How is it that one of the largest software companies in the world can’t even get their updater to work properly?

The update cannot be applied to the product. Please re-install the product and try again.

Well played Adobe.

I decided to push up the new version of my site, it was starting to sit on staging and I had a feeling that if I didn’t get it up soon it would never go up. I have a few more things I want to implement involving Flash and Flickr, but those will take some time to complete and I didn’t want to wait. I know there are issues with the CSS, if you see something odd, please post a comment!

Something that I worked on and finished up before leaving sunKING is AE’s 77e New Music Weekly. It showcases a lot of really great bands and provides a few free mp3s each week.

I have never done much backing up, and I have never had any major failure of a critical drive. A good backup plan seems like a good thing for me to have. It seems as though I must be due for one.

Here is my plan, based on the advice found here.

A good backup plan must be redundant and automatic, therefore I am purchasing two hard drives, and two external enclosures. One 250gb which will back up my iMac’s internal drive, and one 500gb, which will back up my external media drive that holds my music and photo collection. I will do a SuperDuper backup each night of each drive, which will essentially mirror the drives. The idea being, that if my iMac’s drive fails on me, I can just add in the drive in the enclosure and pick up right where I left off.

This is in addition to backing up off site to Mozy and Time Machine.

Next month I will buy two more of the exact same two drives so I can do the exact same thing, only I will take them to work every month and switch. That way I always have a drive off site in case of a fire.

Again, this is addition to my off site backup to Mozy. Like I said, I am due for a major failure.

If you build just about any Flash application you will need a menu that will manage button states and let you know when something has been clicked. This class will do that and can be implemented in projects big and small. Below is a very basic example on how it can be used, on the Mall World page it is implemented six times. Can you guess where?

A very basic implementation

[embed swf="/flash/examples/MenuImplementationExample.swf" width="640" height="140" version="9"][/embed]

Creating a Menu Object can be as simple as this

var menu = new Menu(); menu.addItem({clip: buttonOne, id: 1}); menu.addItem({clip: buttonTwo, id: 2}); menu.addEventListener(MenuEvent.NAVIGATE, this.menuNavigateHandler);

This code is released under the MIT License with just one request. If you improve it in some way that could benefit other users leave a comment.

Download the code & example files

Good stuff

I was hoping to find one of my co-workers outside smoking.

Lisa Belkin has a good article on productivity in the workplace on the The New York Times.

“The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

I am a little guilty of this one sometimes. When I get into work I check all my email, check the RSS feeds in NetNewsWire and read the new stuff on Coasterbuzz. I start working around 9:30 or 10 and usually keep going until lunch time if I can stay focused.

A lot of this time though is spent keeping up with new technology news, Flash and HTML news and things related to my job. So its not all wasted time.

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass.

This is one that really gets me. I am asked to work long hours for long stretches of time at sunKING and the longer I go, the less productive I become. Pretty soon I am making mistakes, staring at my screen while searching for a file, and overlooking simple code bugs. Working longer doesn’t mean more work is getting done!

A few companies are taking the concept of “watch what I produce, not how I produce it” even further. At the headquarters of Best Buy in Minneapolis, for instance, the hot policy of the moment is called ROWE, short for Results Only Work Environment. There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.

When I sit here at work, sometimes I waste time cause I am not in the mood to work on what I have to work on that day. I have to force myself to try and get anything done, then I am out the door at 5:30. Not much gets done.

I always say that if I ever start my own company that I would ask my employees to be available by phone form 9-5, and they could get their work done when and where they want.

Ever since installing Photoshop CS I haven’t been able to view thumbnails in Windows Explorer like I could with Photoshop 7. Here is a fix.

Info from Mike Golding.

1. Download psicon.dll from dlldump.com
2. Copy it to c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Shell\

Thats it! Its a shame Adobe stopped supporting this and want you to use their file browser instead, which is cumbersome compared to Windows Explorer.

Found out while working on a project that comments are not allowed above your document type declaration and IE Windows will revert to quirks mode. I found this out after about 300 pages were created and depending on said comments (Dreamweaver templates) so I had no other option than to hack the css to fix the problem. Lesson learned.