Adobe Flash is not dead, but it does not look good.

A while ago I blogged about Adobe's decision to "Open Source" Flex (
http://simple-webdesign.blogspot.com/2011/11/thanks-for-nothing-adobe.html
). The feeling at the time was that Adobe was teetering on the edge
of killing Flash. The adoption of other standards by Apple, Google
and even Microsoft served to shrink Adobe Flash's market. Then we
hear that Adobe is getting rid of the Android Flash plugin (
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/06/flash-player-and-android-update.html
).

This is a good thing in the long run as Adobe has ruined Flash
entirely. This is impressive considering where Flash started, it was
the bane of dial-up users in the 90s and then a major security concern
of the 00s. Steve Jobs will be remembered for a lot of things, but I
think I will admire how he killed Flash by speaking the truth. It was
a brave thing to do, to say "Adobe has no clothes". They were part of
the complacent IT crowd that assumed technologies like Internet
Explorer, PDF, Desktops and Flash would be a part of our lives
forever. This is no longer the case.

Maybe this will let Adobe shrink and focus on what they do well,
making multimedia creation applications, and not things they never did
well such as drive web technologies. The Macromedia acquisition by
Adobe was a big, big mistake for everyone except the people who cashed
in on the stocks. Since then it has been a phenomenal loss. With the
death of Flash what is Adobe left with? They killed Freehand (it was
inferior to Illustrator anyhow). Adobe is left with Fireworks,
Dreamweaver and Coldfusion. What a mess. Adobe is primarily a
multimedia content creation company and they hold the *best*
closed-source web application server technology (meaning: better than
ASP as that is all that is left). I never liked Fireworks but on the
other hand I am a designer who can program so maybe I was not intended
to like it. I was Ok with Dreamweaver but it is hardly essential and
consider it strange that Flex/Flash Builder was based on the MUCH
better Eclipse, and not Dreamweaver. If they were going to charge
money for something why not leverage their own products. But that is
the dumb moves that got us to this point.

Adobe pushed Flash to be everything to everyone without considering
"should" they do something vs "can" they do something. They have the
same issue with PDF, so it comes as no surprise that I think PDF has
days that are numbered as well. All of this is too bad. Flash is
still a great animation platform, only for television and not the web.
For example the new Titmouse cartoon MotorCity (
http://peopleofmotorcity.tumblr.com/ ) is entirely Flash... or mostly
Flash as I assume a lot of the car/racing effects are 3d. Flash is an
important part of their workflow, a complete dissolution of Flash
would alter how they work. I like Flash for animation and drawing, it
is what I doodle in when I have the chance. The excellent Webcomics
of Humor Scientist Kris Straub ( http://krisstraub.com/ ) are done in
Flash.

I'd hope this only spells the doom of Flash the plug-in and not Flash
the vector animation and drawing package. I'd really hope for an open
source alternative to the drawing and animation functions of Flash but
that is because I'd like to use a new version of Flash on Linux
without Wine. If you know of such an open source application that is
as smooth as Flash for drawing and animating I'd love to hear about
it.

It has been 2 years, time for a XBOX Live problem

So 2 years ago this happened (
http://simple-webdesign.blogspot.com/2010/11/xbox-live-anguish.html ).
We had a big problem with XBox Live where Microsoft tried to charge
the automatic subscription fee to an expired card, when we bought a
gift card for our son to renew his subscription he couldn't because
the account was locked because they billed an expired card. Two years
ago, I sat on a phone for close to 8 hours for the opportunity to give
Microsoft money. It has been two years, the card the subscription
bills to is expired. Have they made things better?

No. Things are not better. The card expired and before the
subscription fee is due, we decided to update the card information
BEFORE it expires. Turns out you can't. The new card has the same
numbers as the old card with the exception of the expiration date and
the CVV2 code. For 10 hours my son and then wife tried to update the
card on the console. It would look like it took, but when you go back
into the billing area the number reverted to the expired card
information. I got home and did a few Google searches (I won't use
Bing!). Every XBox forum post link resulted in an ASPX error (nice
advertisement for the raw power of ASP!). Via Google cache, I was
able to get the real support page for XBox Live (
http://support.xbox.com/en-US/contact-us ) -- I was not able to find
that page otherwise, only a hell of pages that link to each other with
"trouble-shooting" information on them.

I tweeted to the XBox Live support account and got a few
back-and-forth tweets of moderate usefulness. The real help came in
the form of a agent on their chat system. The first time I went on
chat the page informed me that I would only have to wait about 3
minutes. I waited 45 minutes to get to number 2 in the queue only to
stay there another 35 minutes. I left and got back into chat and
spent another hour waiting for an agent. After going from 26th to
1st, I met Nichole (my second most favorite Microsoft employee,
EVER!). She had me do some things and in the end we had to cancel the
current subscription, she re-issued me "gift subscription" codes to
get back my remaining balance of time and then we had to resubscribe
to XBox Live with the gift accounts and then enter the new card.

Once again, I found myself putting in a solid day of work to give
Microsoft money. Am I out of line to think that, as a customer, they
should put in a day's work to GET my money? What success would a
business be if to pay your bill with them you had to wrestle
alligators and jump through flaming hoops just to hand them a check?

I think about our other console, the Wii. Internet access is free on
the Wii. It is integrated with Wi-Fi which is the way MOST people
access the Internet from devices in their homes. If you want to buy
stuff to play on the Wii from their store, you can buy points from the
console or Grandma can mail you a gift card. No subscriptions, no
adapters, no multi-layer accounts (Windows Live account -> XBox Live
Profile??) Nintendo does the work and you give them money. They made
it easy. Microsoft intentionally makes it harder than anyone else.
In the age of the App Store and Google Play Store, or even the Ubuntu
Software Center, users can buy and install programs very easily. Is
this usual XBox Live fiasco the way it will work with Windows 8? I
hope not!

Not that it matters, I'd love to throw the damn XBox into the sea
after this last set of issues. Check back with me in 2014, maybe they
will have fixed it by then? LOL!

Scan a network for Public and Private SNMP with Linux

This applies, in my case, to a Virtualbox VM running Backtrack 5r2. I
have a network I inherited. It has been a source of pain that few
could describe. Recent events had me curious, "How to I find out if I
have dumb SNMP configurations on my network?" Often devices come with
bad SNMP and other times people do dumb things, and sometimes there is
a calamitous combination of the two.

The tool of my choice to scan for public and private community strings
was Snmpwalk on Backtrack. I am sure there are other tools and it
might not be the perfect choice, thus my initial frustration at the
lack of documentation and my desire to create this post.

Snmpwalk is available for many linux distributions and offers a huge
array of capabilities. For a quick sample of snmpwalk commands you
can check Kioptrix (http://www.kioptrix.com/blog/?p=29). I went with
a very basic command as I was hoping to not get any results at all.
The command I went with was:

snmpwalk -c public -v1 targetIP

This worked great for a single IP address but I had a whole class c
network to scan. So it was time to use some bash to make this work.
I must confess I love Linux but have the most experience with Windows.
If you are like me then you might be interested in a way to scan a
whole network.

for i in {1..254}; do snmpwalk -c public -v1 192.168.10.$i >> snmp_scan_$i; done

This will scan all the IPs from 192.168.10.1 to 192.168.10.254 for
devices with SNMP configured with a community string of "public". You
can change this to scan for "private" or scan other IP ranges. I am
sure there is a better way to filter out the "No Response from .."
messages. But this worked for me and I wanted to give back to the
Internet.

If you found this at all helpful then please leave a comment!