Update: Here is a fantastic example of someone who has completely gone off the rails with respect to Flash…
Wow…nothing generates conversation in the tech industry like Adobe Flash. In just the past couple of days I’ve read articles about how HTML5 might be a ‘Flash killer’ along with articles on the release of Flash on the major mobile platforms, aside from iPhone. Along with those articles comes a lot commentary ranging from the people complaining about the lack of Flash on the iPhone to those with a strangely visceral hate for Flash who think that the lack of Flash on the iPhone is a bonus of the platform.
HTML 5 as Flash Killer
With all due respect to John Gruber over at Daring Fireball Adobe doesn’t view HTML 5 as a threat to Flash not because of anything to do with Internet Explorer but because of the history of HTML and CSS themselves. HTML 5 has a lot of great features and sounds like a real winner paired with CSS3 but modern browsers still can’t get the older standards right. There are still many workarounds required to get things rendering the same way on different browsers. Granted the situation is better than it used to be but these things simply aren’t an issue on a Flash-based user interface. While the browsers continue to play catch-up in the compatibility space Adobe will keep adding compelling features to Flash. I just don’t see HTML 5 being a serious challenger to Flash anytime soon.
Flash on Mobile Devices
I’d love Flash to be available on the iPhone. I really don’t get the reaction people have to Flash in general but when people go as far as saying that no Flash on the iPhone is a feature….please. Get a grip already. The iPhone experience would be that much richer with Flash available on the phone. HTML 5/CSS3 support on mobile Safari could be 100% compliant but until people start adopting those features on a mass scale it won’t be an alternative to having Flash available on the phone (see above).
I’m just not getting the dust-up over this stuff. Flash is a tool like anything else. Wider support of both HTML 5/CSS3 and Flash makes the web better, not worse. To those who would rather not have Flash exist at all: I think the web is a richer place with You Tube, Pandora, etc. than without them and they exist because of the ubiquitous nature of Flash. You seriously don’t? Because they wouldn’t exist right now if it weren’t for Flash.
Happy to say that with minimal fuss I was able to get the newest release of Ubuntu Desktop, 9.04, running on VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Five easy steps:
- Follow this blog post for the install (he also links to the bits I am here) – but don’t worry about his suggestion for the mouse driver since the VMWare tools install takes care of it.
- Once the install is completed uninstall VMWare tools (they were installed as part of step 1 but not all of it was done..vmhgfs isn’t set up). You might have to remount the install “CD” by selecting “Install VMWare Tools” from the Virtual Machine menu. In any case untar the tools tarball and run the uninstaller. The uninstaller is in the bin directory of the vmware-tools-distrib directory you created.
- Follow the directions here for getting vmhgfs to work.
- Rerun the vmware tools installer in the distribution directory you created in step 2.
- Bask in the glow of a job well done
AT&T 2nd level support really came through for me. After writing here about having my connectivity problems return and getting in touch with AT&T tech support I can happily report that I am now routinely getting 900kbps (on average) at my office. There was a problem with a tower in the area and it was fixed. I’m a seriously happy camper. Pandora here we come (again)….
Update: Problem solved!
Awhile back I wrote about having found a solution for the data connectivity issues that were plauging my iPhone in 3G mode. At the time a call to AT&T Tech Support made my reset my network settings which appeared to clear up the issues, and it did help….for about a day.
Since then I’ve been having the same problems and I contacted support again. The agent I spoke with was very helpful. I didn’t get the run-around and after some questions he told me that he was going to refer the case to a higher level of technical support. Despite the higher level of tech support not honoring my request for email contact I was able to get in touch with them to get the ball rolling on what I hope will be a resolution.
It certainly is odd though. More testing indicated that I was actually getting worse transfer speeds in 3G mode than if I switched the phone into EDGE mode. 3G was netting me about 50kbits/s while in EDGE I was averaging about 140kbits/s. Those are not the results I would have expected. Of course this is still only happening at my office. At home I routinely get 1400kbits/s download and about 400 up.
It certainly has been an aggravating experience but I have to say that my interactions with AT&T’s tech support have been very good so far. I hope that continues
The MacHeist 3 bundle looks fantastic but I think they’re unlock priorities are off. Why was BoinxTV the first unlock level instead of The Hit List and Espresso? Those two applications certainly would have a wider audience than BoinxTV. Hopefully MacHeist 3 will sell enough copies to unlock those two applications. I’ll be buying my copy later to help the process along
Last week I ran into an odd situation with our HTML output from JasperReports in Internet Explorer 7. All text, link or otherwise, was being underlined and I’m not really sure of the root cause other than it would appear we ran into a CSS rendering bug. The same thing does not happen in Firefox 3 (though my research indicated that the same issue occurs in Firefox 2).
In rendering HTML output JasperReports inserts various anchor tags of the form:
<a name="JR_PAGE_ANCHOR_0_1">
It doesn’t use these with href attributes but it does use them for some purpose.
Our global CSS file indicates that anything that is inside an anchor tag should be underlined. This would make sense assuming that anchors are used for links (a pretty good assumption). We also use the Dojo JavaScript framework and the Dijit ContentPane widget allows using the ContentPane (normally used with a DIV) to show external content. That external content can be “scrubbed” to allow it to play in a nicer fashion with the overall site design. That is where the problem occurs.
The scrubbing of the content coming in to the DIV, to filter out things like styles, TITLEs, and other tags, is where IE seems to have issues. Those anchor tags mentioned previously, and which look fine in IE when previewing a report inside of the iReport designer, now all have text inside them underlined. The quick fix, or so I thought, was to remove the A tag from our global CSS file. That fixes things until someone hovers over any text at which point another CSS rule comes in to play for a:hover and all text is again underlined. Probably time for another CSS tweak…
Just a quick posting about an issue I was running in to that was solved pretty easily with a minimal amount of work. Providing it here as a tip for people new to JasperReports and using it to deliver HTML reports via the web.
The issue I was running in to was caching of report charts when outputting to HTML format. When JRHtmlExporter creates links to images in the report output it uses the format img_x_y_z[_z_z] where x, y, and z are as follows:
- x is the index of a document within the list of documents to export in batch mode.
- y is the page index.
- z values are a series of one or more element indexes that locate the image on the page,
looping through nested frames if needed.
(taken from the JasperReports Definitive Guide – pg. 197)
The issue is if you run a report which generates a chart and then rerun the report with similar parameters which doesn’t result in a change to the image name you will end up with a cached copy of the chart image…probably not what you want.
The solution is simple: when you define your IMAGES_URI paramter for the JRHtmlExporter tack on the current system time as follows:
exporter.setParameter(JRHtmlExporterParameter.IMAGES_URI, "/jasper/image?time="+System.currentTimeMillis()+"&image="); |
In this example I’m using the system time to “randomize” the image url which makes sure that the images are always displayed properly. Note too that I’m using the image servlet that’s included as part of JasperReports.
I hope this helps someone. I was scratching my head for a bit over this one but the solution is pretty simple.
Update: I’m still having these issues….
Several weeks ago, after upgrading to release 2.2.1 of the iPhone OS, and also installing the AT&T network update that came right after, I started having issues with data connectivity problems on the 3G network. My phone, which normally gets a very fast and very stable 3G connection at my office, started having problems maintaining a 3G connection even while the phone would be sitting on my desk. Consistently I would have a 3G indicator with 5 bars for the signal strength but as soon as I started accessing the Internet, whether via Safari, Pandora, or any other application, the phone would drop to EDGE mode. As soon as the network activity stopped the indicator would switch back to indicating 3G. This happened consistently every time I attemped to access the Internet.
After about two weeks of this I was going crazy and downgraded my phone to the 2.2 OS revision (this was an adventure in and of itself) because the phone had worked perfectly with that release. And according to the various forums, etc. I searched the network update was only simple changes to icons, etc. that AT&T sent. Well, 2.2 worked perfectly, no more network problems. But I found out one of my applications, which had just been updated recently (Ambiance) required version 2.2.1 of the OS so eventually I reupgraded the phone. This time however I didn’t apply the network update from AT&T when I was nagged about it.
The phone worked perfectly with 2.2.1. Again no network/data connectivity problems. I then decided just a few days ago to reapply the network update and lo and behold I started having connectivity problems again.. After a few days of this I hopped on to the AT&T website and chatted with a customer support person. There were no indications of problems with any towers in my area and the only thing the agent could do was suggest to me to reset my network settings. I didn’t know that option was even there before so I figured I’d give it a shot.
I was completely surprised to find that my network connectivity problems had disappeared! I lost my WiFi settings but I can deal with that if I can get a solid 3G setup again. So far so good. I’ve been getting consistent, fast, 3G performance as I was before. I’m not quite sure what the network reset does aside from removing WiFi settings but it seems to have worked.
Here is the document from AT&T: Reset Network Settings
I know that it’s a tough thing to move forum contents from one system to another and I know that Oracle and BEA, prior to their buyout by Oracle, had a different forum system than Oracle. I also understand that Oracle would want to move the Weblogic forum traffic to their own forums once the buyout was complete. However why didn’t Oracle keep the BEA forums in place in a read-only format?
Seriously. I’ve been trying to research some Weblogic 9.2 issues I’ve been dealing with and Google results return a lot of hits to the BEA forums. Clicking on one of those links brings you to the Oracle forums….at the top level of the forums. It would appear that those postings were never moved. Again I understand this given the difficulty of moving from one system to another but they should have kept the old system in place for those of us who need to get answers for our Weblogic problems.
The odd thing is that Oracle kept the BEA edocs site in place with the same URL. Why didn’t they do the same thing with the forums?
Update:
Thanks to Justin for pointing me to the read-only forums. They are located at the following url: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=202
They still don’t have them at the original URL so that a Google search will bring up the posts but at least they have the data available.
I have had absolutely awful 3G performance lately on my iPhone. The stability has just been unreliable. The phone keeps switching from 3G to EDGE at random. Sometimes it’s even switching down to GPRS when things get really bad.
I thought it was the 2.2.1 OS update as these things seemed to start happening after I did that update. That being said I downgraded my OS to version 2.2 because I never had these issues with that version of the OS. I thought for awhile that it worked because it seemed to be more stable. But after a bit of use it seems to be in the same boat as with 2.2.1 which just stinks. I’m paying for 3G and not getting 3G. It’s totally ridiculous.
Doing some searching it appears many others in the Chicago area are having the same problems. I’d really love to know what is going on over at AT&T. 3G hasn’t ever been great but it’s certainly been a lot better than this. Very frustrating.
