Steaming Turd

Some people who know me have heard me rant about Shockwave Flash and the evils surrounding its use. Don’t get me wrong - I laughed at the first dozen episodes of Weebl and Bob, everyone enjoyed All Your Base, and even one of my favorites, an online rendition of Knights of the Dinner Table, used Flash. But there are atrocimicies out there - abdominations, if you will - of the web, where Flash isn’t just used for amusing people. Instead, on these bane-of-teh-intarweb sites, Flash is used for everything, rendering your web browser’s normal functionality (like the back, forward, view source, and status bar) to a smoldering pile of goo. Don’t have Flash? Well, if you’re (un)lucky, these sites will conveniently forward you to Macromedia’s website to download the SWF plugin, whether you want them to or not.

That’s why I hate Flash as a matter of principle. When people design their sites with Flash as a major component, they forget that some people don’t have Flash or don’t want to have it, and they shut out potential users because of it.

Well, it turns out that Macromedia, the makers of Shockwave Flash, actually get it. Quoth the article (a tutorial on automatic detection of the Flash plugin):

To create a good detection experience, you need first to be able to specify what happens when Flash Player is not installed on the user’s browser. If you offer no alternate content, is the user going to sit there staring at a blank screen, hoping that his or her web-savvy neighbor will come along and save the day? Most likely, the answer is no. Instead, your visitor will head off to your competitor’s site, cursing your name the whole time. See, not every person that visits your site is going to want to perform a software installation just to view your content, regardless of how simple it is.

Now, Macromedia goes on to suggest that a redirect to install the plugin is one form of “alternate content”, but they also admit that just providing an HTML version of the site is as good if not better. And I’ve never seen a website that used Flash for site navigation that couldn’t achieve a result just as aesthetically pleasing with some well-crafted HTML and maybe a smidge of Javascript.

There’s another reason I’m making this post. I’ve been working on (since, er, last November, but I finally got off my lazy duff and dusted the project off recently) a browser plugin I call “Flushplayer” (Get it? Flash, flush? Funny, huh?). It solves - or nearly so - the problem of sites with Flash for site navigation by downloading the Flash widgets, scouring them for things that might be links, and then providing you with the ability to click where the Flash widget would normally appear in the web page and get a context menu with all the places that widget can take you. Just click and go. No animations, no sound effects, no punching the monkey - just actual, real life web surfing.

I have some tidying up to do, but when I’m done with that, I’ll be posting Flushplayer for download by anyone who wants it. It’ll be listed in a page at the left. For the tinkerers among you, the source will be available as well, and most likely (if I don’t find any other licensing concerns) it’ll be released under a Creative Commons-esque license (most likely the Open Software License).

A quick note: Due to someone spamming my weblog today, I have changed settings to require users to register an account and be logged in to post. You can feel free to use any e-mail address you like, if, for example, you don’t know me personally (most of my readers do) and don’t trust that I won’t spam you, but the e-mail address does have to be real and checkable by you in order to complete the registration process.

Once you’ve created your account and logged in, you can go to the “Site Admin” link at the left to access your profile and change your password to something other than the random one that the site will issue to you.

My apologies to everyone for the inconvenience, but it’ll sure beat having a bunch of crap comments to sift through on my weblog every day.

This, from my sister, in a card I received Wednesday:

Thanks to Mechanical Artificial Device Engineered for Online Fighting, Masterful Exploration and Accurate Troubleshooting for the link.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=159953&cid=13390079

Not to be outdone by their own misdeeds, the city of New London and the New London Development Corporation (NLDC), previously infamous for winning the Supreme Court case granting them the right to use eminent domain to seize property so that it can be privately developed in order to improve the city’s tax base, have demonstrated the truly massive size of their balls. The Gadflyer links to an article in the Fairfield County Weekly, reporting that the NLDC not only is taking people’s property, but also (1) is charging the property owners back rent for the time since their initial efforts to claim the property in 2000, and (2) is compensating the property owners for their property at the pre- real estate bubble rates of 2000.

In other words, the deprived residents will lose their homes, will not get enough money to buy new homes in that area (where, presumably, they all have jobs and families and whatever), and much of what money they do get will go right back to the NLDC.

You know, even if that city were my ancestral home or whatever, I wouldn’t want to live there anymore. Having the world’s biggest pair visible from my front window just isn’t my idea of a nice view.

Thanks to Eldan for dropping me the link.

In writing this, I could very well be going beyond my personal expertise. Feel free to call BS if you feel it’s warranted. Note also that I plan on linking to a few Wikipedia articles that may not currently be neutral point-of-view, or for that matter, may get vandalized in the near future.

Anyway, you’ve probably heard that the deadline has arrived for Israeli settlers to leave the Gaza Strip, and those people who haven’t left are being forcibly removed by the Israeli government.

A bit of history, first: Israel captured the Gaza Strip from Egypt during the Six Day War between Israel and its neighbors. Actually, they captured the entire Sinai Peninsula, but were internationally pressured to withdraw much later from most of their newly-acquired territory (see this article on the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt). The Six Day War occurred when Israel pre-emptively struck its neighbors who had in recent years formed a mutual protection treaty whose stated goal was the elimination of Israel. The “pre-emptive” part would normally the legitimacy of Israel’s gains into question - see the Gulf War for an example where territory gains through aggression are frowned upon. But in the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, the Gaza Strip was effectively ceded to Israel.

Looking a bit more distantly into history: When Israel was first formed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, many Palestinian refugees within the newly-formed state fled to the Gaza Strip. In fact, much of the current population there consists of those refugees and their descendants. One could thus understand their ire toward Israel, and thus the danger to Israelis living within the Gaza Strip is significant (and policing the Gaza Strip becomes more difficult for Israeli forces due to the presence of their citizens there).

Here’s where my opinion starts to come into play. Since 1967, Israel has sponsored settlements of their citizens within the Gaza Strip (and the West Bank, but that’s another story). But in nearly 40 years, the total Israeli settlement population is about 8000, and nearly half of that population was formed within the past 15 years or so. Compare that to nearly 1.4 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Now, if you’re a country wishing to exercise political control over a piece of territory you’ve recently annexed, there are a few ways to go about it. You can use military force to subdue the populace. You can kill or enslave the populace. Or you can flood the territory with your own citizens in an effort to create a substantial political majority. Well, 8000 versus 1.4 million does not constitute a flood; in other words, sponsoring the settlements in such a weak and pointless fashion was a mistake.

Now, Israel is unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, and forcing the settlers to leave. But they’ve provided those settlers with a very nice compensatory package, reported to be worth between $150k and $400k. In other words, Israel has essentially exercised eminent domain over the settlements in order to raze them.

I’ve already indicated my distaste for eminent domain, but in that post I acknowledged that sometimes the public good does have an interest in eminent domain being exercised. Typically, in the US, this happens when a new piece of transportation infrastructure needs to be built.

In Israel, it apparently happens when an effort is being made to achieve peace.

I don’t see the problem here.

Now, the terrorist organizations like Hamas have already stated that they don’t plan on halting their operations anytime soon, even with the pullout and even with the eventual creation of a Palestinian state. Those people can be dealt with accordingly by Israel and Palestine, and the sooner that Palestine follows the road map to peace and becomes a separate state, the sooner that international pressure can force the Palestinians to police their own people. This becomes easiest once Israel can be found blameless in this whole situation, and the Gaza pullout is a huge step toward making that the case.

The government of Pakistan recently released a statement (reported here) concerning the testing of a new cruise missile. The press release included the following sentence:

By the grace of Allah, all design parameters for the flight were validated.

Credit where credit is due, I suppose.

This article notes that the Anti-Defamation League is calling on Jerry Falwell to retract a statement that Falwell’s followers/fans should “vote Christian” in upcoming elections. In a newsletter sent to subscribers, Falwell included stickers that say, “I Vote Christian”. The article doth quote Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL:

[Falwell’s statements are] directly at odds with the American ideal and should be rejected…. Understanding the danger of combining religion and politics, our founding fathers wisely created a political system based on individual merit and religious inclusiveness.

Excuse me, Mr. Foxman, but last time I checked, Mr. Falwell has every right to speak his mind in the public political forum, and he (and every other voting American) has the right to vote Christian, Jewish, Satanic, or Subgenius. If a person wishes to use the religion of a candidate as a litmus test for determining whether to vote for them, they have every right to do so. If people wish to discuss that test, they can do that, too. The voting booth has a sanctity that political correctness should never be able to breach. And finally, our vaunted First Amendment guarantees people the right to proudly declare the reasons they vote in a particular way - in fact, it was none other than the founding fathers who ensured that our right to free speech is explicitly delineated in the Constitution.

That is the American ideal - the freedom to express yourself, especially when choosing our political leaders, without feeling guilty if you don’t include a token representation of other religions on your ballot.

You’ll have to copy and paste this link to get past the anti-deep-linking crap:

http://www.fortliberty.org/patriotic-humor/patriotic-pictures/gods-creatures.jpg

Well, I thought it was funny.