I know the historic influence of the British but it still seems odd now.

Photos courtesy of andrewsullivan.com

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.

A recent conversation with a friend really tripped me up. It started out innocently enough basically as something to pass the time on the train ride to work. Political mattters sometimes are better left undiscussed but this was, from all appearances, a simple discussion over the economy. Given that my friend and I are really at opposing ends of the political spectrum the discussion became more heated than it should.

He simply could not understand that I didn’t agree with him. The conversation degenerated further in a series of emails traded back and forth over the rest of the day. This friend tends toward Libertarian, and in my opinion, pretty extreme views. Keyensian economic theory popped in to the conversation (as a joke I might add) at which point he essentially accused those who subscribe to the work of Keynes as Fascists and Communists and all of the other words that people generally tend to throw around these days to describe people with whom they don’t agree.

I’ve grown really weary of weak minds who latch on to these terms with little to no understanding of what they mean and wield them like sticks with which to beat people with whom they don’t agree. Main takeaway point here: if you don’t understand what something means don’t use it to label someone. You may think you’re being righteous but you just look ignorant at best, or stupid at worst.

So what does all of this have to do with my opening point? In a nutshell this: that conversation opened the floodgates in my mind as to just how much of the precious time in my life I’m wasting. Time I’m wasting on feelings of guilt, feelings of fear and worry, feelings of anger. Time I’m wasting lusting over things that are of little import (new gadgets, software, etc). So much time spent on things that really don’t matter and that when I look back on my life will mean nothing.

This isn’t some sort of religious conversion but as I get older I keep having these moments where I realize just how quickly time is passing and how I’m letting life slip by without doing any of the things I really want to accomplish. Whether those things are life changing events or small projects I want to do makes little difference. The size of the thing is irrelevant if I’m wasting all my time since absolutely nothing will get done.

So getting back to that conversation one more time: it really jarred me. It was one more conversation on a topic of which neither I nor the other party have any expertise in which to have a useful opinion yet it started to turn ugly. I’m tired of that direction of life. The honest truth is I have nothing to prove to anyone nor do I need to convince anyone of anything. What I *do* need to do is try to live my life to the best of my ability and make each minute count as much as possible. It all sounds so trite since so many people talk about these things on the Internet but it really is true. When do you reach the point of “enough is enough”? I think I’ve reached it this week. The question is: when do I do something about it?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Follow the directions here for getting vmhgfs to work.
4. Rerun the vmware tools installer in the distribution directory you created in step 2.
5. Bask in the glow of a job well done

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

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…

As I was reading Get Rich Slowly today and catching up I came across a guest post titled The High Cost of Having Children in which the author,  Cathy from Chief Family Officer, talked about the choices she and her husband have had to make in their financial lives because of their choice to have kids.   One of the comments also pointed out that many of the top tier personal finance bloggers are kidless.  All this really hit home for me and had me really scratching my head as to why I’m struggling so much with direction in my financial life.

When is enough advice enough?  Why am I reading these blogs and setting my own standards by what these people, in different financial situations, are doing?  Don’t get me wrong, I find these blogs have really valuable information but I think it is far too easy to use these people to set standards for yourself that are impossibly high instead of simply looking at the advice being offered and using it as you see fit.

I, like the author of the post, am not in a position to pay off all of the debt I have right now, really concentrate on it like JD from Get Rich Slowly has done.  I’ll be in his second stage, again as the author notes she will be, for a long time to come.   There is absolutely nothing wrong with that either.  My life is different from JD’s.  I need to make other decisions, hopefully smart decisions, as to how to proceed in my financial life.

At the very least I think I learned that I need to put some distance between myself and the personal finance wizards out there…at least for a bit.