The Hydrogen Project

Irrespective of your opinion of Flash, the following situation has arisen now that Flash 10 is out, and it bothers me greatly. A bunch of websites look at the Flash version string in order to figure out which version is installed. This string looks something like ‘Shockwave Flash 10.0 r12′ and is accessible from JavaScript as navigator.plugins["Shockwave Flash"] or similar. Some websites requiring a minimum version of Flash perform their version checking by finding the dot in the version string and then converting that character to an integer. Now that Flash 10 is out, browsers with Flash 10 installed are completely barred from some offenders. Others may at least allow a user to bypass the version detection. Of course the proper thing to do is to match against a regular expression like “\b(\d+)\.” and use a backreference, which you can very well do in JavaScript (RegExp.$1 in this case).

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site. Over a month! For that I am sorry. I have a number of good excuses though.

The first is that I spent a lot of time in October trying to find a new job. I started this past Monday at Akamai Technologies, where I will be working on log processing. That may sound boring, but think about what Akamai does, and how much traffic they handle every day (6 million hits per second!) That results in some ridiculous number of terabytes of log data per day!

The second is that I have been preparing for my second batizado. I have never actually talked about capoeira on this site before, but I have been training in capoeira for the past two years, and I aim to keep going until I need to get joints replaced. A batizado is an annual event for a capoeira group where students who qualify move up in rank. I received my second cordao, which meant that I had to fight seven masters of capoeira until one of them finally got me on the floor. Maybe it wasn’t seven; I lost count. :) I am spending today recovering my strength.

Anyway, I will be posting some old playlists here. I will also be writing more about computers and capoeira, since I don’t actually write so well about music.