New Firefox is out ( 3.0.1 ).

They fixed the issue of image blurring, and some other stuff that I do not care about.

It was about bloody time because I was THIS close to switch to some other browser. Don't care which one, just some that does not crush my images into unrecognizable blurb of pixels.

Thanks Mozilla.

The other day I wanted to copy xhtml templates, images and javascript files from my colleagues computer (xp) to my own (xp) to make a new repository for a project we were working on.

Nothing unusual here except the fact I was forbidden by his xp to copy any .js file with error similar to permissions problem. I walked to his computer and checked permissions and everything was ok with them. But, rightclicking one of .js files brought interesting message: "This file came from another computer and might be blocked to help protect this computer".

Right of the message you can see a big Unblock button, which actually doesn't do anything. After "unblocking" I was still unable to copy them. This situation occurs only if you have XP SP2+ and use IE to download files because IE tags the file with an additional "NTFS Stream" of information.

There are few possible hacks how to disable this annoyance slash security feature:

1. unblock the file, then copy it to FAT32 partition, and then move it back to NTFS.
2. Disable NTFS Streams with SysInternals Streams utility (mega haxor)
3. User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Attachment Manager. Enable: Do not preserve zone information in file attachments (only works for new files)
4. Just stop using IE! :)

More than 600 artists on 24 stages - Tiga, 2 Many DJs, Soulwax, Dubfire, Booka Shade, Dillinja, Shy Fx, Sex Pistols, Pekinska Patka, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Miguel Migs, High Contrast, Ben Watt, Manu Chao, Laurent Garnier, Roni Size, Sven Vath, Francios K... the list goes on. Organization, lights, sound, million people everything was brilliant. Everything except sand storm. :) Big shout to all crazy people I met!

And yes, check out the official gallery.

So anyways, the story goes as follows. I do not watch much TV, and I was at the seaside for a week, disconnected from TV or internet. When I got home, I turned on the TV using remote, and tried to navigate through programs using that cross-buttons that all remotes feature nowadays.

Cross buttons:

However, I kept pressing Arrow Down in order to go to next channel, resulting in going from channel 1 to channel 0, then 99, then 98, etc ...

At first I was thinking that remote is not working, so I tried again. Press Arrow Down - and again I got the wrong effect.

And then it hit me. Since I did not use remote for quite some time, my brain defaulted to the web way of navigation, where all the NEXT options are DOWN in the line, not up.

Think about it. All the lists are written so that the starting option is on the top, and next in line is below it. If you want to access next option in any menu, you must go down (or in case of tabs, right). When you come to think of it, everything we do that needs some sort of ordering or listing is done by putting first option on the top, and then next option goes below. Your shopping lists, your to-do lists, ...

So, naturally, when I tried to access next channel in list, I pressed Arrow Down.

Furthermore, if you access your TV's menu, where you have channel list, and when you are moving on that list, you select next channel by pressing Arrow Down. Pretty inconsistent I must say.

Channels in the TV menu:

My proposal? Rework the cross-buttons functions in this way:

1. Arrow Up: volume up
2. Arrow Down: volume down
3. Arrow Right: next channel, you have a feeling that you are flipping book pages to the right
4. Arrow Left: previous channel, flipping back

This would actually make more sense considering their function.

You just have to watch this. :) Sounds familiar?

Off course, not thanks to Apple, but thanks to couple of very creative guys.

Thomas Joos did the porting of his Flash Lite app using the b.Tween framework which sits on top of barefootsoft’s EyeGT technology. eyeGT is multi platform highly efficient graphic renderer, capable of handling vector graphics and bitmaps. Think about eyeGT as a Windows GDI+ or Mac OSX Quartz2D on steroids, heavily optimized and designed from the ground up for mobile. This is NOT a iPhone Flash Player (Lite or otherwise), but rather a sets of tools, a graphical engine (eyeGT) and a framework (b.Tween) that extract, rework, and optimize the Flash application, turning it into a fully native and compilable Objective-C/C++ application that doesn’t require any runtime, thus complying with the iPhone SDK requirements. Crazy stuff! :)

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files. They teamed up with Adobe and improved the performance of Flash indexing algorithm. Stop cheering, calm down and continue reading. :)

This was a great news for Flash beginners but real problem lies a bit deeper inside complex Flash architecture which can't be that easily indexed. No, this won't magically bring SEO to your Flash website. No, this won't lift your pagerank to a new heights. The algorithm it self has few rather nasty caveats which actually can, in my opinion, bring more confusion than good search results.

Even with new improvements, Google spider:

• is not able to index text in additional flash content you may be loading (trough bootstrap loader with XML or something) and even if, by some miracle it does get indexed it won't be connected anyhow to other crawled text content in Flash files you may be using on your website.
• can't really cope with different crazy javascript flash embedding techniques (eg swfobject and such)
• doesn't understand graphics and FLV's

Knowing that and being hardcore Flash fanatic as I am, I contemplated a bit around Flash crawling concept. I can only speculate how Google crawls Flash these days, but I remember tool from couple of years ago called swf2html.exe shipped with Flash Search Engine SDK.I suppose search engines used that, for retrieving text from Flash files. The tool was not updated since Macromedia wrote it in 2002 but you can check it here.

Indexing Flash content by extracting strings of text from Flash files completely invalidates the purpose of Flash as a complex and feature rich presentation technology. Many parts of website are basically graphics with static text, or are dynamically loaded or generated. If you ignore that graphical-textual content (and you have to since crawler doesn't have OCR), and index just a text content, the search engine user will get confusing, or even very dangerous results. Partially indexed misleading information is more dangerous than no information at all. Flash RIA applications in 99% cases use dynamically populated lists so I am not sure that Google will be able to crawl those sites either.

This is like having a tour guide, to guide you trough city in which he has never been before, and in country which language he doesn't speak fluent. Thank you but, I think I'll pass.

Correct my if I am wrong, but solution is pretty simple and it works great - If you are building Flash website, build an XHTML fallback version of the website. Google knows and loves valid markup structure and there are still many corporate users which can't install (or upgrade) Flash because their system administrator is a noob. By having XHTML version you can even better control the content you want to get indexed and non Flash users will thank you too.