in-browser engines. Browsers have an influence on how many processor cycles their guest renderers enjoy. You can confirm this by looking at the same SWF in different browsers on the same machine... you won't always see a difference with all files, but it's pretty straightforward to prove to yourself that the browser has a role to play. Get out of the browser... compare standalones.

Then cut out simultaneous tasks. If you've got the Flash authoring application running in the background, turn it off. Turn off all other apps. And make sure that the SWF file is local, not streaming over the web. Systems definitely differ in how they accommodate simultaneous tasks. Get rid of that variable.

Once you've got a locally-stored SWF playing standalone on two different machines, then you can start comparing performance of the particular features used in a SWF across two different machines. Systems definitely differ in individual tasks, such as vectors-to-screen, scaling bitmaps, decompressing audio, processing scripts. It's hard to directly compare two different hardware architectures, but once you get rid of the browser, streaming and other tasks, you can then start to see how those two machines do on individual tasks.

There could definitely be differences across systems at this point. Each recent round of Flash Player development has had a significant amount of tweaking specifically for Mac Classic and Mac Native playback... there's always a way to identify a pressure point and try to work around it. Knowing exactly what you're measuring and testing is the first point, though. (If you do have a file which seems to be remarkably different across systems, then we'd really like to get more info, thanks.)

2003-02-13T14:00:00.000-08:00

Safari update: This browser isn't as important to consumers (relatively few run Mac OS X), but it is important to many developers who use this platform themselves. The comments in Dave Hyatt's blog discuss certain outstanding issues which could have an effect on readers here. There are still certain cookie issues, and some report unnamed JavaScript differences. For Flash, communication through Flash Remoting or regular XML is still blocked (a string-truncation problem in at least some cases). Also some have difficulty typing single-byte non-ASCII characters (cedillas, etc) in fields in SWF in browser.

2003-02-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

Web bugs in HTML spam: The Register reports that: "83 per cent of unsolicited commercial HTML emails sent to these accounts contained hidden tracking codes that notified the spammers as soon the messages were opened. Opening such messages (even in the Outloook/Outlook Express preview pane) results in yet more junk, natch, thanks to information gleaned through the hidden tracking codes." More info in Web Bug FAQ.

2003-02-13T13:06:00.000-08:00

The Little Book of Picture Messaging Vodafone is apparently trying to entice customers to use photographs of worldly objects to convey messages over their phones... a doll with a broken leg means "good luck", a shot of ice cubes signify "cool", etc. Some don't buy this, saying that text-messaging shorthand evolved spontaneously, bottom-up. A bigger problem may be that the right visuals aren't available for shooting when you want to send a message. But there's still something compelling in framing a visual picture to convey meaning...?

2003-02-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

Changes in freeware distribution: Tom Spring of PCWorld examines the crunch many freeware sites are facing. As they get more popular the bandwidth costs they eat become more difficult to absorb -- although developers donate their production time, the distribution costs are still measurable. Download sites themselves tend to follow a power-law distribution, with a few large sites handling the bulk of downloads. Small depots are still free to start up, but as they become more popular their own costs increase. Is charging developers to list a free download the only sustainable path possible? Or can such sites carry a combination of for-pay and free-to-use utilities?

2003-02-13T12:38:00.000-08:00

SMIL article: Odd article at Computerworld... "Why SMIL? After all, do we not already have Flash from Macromedia, which can achieve similar results? The difference is that Flash remains essentially an animation data type - it is a content type rather than pure content itself. Furthermore, as an open recommendation from W3C, SMIL can be used by anyone to create compliance software." Maybe the author hasn't seen any Flash work besides animation, and doesn't know the range of tools which create SWF? Anyone have any other ideas? On a related note, has anyone out there parsed and displayed SMIL documents within the Shockwave or Flash Players? I remember the Director community discussing it five years ago when SMIL first got finalized, but has anyone used either player as a SMIL rendering engine recently? Thanks in advance for any pointers.

2003-02-12T17:14:00.000-08:00

New RIA presentation: This is aimed mostly at IT and exec staffs, but could be useful for your own purposes if you're trying to convince a client to take a specific direction on a new project. Al Ramadan (Macromedia), John Dalton (Forrester Research), Joseph Pine (The Experience Economy) and Pamela Kramer (E*Trade) take a television-like approach to demonstrating how realworld Rich Internet Applications are currently improving user experiences and providing measurable returns on investment. Towards the end it gets into a pitch on Studio MX and servers, but this presentation is still a clear demonstration of how the new technology makes for a better user experience. Runs about fifteen minutes, give it a look.

2003-02-12T15:55:00.000-08:00

Sixth-grade felony: An 11-year-old changed his grades while the teacher was at lunch. He got caught, and got suspended. But because the teacher stored the grades in a computer, instead of paper-and-pencil, the penal system came in and hit him with a felony. He spent some time in jail but is at home now. I sorta suspect that the teacher now might be logging off the unattended computer rather than leaving it open all the time.....
[via Matt Drudge]

2003-02-12T15:44:00.000-08:00

Jim Von Ehr update: Jim sparked Fontographer, FreeHand, the EPS format and other tools, and has recently been driving the field of nanotechnology forward. He founded Zyvex, sponsors university research, has served as a technology adviser on President Bush's Economic Forum, and has also sponsored some of Rob Freitas's work on nanomedicine and life extension. "I think nanomedicine has such promise for humanity that I have taken a small portion of my net worth and hired Rob to write a book and to give us some ideas about what might be possible," Von Ehr said. "We can't build any of the devices he has designed yet because we don't have atomic precision. "But in 20 years we are going to be able to make little devices to go in your body and actually fight diseases and cure some of the ageing problems in cells." (For more info, try this June'01 interview.)

2003-02-12T15:29:00.000-08:00

Microsoft rumor: Here's the reaction on CF-Talk to someone springing that "has anybody heard anything" thread... I know people who read blogs are too savvy to muck up a list like this, but there's one born every minute.... (Reading through this digest makes it clear why it's de rigeur to trim quoted material in a reply, by the way.) Last week Spencer the Katt said some tipster gave a conclusion without supporting evidence... pretty weak, but hey, a feline has to get their quota of column inches each week too. [Obligatory disclaimer: I have heard of no such thing internally, but the more conspiratorially-minded will cite this as proof I'm out of the loop, I'm sure.... ;-) ]

2003-02-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

New Safari, faster Flash: I don't see hard info on Apple's site, nor at Dave Hyatt's blog, but MacCentral reports: "[Wednesday's] Safari beta update also improves the ability to interact with Flash content, one of the most ubiquitous multimedia formats on the Internet. Flash content is now five times faster, according to Apple." The discussion board seems to confirm it, although with small sample size. Build number is version 60.

2003-02-12T13:51:00.000-08:00

HTML to Formatting Objects conversion: Doug Tidwell at IBM DeveloperWorks has a long tutorial on creating an XSLT stylesheet, which, when fed with an HTML document into the Apache Xalan XSLT engine, creates a document with a neutral representation of text and formatting (XSL-FO, Extensible Stylesheet Language - Formatting Objects). He then translates this XSL-FO representation into PDF. The reason I bring this up here is that I know a lot of us have various types of formatting-conversion tasks... using a normalized intermediary format like XSL-FO can be cheaper than reinventing the wheel for each conversion.

2003-02-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

The power of stupid questions: We work in a technical field, and no one has deep knowledge of all aspects of it. Newcomers often try to assert their worth by bringing conversation deeply into their speciality -- talking in detail about their one tree, and leading the group's focus away from the forest. This short article at Builder.com shows how, if you're confident of your abilities, you can contribute a lot just by acknowledging the things you don't know -- making sure you're all really in a forest instead of in a sawmill somewhere.....

2003-02-12T13:18:00.000-08:00

Social aspects of online games: This BBC article is a little frothy, but there is apparently some current research from Loyola University investigating what actually happens within a group game of Counter-Strike. "For this reason, and others, Prof Wright believes that gaming is undoubtedly good for players. Before now, he said, many studies of game playing have been skewed by hidden agendas... it was a mistake to think that this meant that gamers were misanthropists. 'The most common emotion when people are playing is laughter,' said Prof Wright."

2003-02-12T13:14:00.000-08:00

Dot.com biz taken seriously: Business Week writes that there's an increasing number of businesses started during dot-com hype which are now making money. I'm sure there are arguments either way, but regardless, this is what mainstream business magazines are telling their audience of investors... possible positive-feedback loop here.

2003-02-12T12:57:00.000-08:00

Comments on-and-off: I appreciate that HaloScan has hosted a comments system for this blog. They do have heavy traffic, though, and I notice that comments have been flicking in and out of existence again today. (I'll eventually be moving over to a system similar to Mike's, but I'm still tracking HTML connections from old to new sites.) Anyway, my apologies if you'd like to add to the info here but get caught in an outage.

2003-02-12T12:23:00.000-08:00

ALT1040 and this blog: Caught this in my referrers, and machine-translated it through Google. Apparently the writer prefers to read from developers coding their own projects. Sorry, I don't own a particular project myself... I mainly listen to other people all day and try to collect together the useful tidbits here. If you find that your time spent reading here is of value, great. If not, then I'm open to suggestions for change in the comments here, but I realize in advance that my own spoutings may not be to everyone's taste.... ;-)

2003-02-12T11:50:00.000-08:00

"Browser Helper Objects": Rudy at Evolt reported that his Google display had suddenly changed to frames, in IE/Win. The cause of the change isn't nailed down yet, but it seems like some type of "browser helper" program was installed without his knowledge. He tried a few spyware-detection programs without results, but following a tip from Tony Crockford, found that BHODemon revealed an "SbSrch_V2" module which, when deactivated, reverted his search display to normal. I don't know the people from Definitive Solutions myself, and so can't personally vouch for their code, but they apparently received a recommendation from Chris Pirillo so I assume they're on the up-and-up. The discussion also revealed Sandra Harmeier's page of IE/Win spyware exploits. More of the story is to please be confident of the executable code you install on your machine -- filesharing just puts data on your machine, but executable code can install instructions, so it's good to know whose orders you're obeying.