Unless you follow me on twitter (@flashfreaker), you’re not privy to my growing concern with the perception of the Adobe Flash runtime by many standards-based members of the web community. With yet another move by Apple to be the guardians of the “open web” with its announcement of the iPad yesterday, there seems to be more fuel for the anti-Flash camp and a call to action for those who use Flash or any other 3rd party plug-in to voice our opinions. Most of this anti-Flash chatter relegates Flash to an under-performing video player and stresses that the HTML5 <video> tag takes care of all video needs for the Internet. Ergo, the world wide web no longer needs Flash so let’s just get rid of Flash content all together. I’ll start my defense of Flash by doing a less-than-comprehensive review of where Flash content is employed on the Internet:

• Banner ads: Most advertising on the web has relied on the small file size (well, hopefully it’s kept small) of Flash SWF files to deploy ad graphics, including micro sites for product demos. With chatter I’m seeing on twitter, I’m getting the impression that many people believe web ads will just “go away” and good riddance. While I’m not a fan of annoying banner ads (and most of them are, indeed, obnoxious and annoying), I’ll take the lesser of all evils and suffer a small Flash SWF eating up a minor portion of my bandwidth than some other multimedia format. Future without Flash prediction? Banner ads could turn into video ads that are much larger in file size and data transfer than the equivalent animation/experience in a Flash SWF. Poetic justice, perhaps, for the already crippled AT&T 3G network that the iPhone uses for its open web experiences.
• Web applications for e-business: Many businesses rely on Flash technology to deploy rich internet applications (RIAs). While a portion of these applications could be built with current HTML/JavaScript/CSS capabilities, many businesses prefer to use SWF because now, more than ever, the programming required for the front end SWF file (ActionScript 3.0) can be utilized across multiple platforms, from the web to the desktop (Adobe AIR) to mobile devices–Flash Player 10.1 is finally gaining ground this year on mobile devices! Businesses also want to protect their front-end intellectual property by using the SWF file format, thereby preventing exposure of their user-interface capabilities via HTML/JavaScript/CSS. It’s true that SWF files can be decompiled, but from a legal standpoint, if company B “steals” code from company A’s SWF content, it’s pretty clear they took extra steps to access the code and extract it. Perhaps more importantly, let’s look at the software development process in general. Web applications are not web pages–they’re apps in the browser. So, they’re written, usually, by experienced computer programmers who need grown up programming languages. If you’re not aware, Flash Player’s scripting language, ActionScript, has grown up over its 10+ years of life, and more “traditional” software developers continue to embrace Flash technology with the growth of Adobe’s open source Flex framework and its free compiler. You don’t even have to give Adobe any money to make a web application. (I prefer to use their tools because it’s usually much less hassle, which means less $$$ my clients have to spend to get something built quickly and reliably.) JavaScript has to play a lot of catch up to reach the capabilities of ActionScript 3.0. Also, many businesses want their applications to run across the web and on thin clients. I’ve worked on two projects for companies targeting gym chains, and they can take their application from a Linux client running nothing but the OS and AIR with cheap hardware to the “normal web” without a complete reinvestment in a new solution. As more and more devices run multimedia content, from cars to boats to kitchen appliances, reuse of existing IP is critical.
  

On2 announced on Monday some interesting improvements/enhancements to their VP6 codec:

http://www.on2.com/index.php?id=439&news_id=623

I’ve been MIA since Monday morning trying to solve a crisis with my home office network servers. Of course, being the tech idiot and geek that I am, I run my own Microsoft Exchanger Server and maintain a domain controller, yadda yadda yadda. What happened Monday morning? Well, I got a new MacBook Pro. Cause for celebration, yeah? I started by trying to setup Active Directory services on the new computer, and me, being the tech idiot and unnecessarily rushing the process while looking after my daughter, inadvertently specified my domain controller’s computer name as the MacBook Pro’s name when I added the the new computer to the domain. Well, SHEEEEAT! All hell broke loose with Active Directory–so much that Active Directory’s DNS zones registered the MacBook Pro’s IP as the IP for the lookup of my domain controller, and I only have one primary DNS service running on my network. I have a secondary DNS, but that doesn’t allow me change jack, and that secondary DNS is running Windows 2000 Server, not Windows Server 2003.

It’s now Wednesday and every tech note I could find on Microsoft won’t help me get rid of the error messages I’m seeing on my poor domain controller. Luckily, I have an older domain controller that’s been offline for the last eight months, but I don’t make many changes to Active Directory, so rolling back to that data shouldn’t be a problem. BUT, and here’s the huge but, that machine has been on the fritz, not completing boot cycles, hanging randomly, etc. So, I cloned that machine’s hard drive to some a new drive and put it in a Pentium 4 box and ran the Windows Server 2003 install CD and performed a repair. So far, everything looks intact, but I haven’t rebooted the monster domain controller that’s run amuck yet. All e-mail @theMakers.com is down at the moment, and I’m hoping to have it resolved tonight.

BTW, I should mention that I did have backups on the monster domain controller, but the last backup was CORRUPT! The damn BKF file couldn’t be read by NTBACKUP and the most valuable information there–System State–could not be extracted “as is” by all of these damn popular BKF repair utilities. Those are great if you need to recover documents, but system recovery? FORGET IT!

As if getting taxes done this year wasn’t enough (doing the books for [theMAKERS], etc.), I’ve had the misfortune of two different drives heading south. The first one was a Western Digital 500GB My Book USB/Firewire edition, and the second one was an internal Toshiba 80GB laptop drive–at least three years old if not five!–that I had in a USB enclosure. I don’t know exactly what went wrong with the former drive, but it failed to mount on my Windows XP Media Center. I was able to run chkdsk and I thought all was well, but I wasn’t able to copy files from the drive without errors, and the system would hang/lock up for long periods of time while trying to access the drive. I took the drive out of the Western Digital enclosure (not easy! no screws… had to google that one), and used my nifty newertech USB 2.0 Universal Drive Adapter to connect the SATA internal drive to various systems. I’m still in the process of using Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software (about $100) to recover the files. Many of the files have been recovered without errors, but it’s a painfully long and slow process–I’m still not finished after a week or so of running the software. I hope the drive continues to “hang in there” while the recovery process is running.

The latter drive–remember the internal 80GB laptop HD I mentioned?–is doing much better with respect to recovery. I discovered that if I kept the drive in a vertical upright position that it could read much better. The crazy noises it was making stopped when I held the drive upright! (And, btw, it’s not in any enclosure anymore–there’s no fan or anything like that inside of the drive, and I imagine it’s the heads of the drive making the noise.) So, I have it affixed flat against the side of my new el-cheapo Dell Inspiron 530 desktop tower during the copy process. Seems to working great so far, and I’m nearly done recovering every file from it.