Flash 10 Headache

One of the problems inherent with being part of a very small (one person) development group, is that it is difficult to maintain the ability to test your site/application with every browser on every os with every new update and release. That is why, when I got that terrible email that says "I just installed Flash and the website doesn't work" I panicked.

What was calming, and frankly pretty funny, was upgrading myself to Flash 10  and wandering the internet looking at the large number of sites that didn't work properly.  The irony of seeing "Hey maybe you should update your Flash player" messages everywhere moments after getting the newest release.

The culprit? A little bit of javascript which was, in fact, the exact script recommended by Adobe in the first place. The purpose of this script is to make sure that the user has a new enough version of the plugin installed to get the full impact of your totally awesome Flash animations.  The problem is (here is where I probably bore some of you) that the script pulls in the description of your installed plugin, which might be something like "Shockwave Flash 10.0 r12". Well, that "10" used to be a "9" and had never before been two digits. Adobe's sample javascript just pull the ONE character to the left of that first period, and called that the version. Sadly, with Flash 10 installed, that script would think you had version ZERO which logic told it wasn't enough to handle state-of-the-art.  Nice forethought Adobe. 

Fresh start # 2

April was the last (and only so far) entry on this blog, but there have been a number of things in the last few months that have inspired me to start documenting my thoughts and activities again.

In April, I was still very much "the new guy" both at work and in New York, which in many ways is a very comforting title to have. Lower expectations mean higher rewards when something actually goes right. 

So here is my life over the last six months, summed up in bullet point form (in no particular order):

• Learned how to try to catch mice
  
• Learned how to just give up and live with mice
• Went to ATP in Monticello (Catskills) and saw My Bloody Valentine, which I thought might be something that would never happen.
• Continued to meet new people, but mostly just got to know people better that I had already met.
• Launched a great website at work
  

So, from now on, I will post here more often. I will post pictures that I take, probably talk about work a bit, maybe about technology, maybe about music, maybe about how frustrating it is to go on dates. I am not sure what the "personality" of this will be, or if it will have one. I don't think anyone is reading it anyway...