An Elaborate Hoax

I read a lot of blog posts. Like – a whole bunch of them. Some guys like video games (feel like I’m growing out of it) while others like sports (never got into it) but me, I love to read these tiny personal stories all over the internet. Every now and then though – one really hits. I mean, like you are literally a different person after you’ve read than you were before. This is one of those posts:

http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-perspective/

I don’t know Linds – in fact, I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore. I hope he is. I pray he was cured and rather than update his blog he swept his family up and sailed out to some remote island to enjoy the rest of his life eating coconuts and swimming in a clear ocean tide. Probably not though – and in reality – we all have a story in the same manner. A story that defines how we will leave this earth.

Just like Linds evaluates his life and work in the advertising space it’s one of those posts that makes you step back and really, really look at your life. How is work? Going good? Great? Mediocre? Is it boring and vapid? Frustrating and grating? Unless you’re mapping the human genome or discovering the cure for heart disease – is it truly worth it? I’m not talking about a legacy, I’m just asking the question, “Does it really even matter?”

I guess we all have our own answers and our own reasons. Truth be told, I don’t think the answer even matters – what matters is that you keep asking the question.

Linds – I hope all is well. And thanks.

Well Said

One company that just launched at Disrupt is trying to fix medical bills. Another wants to bring fresh produce from farmers direct to households. Another company built the universal translator from Star Trek. Good software developers invent the future.

This is what matters: launching products, getting them in the hands of users, and hearing them get value out of it. That’s why we stay up late, ruin our wrists and our eyesight, and drive our families crazy. It’s all about shipping.

Source: Should you launch at a Conference?

JW Player and Internet Explorer

At work we use the JW Player for all our online video and it’s great. The only problem is, for the longest time, using custom skins on the player causes IE 7 and 8 to lock up in a very bad way. Like, “we can’t use this we’ll have to use something else” bad. I thought it was a bug with the player but a couple versions have passed and I was still having the same problem. The frustrating part was that it worked in IE 9. So what was the problem?

Turns out, Apache was set up to gzip everything – including zip files, which is how you load skins into the player. That’s fine right? Well, no. Apparently…

Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, and 8 report deflate support but do not actually accept RFC 1950 format, making actual use of deflate highly unusual.

Source: Wikipedia

Turns out, IE 6, 7, and 8 all hang when loading a gzipped zip file.

Sure the zipping is redundant, but when all else fails…so does IE.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes.

From Wikipedia

This could be quite possibly one of the scarier things that I’ve read. How can I ever be sure that I’m truly right about anything!? Darn you incompetence and lack of metacognitive ability!!

I was wrong

For a while there in 2010 I was red hot on the “Flash is awesome for everything” side of the debate started by Steve Jobs infamous “Thoughts on Flash” memo. Frankly, I must have written a dozen red hot posts blasting Apple about their reasons and decisions to not run Flash on their mobile devices. It’s reviews like this though that make me think I was dead wrong:

“For the PlayBook, that edge is support for Adobe Flash, a feature that the iPad is famously lacking. RIM says it took over two years of working with Adobe to bring Flash to its tablet.

Two years may not have been enough. During a round of Plants vs. Zombies, gameplay bogged down whenever the animation got intense. Every time I tried to access a Flash game on Facebook, the browser crashed. Yes, every single time.“

Source

If you want animation on your pages to run on mobile devices you really should learn some HTML5. If you want to play a game, write some thing in the native language (or use a really good framework like Corona.)

Sorry Flash, can we still be friends?