During last week’s town hall, Jobs also took a swipe at Adobe Flash – still absent from the iPhone and apparently absent from the iPad as well. “They are lazy,” Jobs allegedly said of Adobe. They have all this potential to do interesting things, but they just refuse to do it…Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy…

“Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash…The world is moving to HTML5.”

This was taken from an article at theregister.

I have to say though, the guy has a point. I have been working with Flex now for a couple of years and we have found A LOT of bugs and errors with the platform and are always having to find a work-around. I started imagining the situation when Adobe thought up Flex. I just imagine this meeting where everyone is sitting around this big table scratching their heads about what to do next. “Why don’t we create a ‘framework’ that let’s people do these new RIA thingy majingies. We can just build it right on-top of flash with hardly no work at all”. That explains why its near on impossible to create real powerful applications. It turns out that Silverlight was actually thought about properly and designed and implemented from the bottom up correctly. I really wish that Adobe would sort out a lot of the problems it has with Flash. I mean we’re at version 3 of Flex now and its still buggy. Version 4 is about to come out soon so we will have to see if it gets any better. I doubt it will though for the security model (where most of my issues lie) as this is within the flash engine itself. We all know that Flash has had some (and most likely still does) incredibly shit security holes. It seems to me that they have just patched it up non-stop to fix the issue at hand. Some things we have tried to do are just impossible and I have found that the security model contradicts itself in many places.

I would like to end it on a positive note though. There are a lot of things that I do like about Flex and Flash or else I would never use it at all. I just wish that the player itself would have a complete rewrite going forward with perhaps a compatibility mode so the older stuff still works.

UPDATE.

As we suggested recently, the myriad bugs that over the past few years have routinely imperiled the entire internet have made Adobe the Toyota of the software industry. Company security personnel seem intent of correcting the problems, but the only way for that to happen is to launch a comprehensive initiative that makes a top-to-bottom review of the company’s entire code base.

It would seem that things are just getting worse for Adobe and other people are also suggesting that Adobe revamp their whole product security.

It seems this has been making its way around the web and I thought it was funny so thought I would share it myself.

A few days ago facebook released (under opensource) their HipHop for PHP source code transformer. I remember first reading about this from an interview with a facebook employee on reddit. She mentioned that one guy was pretty much rewriting PHP to work on C++, which at the time sounded like they were working on some compiler. The actual product though is different, they basically convert the PHP source into C++ code, and then you can use your compiler of choice (probably g++) to get it up and running. I know something about this area as my final year project at uni I created a code transformer that would take a web script in PHP -> JSP -> ASP and convert it into any of the others. You could basically go in any direction – plus you could add in new modules for other languages that would allow you to transfer between even more. This was far from completion (I had it working for about 50% of common functionality) but I proved that it could be done – I also showed that you could optimize the code quite significantly. I basically added rules that would find common coding patterns and transform these in the AST (abstract syntax tree). Transforming to the new language was relatively easy as the tree was already in a good shape and the transformer knew how to properly express the tree in the most optimized way. The way I see it – HipHop has the opportunity to not only transform but optimize the hell out of the code as well. They say that in practice they are seeing a 50% CPU decrease and much better memory overhead.

I believe that the current version is compatible with PHP5.1 and they are quickly looking to get it compatible with 5.2. There are also some bits that it wont do, such as the rarely used eval() statement and function exists checking – these are things that they cant link to as they don’t know they exist, therefore can’t compile against

I have always liked PHP and have watched it get better and better to the point of it being a very professional tool in the right hands. I still regularly use PHP for my own applications that I need to get out the door quickly and effciently. What makes this interesting to me is that I can also look at it as a tool of choice for applications where I wouldn’t have before used PHP. I will have to play with it a bit and see what it can do. I think it will get more interesting when they get a version that can run on Apache/lighttd etc.

Go and get the code for yourself and check out the video for further information.

For more information on the technical challenges they face scaling Facebook, take a look at this article which goes into a deep enough description.

I have had to deal with Dell again in the last couple of weeks, first off to order a computer for someone else and then for a cheap linux box myself (I must be crazy).

The story starts with me ordering a computer for someone else (they really don’t get the internet hence they want a computer to learn). The laptop was around £900 and ordering it online went well. Literally like 3 minutes after I placed an order I had a call from my credit card company for a fraud check (Well done to Virgin (MBNA)). They said to contact Dell by phone or email to let them know that they can take the payment now. So I thought I would give them a ring. I called their number, ending up getting through to India once again. I must have pressed about twenty different options, and when I finally got through to someone I get passed passed around about four times. It appears that no one there actually understands how to deal with this matter. During this they decide to drop my call – this is after having been on the phone for about 40 minutes. Furious now, I ring them again. I finally get through to someone after about 20 minutes and guess what, yes, they pass me over again. This time I was angry enough to stick it to the next person who picked up and said this was a disgrace – never in my life have I had to fight for a company to take my money. The annoying thing as well is that I am having to wait back in the queue every time they pass me over to someone else.

Anyway, I finally get through to someone who can deal with me. Within about 1 minute she does something and that’s that. Something which just took me about an hour on the phone was completed in about 20 seconds – I was even more peed off now. I told the lady that the credit card company has allowed them to take the money out within the next 24 hours so they must do it by then or else it wil bounce again. Can you guess what happens next? Yeah thats right, they didn’t take the payment again so it bounced once again. I was seriously pissed off by now. How unprofessional can one company be? It turns out that very!

So I now have visions of being stuck on the phone again for another lifetime but thought sod it. I just called my credit card company, and got through to a human in like 3 minutes (take note Dell), and told them to extend the time for the payment which they did. I thought I would just wait for Dell to take the payment again and if they don’t then its tough luck and they can sod off. Anyway, they did end up taking payment later on Sunday night (remembering that I placed the order on Thursday). I get my confirmation email and the date of arrival is a month in the future – WTF! I even called the sales team before I placed the order to get an idea of how long it would take and they said about 7 – 10 working days. This would come way after Christmas so was a bit pointless as a christmas present. I ended up calling them up again to cancel the order. This time it seemed fast for Dell’s standards – about 20 minutes on the phone.

Now for the second machine. I have wanted a cheap laptop to install ubuntu on and I know that on Dell hardware it pretty much installs easily, so went for the £300 Inspiron 1545 and upgraded the battery and memory so it came to about £335. Exactly the kind of price I wanted to pay. I know I should have known better by now but it was cheap (and I think this is the only way Dell gets business these days) so thought what the hell. Anyway, this one went fine with the payment but when I got the arrival date it would arrive after I head back to Germany, so again would be no use to me. I cant believe they cant get it to me within 2 weeks. So anyway, I am literally now on the phone waiting to get through to someone to cancel the order (again) and have had time to write this while waiting.

I have just come off the phone with them – a total of 30 minutes! I told the guy on the phone that I was not happy about having to wait 28 minutes to get through to someone, his reply was “that they have a very high volume of calls coming through” blah blah. It’s the same answer I get every time I call. I told him the mechanics of the company don’t interest me in the slightest, and if they are struggling isn’t that enough information for them to hire more call operatives. He seemed a little puzzled by that question for some reason.

So my question is “What has happened to Dell?”. I can say that they used to be fantastic – absolutely fantastic! I wouldn’t have gone with anyone else for the same sort of price. Their customer service was brilliant. I remember getting through to an Irish call center and their staff there would always deal with your issue immediately without having to pass you on to about twenty people. When you had problems with the hardware you got through to some technician who understood your point and opinion and sent your stuff out pretty quickly so you can do it yourself. They listened to reason and took your word for it accepting that you may have a brain.

Since HP took over from them as the biggest computer seller it seems that they completely panicked and thought of nothing but getting that spot back again. They seem to have removed all the Irish centers (I have not yet got through to one in a while) and moved them all to India. Now I don’t have any problem with Indians in the slightest but I find that it just takes so much longer to explain to them what’s going on and you have this problem when they just don’t hear things right (accents play into it here). I remember having to repeat my address to this one guy about 20 times. The technicians just don’t take your word for it and make you go through all this crap just to get to the place where you started.

It seems to me that in the hope of cutting costs they have lost the one major thing that is important – the customer’s respect!

Update: It would seem that Dell has now been put into third place thanks to Acer