Recently in Computer Related Category

So basically, I create websites for a living.

Not just any websites though, I build websites that are essentially computer programs behind the scenes. People have to be able to use my websites to get their work done.

So I never, ever use Flash, and I’ve always found websites made with Flash to fall in the following categories.

First, there’s what I call the “Vanity” website. Those are for companies that don’t really need a website. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of website, as long as you realize that’s what you’re building. Pepsi isn’t going to pour colored sugar water into a glass for you over the internet. So building a sexy Flash site makes perfect sense for pepsi.com. Anyone going to pepsi.com is bored. So dazzle ‘em with bullshit. If you’re building a website for a local veterinarian though, that’s not a vanity site. Don’t use Flash, and put the phone number and address on every single page.

Second, there’s what I call the CEO site. Those are sites that you know were bought by a non-technical CEO from a laptop demo. No one in the real world ever goes to their website, because not only is it Flash, but its 20 minutes-to-download Flash. I once had a gig working for a music company and one of their subsidiaries had a flash site and a low-bandwith version of their site. The “low-bandwidth” version of their site had been broken for 4 months and no one at that company had noticed. Their “web guy” who knew nothing about the web always used the “high-bandwidth” version.

Then there are all the poseurs who who don’t know what they’re doing. Making HTML, CSS and all those other lovely acronyms sit up and beg is hard, and Flash ofters what seems like a solution. Some of these poseurs even have thriving companies. Again, at the record label, I went and visited the “web design firm” that was doing Metallica’s new website. They did everything in Flash, and not a single person at their 30-person company could write a basic anchor tag. They created beautiful, but ultimately unusable websites.

All I can say is: Skip Intro.

Anyways, that brings us to today’s topic. The Flagstaff Unified School District.

Currently, we have an election going on in Flagstaff about whether or not to raise property taxes in order to fund our schools. This is the second election on the same issue in the last few months, because the school district has already lost once and didn’t like the answer. They’re threatening to lay off teachers and close schools.

The reason the taxpayers keep voting no, is because our schools are badly mismanaged. We have one of the most top-heavy school districts in Arizona. So for many taxpayers in town, this initiative seems to be a case of the last straw. Even though the average increase in property taxes is going to be $250/household, many people in town are looking at not just this increase, but the other ones being threatened by other local governments and saying NO!

Given that the increase will be $1,000/year on local businesses, some of which are already marginal and failing in Flagstaff, and I suspect this tax increase could actually decrease revenues.

Oh, and did I mention that this whole override thing is pre-emptive? Its based on the theory that the state probably will implement cuts, but it hasn’t yet. So does that mean that our taxes won’t go up if the state doesn’t cut the funding? Do we get our money back, especially if the state raised taxes in order to prevent the funding cut? Nope!

Oh, and this particular election is illegal after losing the first time, but the district got a bye from the attorney general.

Meanwhile, I’m frankly of the opinion that the real solution for our schools is to fire everyone in the administration but the janitors, use the money to buy gift cards for Amazon, and hand those directly to the teachers. I even created a website for this project last year, The Amazon Project.

So with all this going on, I decided to go to the website for the school district at fusd1.org. Supposedly, they have their budget up there, and the challenge is that if you think you can do better, they’re willing to listen. So I went there.

And you know what happened? Flash.

That’s why our school district is in trouble. We’re spending money on a Flash website. I mean seriously. You’ve got to be kidding. Every single teacher in the Flagstaff School District tells me that the textbooks they’re forced to use are universally awful, and what do I see but a Flash website? There’s money flushed down the toilet right there. It’s just typical. Money spent badly by bureaucrats on nonsense, so they don’t have money for the right things.

So instead of decent textbooks, we have Flash. Flash is for rock bands, not school districts.

Oh, and they don’t really have their budget up there. At least not that I could find.

I’ll be voting no.

I kept wondering, "am I going to see a Blue Screen of Death"?

It was there.

Perhaps I should have asked myself, when, not if.

This is a rant about WebObjects Java Client, but really about Java Web Start, XML config files, and Lazy Engineers.

Submitted to Apple as bug 5806232

iPhone developers need a push API. The iPhone is a breakthrough internet device, but its battery powered. Consequently, Apple has decreed that there will be no background tasks on the phone.

Fair enough. I could live with that. I've heard from others that regularly polling from the phone just sucks down the battery life faster then a:

if (person reading this is a man)

printf("sorority girl can suck down a Strawberry Daquiri")

else

printf("frat boy can suck down a beer keg")

Unlike many iPhone developers, I spent a year with EDGE as my main internet connection, so I know that polling really does suck.

So I don't want to poll anyways. What I'd like instead is a way to push a "hey dummy, wake up and pull some new data" notification to the phone. Besides, once you're on the internet anyways, it makes a lot of sense to setup a server to filter notifications since that server can be plugged into the wall.

Now I don't know about the internals of the iPhone phone radio hardware, so there might be a better way to do this, but it seems to me that there is at least 1 easy way to go about this.

The first way, which I know would work for sure, is to leverage the existing SMS mechanism. Since the SMS mechanism already exists, this would require the following additional bits of infrastructure to be added to the iPhone.

1. The phone would have to be able to recognize these special messages, and know to treat them differently. There are a number of ways these messages could be marked as special, either via the origin (special number), or via the content of the message itself (used here for clarity).

2. Inside the message would be data indicating the destination of the message. For example, this could be a simple as a reversed domain name: com.apple.Mail would indicate that the destination was Mail. In practice, given the short size of SMS messages (140 characters) this might be something shorter, but it makes the idea more obvious.

3. Registered on the phone inside the App bundle would be code for handling the message. The iphone would pass the message into the message handler code, which would have access to the enclosing apps filesystem.

Ex:

The iPhone gets a message saying:

<iPhone>com.apple.Mail|40!gmail.com</iPhone>

This sample message shows how mail could be pushed to the iPhone very reliably. In the sample above, gmail.com is indicating that there are 40 messages available. The handler for Mail can launch, parse the message, queues a sound, and quits. This would not be much more battery cost then that used for receiving an SMS message now.

However this is implemented, I think this is a necessary addition to the iPhone SDK. (perhaps there's some other way to push a data packet to the phone? I know that Blackberry's do this for email. )

Comments Welcome.

Now that I have my hands on the iPhone Software Development Kit, I've completed my first iPhone application.

This application is a digital telephony application that digitizes your voice and transmits it on a special section of the AT&T cellular network dedicated exclusively to transmitting your voice in real time. I call this technology VoCN. In tests, users said it was much superior to VoIP programs like Skype. Unlike VoIP technology, this application works whether you are transmitting data on the EDGE network or the cellular network. Steve Jobs said, upon testing my application:

Wow! My voice sounds so clear! There's none of that weird noise, the annoying delay, crashes or weird dropouts like I have on Skype! This works so much better then VoIP. I also no longer get weird text messages from escort services.

But wait, there's more! Through a special arrangement with AT&T and Apple, Inc. I have arranged to give every iPhone customer a copy of this application just by visiting this web page! While you've been reading this blog post, my VoCN application has already been installed on your iPhone!

It's called "Phone".

Enjoy!

Because this "fake" website actually looks like every other giant corporate site in the world.

The mission statements are incredibly hilarious.

Da Link

When I got my first iPod, and I opened the packaging, it was like the beginning of 2001; all that was missing was "Thus Spake Zarathrustra" playing the background.