Cactuar.net

This is a response to an article on Mactalk.com.au

Basically what we have here is an article on Flash by somebody who self taught and has no qualifications or experience with anything else.
So, as I read it, it becomes clear to me that this fellow is afraid of change. Possibly because he will be left behind if he doesn’t learn HTML5 and also because he doesn’t seem to understand where companies like Adobe will really fit in when HTML5 replaces flash. Let’s explore this.

Open source they cry! A world wide web free of proprietary formats and buggy plug-ins they say! HTML 5 is here and finally spelling the end for Flash. It sounds like an Apple fan boy’s wet dream. A text pad wielding code monkey’s paradise too perhaps? But does the Flash platform need to die in order to achieve online Zenith where we ascend to a magical place where JavaScript libraries and cascading style sheets run wild and free.

Perhaps the issue people have is that Flash isn’t at all stable on OSX let alone any mobile device and even when running its performance is horrendous.
Why use a buggy slow piece of shit plugin when our browsers are capable of the same things flash is? this is more than just code monkeys. this is users and code monkeys alike.

I hope not. I have a soft spot for Flash. Fundamentally because it’s one of the most empowering creative tools of the digital age. It was a huge catalyst for content creation in the early days of the web, but flash also played a key role in the emergence of Web 2.0 through YouTube and Flickr technologies. It showed the web could have more than just static text and pictures, things like atmosphere, transitions and graphic style unparalleled in any HTML sites.

This is true, but it’s 2010 and the times are a changin’.

We now have an HTML spec that is capable of providing cross platform media in a way never before possible. without any proprietary plugins and without any performance hit or browser crashing caused by buggy closed-source plugins that will never be fixed. Flash did do a great thing for the web. but unfortunately for some its days are coming to a close. it pioneered some aspects of web media but HTML5 is going to take us forward.

Youtube understands this, and now support HTML5

I’d like to see HTML 5 do this. I remember I used to get a hard disk over this kinda thing 10 years ago when I was learning Flash. It offered an incredible insight into the potential of the platform and gave new meaning to the web. Sites like 2advanced.com would clearly translate well to the iPad given the obvious attention to detail and design. This is not possible with HTML 5 yet. Nothing the bashers have put forward argues otherwise.

Once Adobe releases their HTML5 designing tools. there shouldn’t be any problems with that.

Would HTML 5 be able to create TV shows like Quads or how about a full length feature Drawn Together movie.

HTML5 is a web technology, it’s focus is not to create Television shows. however the canvas functions should be more than capable of this. we’ll just have to wait and see.

The web is better with Flash. A richer, more inclusive experience.

HTML5 is capable of the same things Flash is.

What Adobe has done right is to plant the seeds of a very diverse and colourful ecosystem of content producers, tools, resources and libraries out there for free (mostly) to anyone who wants to learn.

That’s right, plant the seeds.

What Andrew doesn’t seem to realise is that anything that Flash could do with the web, HTML5 can do better.
Flash is a buggy, poorly performing pile of shit. Designing a site in flash makes it impossible for people link to things on the site, makes it impossible for blind customers to use your site. makes it impossible for a search engine to index any of the content on the page or for the site to work on a machine which is incapable of supporting flash.

It is not the duty of a web browser to support a site, it is the duty of the site to work on any browser. sure some functionality being lost due to small amounts of flash based content on a site but when you build a full site out of flash it’s your own problem when it comes to your customers being unable to view your site.

Any web designer that designs a whole website out of flash is a hack, it’s simply bad etiquette to build a site that relies on flash. Any designer that I work with that uses flash so heavily is usually the self-taught kind. Like I said, sites should be designed to support the browser not the other way around.

However if you’re not particularly feeling like a hack then you’ll have no problems. your friends at Adobe are going to make it through the whole HTML5 thing just fine.

What some people don’t seem to realise is that Adobe will be one of the companies that brings HTML5 development tools to the market.

This is how people will deliver content using things like Canvas. they will provide the HTML5 video players etc. they will make it easy for the average simpleton to move from flash to HTML5.
If you’re capable of learning new things you’ll be fine, Adobe will give you all of the nice tools to make HTML5 development a drag and drop affair.

While trying to be all happy and friendly towards HTML5  publicly they have lodged an objection on W3C mailing list in regards to the canvas property and haven’t publicly announced this.

The reason being that as it’s used for 2D Drawing and would be a direct competitor to the bloated, buggy crapware we’re forced to use now (flash)

Because of this objection, the spec will most likely be put on hold for now while this political bullshit of theirs is sorted.

Seriously Adobe, HTML5 will replace flash. you can either waste it’s last breaths thrashing around trying to survive or you can get in on the HTML5 pie with some tools that will allow people to make great HTML5 content.

(Source: Daring Fireball)

UPDATED

Adobe are claiming that they have in no way hindered HTML5 or any of it’s related specs

Quote by Larry Masinter - Adobe rep

No part of HTML5 is, or was ever, “blocked” in the W3C HTML Working Group — not HTML5, not Canvas 2D Graphics, not Microdata, not Video — not by me, not by Adobe.

Neither Adobe nor I oppose, are fighting, are trying to stop, slow down, hinder, oppose, or harm HTML5, Canvas 2D Graphics, Microdata, video in HTML, or any of the other significant features in HTML5.

Claims otherwise are false. Any other disclaimers needed?

Not sure if I believe it myself. but who knows.

Star Trek: Online

It could’ve been so much

Instead we get a half baked abortion of a game made by a company that seems hell bent on ignoring every support request their customers put in.

Well, almost all.

They seem to pop up in threads where some blind, neckbearded Star Trek nerd puts up a post praising the creators of the game and telling them it’s the best thing invented since cheetos. when one of those posts come up the GMs and Devs drop all their work and seem to suckle on the aforementioned neckbearded fellows cock.

You know, Cryptic would be better off spending less time sucking the dicks of religious star trek nerds who are blinded by their fetish for all things Star Trek and more time fixing the numerous bugs in the game, and replying to actual customers who have some valid input.

How about fixing the rego key issues? people (like me) can’t even apply their pre-order keys because the system claims not to recognise it.
There are extreme rubber banding issues
Regular disconnects and logouts
Missing items from the pre-order packs
Lack of content
Lack of diversity in missions. a majority of them are “go here, kill that”
Stop fucking bringing the servers down every night, during Australian Primetime.
Enough with the random disconnects, and the constant unplanned downtime
Give the game a death penalty, otherwise it’s like it is now, a never ending game of space lemmings where you keep going in to fight the valiant fight, die and then repeat.

Plenty of issues, instead we get bullshit patches for crap like spelling corrections.

I think the worst part is the community of unbathed blind neckbeard having e-heros who spend their time on the forums saying shit like “You should feel privileged to have a ST MMO” and to “stop whining”

Here’s an idea to those idiots, go fuck yourselves!

I paid something like $70 on the game, I’d like my moneys worth please! especially if these leeches want me to pay them monthly for a game based off of the star trek universe, even if they have physically violated it to the point they have and completely fucked with the canon.

The worst part is that I’ve essentially pissed away $70 on a game that I can’t play unless I want to give them more money for subscribing. 6 months down the track I might come back to it to see if the shit flinging monkeys at cryptic have managed to queef something out that resembles a playable game. right now we have a game that needs another year of development before it becomes playable. by then they could’ve gone bankrupt. making my $70 even more fucking wasted because I’ll never get a chance to play this bullshit.

I’m currently migrating some posts from my old custom blog to this. expect images to be missing.

So I finally bit the bullet and installed WordPress. go me

I may or may not transfer the posts from the old blog across. depending on whether I can find a suitable database backup or not.

Running a PowerMac Headless – Finally a soluton that is cheap!

After searching around on the net i have rarely found much info on running Powermac G3, G4 or G5′s headless – the only thing i did find was some $30US DR Bott headless adapter which is quite a bit of money to trick the card into thinking there is a monitor attached. overall cost is under $10

After some research the result is very simple -

What you will need:
3x 75Ohm Resistors if you can’t get 75Ohm try what i did and get something else close to 70
1x DB-15HI Male Connector
1x DB9 Shell
1x 1N4004 Rectifier Diode

Solder the resistors to connect
Pins 1&6, 2&7 and 3&8.

Using the 1N4004 connect pins 4&5 with the silver stripe side connected to pin 5.
Put on the casing and voila! a headless connector that should work on Most cards with an 15-Pin PC VGA connector (G3,G4 Powermacs)

For the Powermac G5 or any other DVI system just connect this adapter to a DVI-VGA adapter and you should also be fine.

Basically what this does, is pulls a load on the signal wires to the same amount a normal monitor would, and also provides an ID Signal to the video card, as far as your mac is concerned there is a screen connected!

Well as some of you would know i have had to use Vista increasingly lately due to work and the fact that nobody really knows what they are doing with it yet.

Everything has been going alright with it i suppose, vista is sort of growing on me.

Well, there was one major issue for me (probably not for most people though) and that was trying to get WPA Enterprise encryption working, i tried everything to get it to go without any luck initially.

After many hours of plugging away at the vista machine and modifying settings on it and on the radius server i was tearing my hair out! it was 3AM and i had achieved nothing, and have seen many other people with problems due to vista’s implementation of 802.1x/WPA Enterprise.

I found that one thing stopping me was FreeRadius being out of date, turns out that Microsoft updated the MSCHAPv2 Standard and remained silent about it, and thus FreeRadius wouldn’t work – I was pretty pleased to read that! it would solve all my problems… or would it.

So i went on the journey of recompiling FreeRadius on my server, and it is a bastard to get working with OSX sometimes. Especially when it can’t find the MySQL Libraries….

Even after upgrading it didn’t work! AGH!!! i was tearing my hair out wondering where it was failing, the radius logs were more cryptic than anything mainly because it’s being handled by the EAP module :(

after a while i conceded that username/password PEAP challenges were not going to happen, so i moved on to certificates. I re-generated all my ssl certificates and distributed them to all the computers, and they all worked – except for the vista installation…

After much probing around i managed to get vista to take the CA cert and use it, but it still wouldn’t auth with it and the client cert, however i’d noticed that it had caused username/password challenges to work correctly – i had a poke around and looked at some MS Knowledgebase articles and it turns out that it was trying to verify the server identity via a certificate, a certificate that it previously didn’t have.

Regenerating the client cert ended up fixing that issue, but i wanted to be able to login with a username and password without needing to install the CA cert on the computer, turns out i have to untick “do not ask the user to verify new/unknown server certificates” or something like that along with “verify server cert before joining”

A Simple fix, i believe it is a combination of the vista issue and with Freeradius and that i was too tired to fix it on account of it being 3AM, however i hope that if anyone out there is having the same issue (my googling proves that there is indeed a lot of people with the same issue) that they will find this info so they don’t have to become an insomniac due to FreeRadius too.