President Match: Find Your Perfect President

I just wandered over to President Match, which I discoverd was fun and kind-of useful, especially if you're not sure who you like in this horse race. The site has a little Q-and-A (nice user interface) that lets you check your opinions on the issues against the various candidates for president. I was a little surprised to discover that according to President Match, John Kerry was actually a closer match for me (at 93%) than Howard Dean (87%). Actually, the whole pack of Democrats scored in the 80s with the exception of Lieberman, who, not surprisingly, was the least closely aligned with my preferences at, at 71%. Bush's score: 5%. [ Not as good as his Texas Air National Guard Pilot Aptitude test score (25%) ] Anyway, try it, it's fun and possibly informative.

R.I.P. LiveMotion

I've been so heads-down this fall and winter, between pushing Convoq ASAP out the door and managing my own series of personal crises, that I didn't even notice the fact that Adobe has finally cancelled LiveMotion altogether. I haven't really kept up with the news from Adobe since I left the company in 2002. This news was a lot like learning that an old friend with a terminal illness had died some months ago. And there wasn't even an obituary: Adobe didn't put out a press release, and the official LiveMotion page is pretty low-key:

Effective November 15, 2003, Adobe will no longer distribute LiveMotion 2.0. Though Adobe has decided to concentrate its efforts in other areas, we want to thank our loyal LiveMotion customers for their support. Adobe will maintain person-to-person technical support for LiveMotion until March 31, 2004. In addition, complimentary technical support will be available until further notice via the Adobe Support Knowledgebase and User to User Forums on the Adobe Web site.

Of course, this wasn't unexpected. It's been almost two years since Adobe told the LiveMotion team that the project was being cancelled. Most of us were laid off, but a few people stayed behind to work on other projects. As for LiveMotion, without a development team behind it, the product wasn't even being supported, much less updated, and it was just looking older and older. Inevitably, it had to be retired. The only real question was when.

I can't argue with Adobe's original decision to cancel LiveMotion. I think it was the right decision. (I don't know if Adobe made any money from LiveMotion; my guess would be they didn't lose money, but they absolutely didn't make a killing.) I don't begrudge the fact that Adobe laid me off, either. They were willing to relocate me instead of letting me go, after all, and if my wife and I had been willing to move out to California, I might still be working there today. And they gave me a very good severance package.

At the same time, I feel a little wistful about LiveMotion's demise. I put a lot of work into that product, and so did a lot of other people I came to like and respect. I'm proud of LiveMotion, and I'm grateful to have had the privilege to be part of its development team. It just hurts to see it all come to such an ignoble end, to see it buried without a proper funeral.

Still More Stupid ActionScript

(is that redundant?)

I just spent several hours struggling to fix a bug in my Flash code. In the end, I was left shaking my head in disbelief that I can get into this much trouble so easily, and the ActionScript compiler will do nothing to help me out.

Let me show you what's happening here. I had written the following code:

myObject.someFunction(arg1, arg2)
{
// ... body
}

My movie compiled and executed flawlessly. Flawlessly, that is, except that for some reason, the function in question didn't seem like it was getting called. When I bolstered the instrumentation on the code, I was able to verify that it wasn't getting called. But how could that be? I had declared the function, I hadn't created any syntax errors, I verified that the caller was trying to call into the function correctly. All along, Flash hadn't issued a single complaint about my programming, but by now I've learned that's not a surprise.

Want to see what the change is that made it work? Here it is:

myObject.someFunction = function(arg1, arg2)
{
// ... body
}

See the difference? At no point did Flash issue a warning, much less an error, because the first code block is perfectly legal ActionScript. It just means, "this one time, in this one frame, call this object method that doesn't exist, using these variables that don't exist as arguments; then execute this block of statements which I have conveniently placed inside curly brackets." The second block means "create a function which takes these arguments and executes these statements, and assign the function to this object property as a method." I suppose there are circumstances under which one might want to execute the first block, but every time it has occured in our code, it has occured as an accident, because we are mostly used to Java and C++, and the first block's syntax is closer to how we think of a class method definition than the second.

Now bear in mind that I had to scrupulously examine hundreds of lines of code in order to determine that this was where my error hid. This one typo cost me hours. A simple warning in the compiler would have saved me those hours.

Something Positive

My old friend Randy runs a pretty well-known web comic called Something Positive. Randy's not gonna get any gigs writing sitcoms for the corpomega-networks. They'll tell you it's because he's too twisted for them, i.e. not bland, mediocre, unchallenging, PC, safe, and corporate-friendly. That's just as well because he's too funny for them. For example, Randy is the sick mind behind the Redneck Tree. Or consider this recent gem. I'm just stoked to know someone who actually is making this web publishing thing work! There is a way for independent voices to survive, and Randy is blazing the trail.

Red State, Yellow Taxi

My new short play Red State, White Hat, Blue Screen (aka Hack the Vote) will be performed at the 2004 New American Playwrights Festival which is being produced by Yellow Taxi Productions in Nashua, New Hampshire. The festival runs March 4, 5 and 6, 2004; Red State... will be played on the first night of the festival.

Leapster Rocks!

So it was long overdue, but I finally got to play with a Leapster a couple of days ago. What a fun product! Basically a hand-held Flash player with a really nice high-res color LCD screen, Leapster is being promoted as an educational toy in the tradition of Leapfrog's venerable product line, with lots of new animated courseware.

My interest in Leapster is mostly from a professional standpoint. I'm a professional programmer who has taken a turn into Flash development at Convoq, Inc. As I've noted in the past, I like developing in Flash quite a lot, even though its limitations as a platform are irksome. However, seeing Flash spread into new platforms, such as handheld computers, cell phones, and customized hardware such as the Leapster, is very exciting. If it continues on the trend it's on now, Flash will be blazing a trail into becoming a universal client technology. That's quite surprising! Java made the promise of "write once, run everywhere"; Flash is as close as anyone has ever come to actually delivering it. I hope that the language and debugging tools evolve into something more suited to serious applications development. In fact I'm confident that they will. [ Yes, Dan, I have drunk the Kool-Aid...]

I had a great time playing with the Leapster, which is whole lot different from just reading about it. I have no idea if the courseware will be any good, or if toys like this really help anyone learn anything. My personal guess about "educational toys" is that they're probably about as effective as books, only more expensive, but what the hell, it's still better than TV.

Bush War II Was Being Planned in January 2001

Ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Niell has confirmed what many of us had long suspected: that the current war in Iraq was part of Bush's plan from the very beginning of his administration. In other words, September 11th was nothing more to them than a convenient pretext for a war which Bush was already planning. How does this information square with Bush's assertions, back in March, that he hadn't made any decisions about whether to go to war? These are revealed as lies, no less than the assertion that Saddam Hussein has anything to do with the September 11th attacks. In fact, it's getting kind of difficult just to keep track of all the lies coming out of this White House, isn't it? But since none of the lies are about blow jobs, I guess it's just wishful thinking to hope that Bush gets what he deserves.

Billionaires for Bush

Billionaires for Bush
"Because the deficit is not growing fast enough."