Thoughts of Dan

I've been an anti-flash guy for a pretty long time now but I've been "ok" with running flash on machines when I had flashblock installed.  Today however I ceded to Adobe's nag and installed the latest upgrade to Flash -- bringing me to Flash Player 10.1  It ran mostly in the background, and I had to agree to what read like a EULA.  My oh my what bullshit they pulled. Turns out they installed McAfee anti-virus/antispyware, which I've always thought was terrible.  Don't just take my word for it though.  You need no further proof as to how seriously McAfee takes spyware than to see that they don't mind that their program IS INSTALLED AS SPYWARE.  If you have McAfee I would be worried that for $$$ McAfee will decide some other programs aren't spyware, and allow them to be installed on your PC.  Nothing is more dangerous than a false sense of security, and it's clear McAfee has little interest in your PC's security. As for Adobe.  I'...

I wrote this in summer of 2008.  My gang of friends had all come down to Woods Hole, and Mark Z. had brought a sweater he had found in his apartment.  All the girls we knew were assembled, yet no  one claimed the sweater.  After the weekend, emails flew among the group trying to decide who owned the "mysterious sweater."  The phrase reminded me of my childhood, and I sat down and wrote the following:     Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Mysterious Sweater It was a warm Memorial Day on Cape Cod.  Encyclopedia Brown was driving down to visiting his friend Dan in Woods Hole from Idaville.  He had picked up his old friend Sally Kimball from Smith, where she was doing a double major in physical education and flannel shirts.   They were looking forward to a pleasant day of vacation.  But when they got to Woods Hole they found a mystery awaiting them. Encyclopedia Brown pulled into the hidden driveway, and saw Dan standi...

I've had some issues with pushing strings in JSON to a browser and having the browser parse them correctly.  Some browsers will take strings as argument, some want numbers -- it's a bit confusing.  To avoid all confusion, I recommend making a new date and then setting the values, rather than using the ambiguous constructors, which are implemented differently on different browsers. As an example new Date("2010, 12, 25"); and new Date("12 25,2010"); both yield a date in Firefox, but not in IE. Better is to do this: Date d = new Date(); d.setFullYear(int year,int month,int day);   Note that month is 0 based, so 0 is January, 11 is December.