This is something I discussed with Jeremy Allaire and possibly also Mike Chambers two years ago - At FlashForward in NYC 2001. The PHP documentation has been the prime example of good documentation and function reference on the web for a long time, and in my interview with Jeremy in 2001 I brought it up, and asked whether Macromedia would make documentation of Flash available in the same manner.

Now Mike is asking the question

"Would you be interested in a PHP like documentation system for ActionScript? What features would you like for it to have?"

My answer is hell yes, and look at the PHP documentation :-)

Its about time you guys got around to start working on better documentation :-)

[Via mesh on mx]

From my interview with Jeremy Allaire in 2001:

FM: Is documentation and making available documentation for products going to be something that will have higher priority?

JA: I don't know where we will end up on that, but Allaire makes all of it's product documentation available in HTML and PDF on the Web site. I don't know if that is going to translate to also doing that for the other Macromedia products, but that is something that we have done historically and which people really like, they want to be able to have that. The other thing that we did that I think was pretty cool, with Allaire, specifically Spectra and JRun, and we are going to be doing it for ColdFusion as well, is the idea of Live Docs. It's actually an idea we got from the PHP community. They don't have a product; they just have Live Docs, which is the actual documentation on the product. Has annotations and comment from the community. So if there is an example or a reference or a chapter, people can annotate it and can comment on it directly inside the Web site, so each page of the HTML documentation is actually a little interactive application.

And that is a neat way of getting the community involved in that. I am hoping that we do that for the other Macromedia products.

In the news today (Google news): The purchase of AllTheWeb.com and its technology from Fast Search and Transfer to Overture Services Inc for 100 million US dollars.

That, just a week after they announced their takeover of the Altavista search engine. Its going to be interesting to see if Overture, which made its money from pay-for-placement search, will add more of the same to both AltaVista and AllTheWeb.

To me, it seems like AllTheWeb soon will be filled with pay-for-placement ads, and that it will become less of a competitor to Google.

[Via andersja's blog]

Actionscript.com says it best: Macromedia shows love for PHP :-)

Its nice to see them paying homage to PHP with all this good information. Especially useful is the "PHP Server-Side Graphics in Dreamweaver MX"

ActionScript.com has the other links to PHP related stuff @ Macromedia.

It certainly looks that way from the small tests that Arve Bersvendsen has done: When is MSIE not MSIE?

It seems a lot of browsers are misrepresenting themselves as Internet Explorer. Probably because a lot of clueless javascripting on the web checks for "Internet Explorer", and excludes other browsers.

It would be interesting to know how those kind of misrepresentations affects "official" browser statistics.

I am sorry for not taking the time to explain about Trackback in my previous posting. Fernando has already raised the question - "explain to me a good use of the trackback feature?"

TrackBack (manual) enables weblogs to ping each-other, so if I am writing about something that Mike has already posted about - I can add his trackback url and his posting will be pinged, and I will be listed among the "Trackbacks". Its a great way to keep track of weblogs posting about the same topic, and adds another layer to the "conversation", at least IMHO.

Here is what MovableType writes about trackback:

Movable Type's TrackBack system allows peer-to-peer communication and conversations between weblogs. Imagine that you write about a movie you just saw in an entry on your Movable Type-powered weblog. Another MT weblogger reads your entry, and wants to write an entry referencing your original post. He could just comment on your weblog, but he'd like to keep the post in his own database and host it on his site.

Using TrackBack, the other weblogger can automatically send a ping to your weblog, indicating that he has written an entry referencing your original post. This accomplishes two things:

On your site, you can automatically list all sites that have referenced a particular post, allowing visitors to your site to read the response on the other user's weblog.

It provides a firm, explicit link between his entry and yours, as opposed to an implicit link (like a referrer log) that depends upon outside action (someone clicking on the link to your entry).

All in all a very cool feature. My blog is configures so that MT will go out and look for Trackback configurations on the pages I link up, and then automatically ping them (Its called TrackBack auto-discovery) - and is a feature that can be turned on and off. It still has its quicks, it won't look at the URLs you add to ping and the auto-discovery urls - so if you add URLs manually and are running auto-discovery at the same time, you risk pinging other blogs twice. Hopefully something that will be fixed in later implementations.

[Update]: Thanks to Trackback, I discovered this link: What is trackback about? which goes into more detail about all the cool things you can do with Trackback. Thanks JabbyPanda :-)

Having lots of fun with MovableType today, I have updated to the latest version (2.63) and moved my entries into MySQL - Should allow me to have some fun with statistics (expect some charts), and with extracting information easier than I did before.

It also means that I am adding Trackback to my blog, and have also kick-started a wish to do a little with my CSS and templates. Don't expect the CSS to become more IE friendly, there is a higher chance of the opposite, although I hope that I will get rid of the most annoying IE bugs when redoing my CSS.

In the middle of all of this, I found a very cool site if you are using MovableType: MT Plug-in Directory. Its a site full of links to cool plug-ins for MovableType.

In there I found empty pages (some movable type tips) which offers a really useful MT-plug-in in the form of the showTemplates plug-in. It allows you to share your templates with your friends and foes a lot easier. (Expect mine to become available when I finish v.2).

Doc Searls isn't blogging much today, but he did say that Emergent Democracy is required reading, and I have to agree with him.

Its about society, democracy, weblogs and other interesting topics. Well worth using some 10's of minutes to read.

From what I have read about Nameprotect and their web-bots, I shouldn't have been surprised that they are lying when they claim to respect robots.txt:

[...]Practices the following best practices to ensure non-invasive crawling:
Honoring robots.txt files - to exclude the NPBot crawler, please use "NPBot" as the user-agent name in your robots.txt file [...]

I have added the necessary line to my robots.txt file to exclude the NPBot from my site, but they are still indexing without caring about what the robots.txt file says.

Its also worth noting that Nameprotect have been (and probably still are) using spiders which are lying about who they are. (more information about "crawler918.com" / Nameprotect)

So my suggestion, if you want to get rid of the Nameprotect bots, is to block their IP-range from accessing your web pages:

Add the following to your .htaccess file:

Deny from 12.148.209.192/26


See my earlier post about NPBot

Interesting transcript of a Bill O'Reilly Fox moment:

GLICK: On September 14, do you want to know what I'm doing?

O'REILLY: Shut up! Shut up!

GLICK: Oh, please don't tell me to shut up.

O'REILLY: As respect -- as respect -- in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians...

GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government...

O'REILLY: Out of respect for him...

GLICK: ... not the people of America.

O'REILLY: ... I'm not going to...

GLICK: ... The people of the ruling class, the small minority.

O'REILLY: Cut his mic. I'm not going to dress you down anymore, out of respect for your father.

The start of the "interview" was even more interesting. Follow the link to read the whole transcript.

One of the coolest Flash blogs disappeared because of lack of feedback a while back - and is back now: valyard|ru

Lets try to keep Valyard inspired, the work he does is so good for showing the united creativity of the Flash community - we can't afford to loose him again :-)

This is plenty cool. The reverse engineering of Macromedia's proprietary data format AMF (ActionScript Message Format) has spawned a project on Sourceforge - AMF PHP - Flash remoting for PHP

The reverse engineering of Macromedias AMF format is still in progress, but is already looking very promising.

Only wish Macromedia themselves would have released the format so anyone could use it, without having to reverse engineer it first. Oh, and MM, please don't kill this project off...

[Via ActionScript.com]

I knew this before, as it has been stated by marketing zombies at the Redmond company, but its the first time I have seen it states as blunt as in this interview with Mr. Gates himself.

Basically: Microsoft does not release software to fix bugs. Many people would argue they don't fix bugs at all, and after reading this interview, I would say that Mr. Gates all but confirms that.

FOCUS Magazine Interview with Bill Gates: Microsoft Code Has No Bugs

FOCUS: But there are bugs an any version which people would really like to have fixed. Gates: No! There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. FOCUS: Oh, my God. I always get mad at my computer if MS Word swallows the page numbers of a document which I printed a couple of times with page numbers. If I complain to anybody they say "Well, upgrade from version 5.11 to 6.0". Gates: No! If you really think there's a bug you should report a bug. Maybe you're not using it properly. Have you ever considered that? FOCUS: Yeah, I did... Gates: It turns out Luddites don't know how to use software properly, so you should look into that. -- The reason we come up with new versions is not to fix bugs. It's absolutely not. It's the stupidest reason to buy a new version I ever heard. When we do a new version we put in lots of new things that people are asking for. And so, in no sense, is stability a reason to move to a new version. It's never a reason.

Got a lot of DVDs and no time to get an overview of them? Hard to remember which DVDs you have from before?

In that case, DVD Profiler is the program for you. Available for Win32 machines, and connected to its own database, DVD Profiler allows you to either enter the Bar-code number, scan the DVD with a bar-code reader, or scan the DVD ID from your DVD via your DVD-drive. It allows for export to XML and CVS files, and also gives you the ability to show your DVDs on a web-page. (See DVD Profiler's My Profiler Collection -- BTW: I have just tried with a few DVDs, my entire collection isn't there yet)

The program is about to be made available for Pocket PC, and then it will be really useful, especially for people like me - that have problems remembering which DVDs they have bought for their collection, not to mention which DVDs are on loan by friends... :-)

Welcome to my neighborhood: BlogStreet Visual Neighborhood

[Via Doc Searls]

This could get interesting, Kevin Lynch has posted an invitation to brainstorm around how Macromedia can help make blogging easier, better, etc. Go voice your opinion now:Kevin Lynch: Blog brainstorming

[Via JD on MX]

[Update: More information about NPBot and Nameprotect]

Found a link to this cute little bot in my referer log: NameProtect Inc :: NPBot Notification

Interesting to see someone so openly telling people they are looking for "intellectual property violations". I wonder if they respect my copyright..

They say they identify with the NPBot user-agent string, which would make filtering out any attempts by the bot pretty easy, or even better - serving up content that did not in-fridge on any copyright if you are into giving away stolen goods. So what is the deal? Are they only looking for the regular Joe Schmo, stupid enough to just publish MP3's and other "goodies" on their homepages?

[Update]: A little more information about the NPBot's behaviour. It seems like Nameprotect isn't all that interested in playing "fair", and that they are lying when saying they respect the Robots.txt file. I am testing it myself to see if NPBot will actually accept not to spider this site. And I have added this to the robots.txt file:


User Agent: NPBot
Disallow: /


I am contemplating starting to disallow the IP-range of Nameprotects servers if it doesn't behave.

More interesting note about robots. I am seeing a LOT of traffic from a spider only identifying itself as "Robot", it seems to be very agressive, and are operating from a japanese server/machine (p1223-ipbf02hodogaya.kanagawa.ocn.ne.jp). Anyone else seen that kind of behaviour?

Aral (Onrelease) is working hard to gather people to protest against the war, the 15th of february will be the day for global protest. Both locally and on the web.

If you want to voice your opinion against the war, you can add the "No War Counter" to your site, as well as joining in on the web blackout on the 15th of february.

Aral (Onrelease) has made available a template for those of you that want to have your site go black, as well as necessary scripts and SWF to add the No War Counter

Here is the page that will be displayed instead of my own sites on the 15th of february.

Other sites that will go black on the 15th of February include:

Flashmagazine.com (http://www.flashmagazine.com/nowar.htm)
Flazoom.com (http://macgregor.net/misc/shrub/nowar.html)

I've been slow to pick up on this one, but it remind me of the lesson learned through my own life, that you shouldn't just trust what you see or hear, no matter the source.

Its interesting to note that it has almost been a year of blogging, and that my blog has gone through some changes over the last year. It started out as my personal arena to just rant about everything and nothing -- as the subtitle of my blog indicates "the ramblings of jarle dahl bergersen".

Later it would turn into a "Flash blog" because of my interest in Flash. after all I was working in one of Norway's leading flash design/development companies and at the same time one of the editors of Flashmagazine.

The Flash section really came to life in march/april last year, as I was traveling to the FlashForward conference in San Francisco, and it was my pictures from the conference that gathered the first "Flash readers" to my blog. Now, almost a year later, people are still coming to my site for Flash information - a lot of people are looking at - and responding to - articles I have posted about Flash news and resources. Its nice to see that what I have been doing has been of use to others.

But it couldn't last.
First of all, for most of the year I have not been working actively with Flash, the aftermath of the .com fiasco took out the company I was working in, and I had to go out and find other work. So, on the computer side of work - I have been working a lot more with PHP and database related work, and not so much with Flash, it has led me to resign from Flashmagazine, and tone down the time I use to keep updated on what is going on. Don't get me wrong, I still feel like a part of the Flash community, but more and more I feel like as if I am standing on the outside looking in.

So....
I guess this is the time when I have to say that if you are coming to my weblog to find Flash news, then you would probably spend your time better looking at other blogs. I will probably not abandon Flash development or the "Flash blogs" and Flash community, but I would be very surprised if I am the one that can give you the fresh news from the Flash world.

My blog will probably move more over to commentary of various tech news, and anything else that I care about, you are free to keep coming back to see what is on my mind, or to stop visiting my PERSONAL blog. (Yes, corporate bloggers nagging about personal blogs being off-topic does get to me).

Some Macromedian bloggers has raised the issue of "Flash blogs" spamming with political content.

JD started it (as far as I can tell) with his post about "Spamming aggregators". To you John, I'd like to say: Sorry if you don't like what I am saying, but from that to accusing me (and others) of spamming aggregators. Come on!

First of all, remember that the Flash blogs are personal blogs from people investing their time and money into keeping the community informed on what is going on -- they are not paid to blog, as you are.

Second, if you check out my blog, you will notice that postings are posted to various categories, and if you look at the RDF feed you will notice that the category is listed as "subject" in the XML feed - so its fully up to aggregators if they want to use that feed, AND filter so they only include the Flash content.

Now, David Humphreys and his Flog has deliberately chosen to not filter the content from the "Flash blog", because as he says

"I learned that flog also allowed me access to a community. It's impossible to read the blogs without getting a sense of who the bloggers are -- and I think that's a good thing. I don't mind reading -- or skimming -- the off-topic rants and raves because that gives me more insight as to who's out there. We are a community. As we have people who will delight and inform, we also have people who enrage and challenge and go off-topic. Sometimes, they are even the same person. It all has value."

And I have to agree with him, its worth it to skim through the off-topic postings, at least if you look at the Flash blogs as more than just cheap information channels.

Other weblog postings about the "Spamming aggregators"

Burch Blog: Technology Blogs get Political
Eat Orange : Blog Spam
Eat Orange : Politics and Technology Butt Heads
Daniel Dura : Do Politics and Blogging Mix?
Hollowcube : my thoughts on political blogging

There is also a discussion going on after JD's initial post