Shanti’s Dispatches

Been tinkering with Flash CS3 a bit lately.

Developed some rudimentary Galaga functionality after a few hours of playing with the canvas, timeline & ActionScript functionality.

This series of tutorials has also been a great resource.

My basic version of Galaga (screenshot):

Was able to get ship movement (via arrow keys), missile firing, enemy randomization / movement and missile hit detection working!

Hardcore coders usually phear the Flash (including the author for a long while) because of its quirky semantics, timeline & animation-based way of doing things. But I was surprised at how quickly one could develop a working prototype within a few short hours.

Once you know the basics of wiring things up, the ActionScript coding part for basic animation, etc. is a breeze. (syntax is just like JavaScript)

The Aftermath

When I tried to redo what I had done the night before, I kept bumping into this maddening error:
“Current selection cannot have actions applied to it”

I was getting that when trying to edit/add Actions (actionscript code) to an instance of a Movie Clip.

The Solution

The second time around, I had mistakenly selected ActionScript 3.0. Whereas the first go I was using ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 compatability.

That’s what the tutorials were suggesting (or they were just older, before 3.0 even existed).

I’ve heard good things about ActionScript 3.0, but after this experience it leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. I’m still not even sure how one goes about adding ActionScript code to instances of Movie Clips, etc. in the 3.0 paradigm.

The style of using a “control” layer makes sense — but you’d not want to put 100% of your code in a flat function space. (php4/c-style, ick!) Bunching things into proper Classes and calling methods like “this._x” make things a lot simpler and more well-contained, codewise.

That’s all there was, no last name or anything. Clicking on a link took me to a signup page with no additional information about our mystery Tim.

Sean over at Scrollin’ on Dubs has had a similar horrible Sprint PCS customer service experience.

It helps to know I’m not the only one.

Are there any good blogs covering this stuff besides Consumerist? Judging from blog reaction (and my own personal blood boiling, which is rare, trust me) when dealing with these companies, it seems to indicate much latent demand for a Customer Strikes Back blog of sorts.

Keeping things light…

I feel bad making this blog too heavy. here iz some lulcatz for u

sum cats require not lolcaptunz!

oh hai, blogger lazyjacked img urls. kthxbai

Woke up today with a massive sore throat & felt like crap. To make matters worse, I found out that my woes with Sprint PCS were not yet over.

A few weeks ago I had finally gotten ahold of their cancellations department, after much rigmarole.

They were going to cancel the 2nd account (which they had hooked up to a broken phone and were attempting to charge me for) and give me some credits for activation fees, etc.

Today I discovered that on top of all that, they had the audacity to charge me a $200 early cancellation fee for this fraudulent transaction.

The Ironic Part

I’ve been recording the calls using HotRecorder for Skype.

For them to be of any use in a court, etc. you have to say “this call may be recorded” to the person on the other line.

When I got to their cancellations department, when I said that, the lady said that it would not be okay for me to record the call. WTF?

They can have a record of the conversation (every customer service call starts off with “this call may be recorded or monitored for …” blah blah blah), but not their customers? Is that even legal?

So I turned off the recorder because I am just too honest of a guy. This lady was nice enough (seemingly)… I’ll see in a few days if any other mysterious/nefarious charges appear on my bill.

New Carrier Suggestions?

Verizon, T-Mobile, anyone? Bueller? They all seem like spawn of the devil to me at this point.

 
  “Why don’t you have a seat over there in my Escalade sittin on dubs.”

First off - I love checking out the Daily WTF randomly when I get a chance.

For those unfamiliar with the site — the WTFs usually come from a new programmer entering a job and finding something that makes them go uhh….. what the f*ck??

Some of the WTFs on there are hilarious. A lesson can be learned from almost all of them.

The Josh Workaround breaks the traditional mold of the WTF. Normally the target is a previous programmer who wrote some shoddy code. The hero is a new hire who is thrust into the new situation, discovering the previous coder’s incompetence.

Breaking the WTF Mold

In the Josh Workaround, it was another set of coders and/or management who decided that Josh’sWorkaround was crap.

The new hire soon discovers though that Josh’s Workaround had indeed been addressing some real issues. The fault of the WTF lay not with Josh but whoever decided to take out his code, which was at least attempting to do something about the issues instead of blindly ignoring it.

What we can really learn from the WTF:

• Many coders out there would rather surf/read/participate in forums than actually be coding
• Many coders would rather critique than create (can you imagine how a code review would go with some of the arrogant, think they know-it-all, pricks that post on WTF threads?)
• Many coders love making arbitrary judgements about code without having all the facts in hand. (Oh, this code sucks? Did you stop to ask whether management give them 5 days to work on it or 30 minutes?)
• etc. etc.

Of course many other WTFs can simply be attributed to a mistake, too little experience/education, etc.

The constraint many participants in the WTF forums seem to forget:

Cost, Quality, Time — Choose Two

And finally a comment from the thread that pretty much sums it up (not all WTF’ers are arrogant pricks):

That’s funny. Arrogant, self-righteous developers who think that their code is 100% perfect and bug free, when in fact it’s not. And to top it off, they forced someone who, from what we’re shown, knew what he was doing to leave the company due to their ignorance. Lovely. I’ve met my fair share of these kinds of buffoons. And for some reason they’re always the ones who stick around with the company.

One of the greatest ideas in Paul Hawken’s Growing a Business is the quarterly review.

Employees get to braindump all of their issues and problems on management. In return for putting up with this abuse, management gets a treasure-trove of information about how to make the business better.

Well, I did Cox Communications a favor (I know, do they really deserve it?) and asked my tech support girl contact how they can improve their business and relations with customers.

Here’s what she said:

If corporate would listen I would tell them to not focus on call times so much. Sometimes we cannot help without it being a lenghty call.

Also we as tech support should not HAVE to offer telephone or cable tv, (so yeah, I know you are having constant problems with our HSI how about trying cable tv or phone?), it does not go well. We end up getting yelled at more than we get told yes.

Our programs bogging down on a regular basis is also not good. And most importantly quit making changes and not telling us!

Below - a list of Cox Corporate officers. Let’s see if any of them subscribe to their Technorati ego-feed!

Brian L. Roberts > Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer

Officer Since: 1986
Age: 47
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Trading Activity - Yahoo Finance
John R. Alchin > Co-Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer

Officer Since: 1990
Age: 59
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Trading Activity - Yahoo Finance
Michael J. Angelakis > Co-Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President

Officer Since: 03/28/2007
Age: 42
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Ralph J. Roberts > Chairman of the Executive and Finance Committee of the Board of Directors; Director

Officer Since: 1969
Age: 87
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Trading Activity - Yahoo Finance
Stephen B. Burke > Chief Operating Officer, Executive Vice President; President, Comcast Cable

Officer Since: 06/1998
Age: 48
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Trading Activity - Yahoo Finance
David L. Cohen > Executive Vice President

Officer Since: 2002
Age: 51
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Trading Activity - Yahoo Finance
Lawrence J. Salva > Senior Vice President, Chief Accounting Officer, Controller

Officer Since: 01/2000
Age: 50
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Trading Activity - Yahoo Finance
Arthur R. Block > Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Secretary

Officer Since: 1993
Age: 51
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
Trading Activity - Yahoo Finance
Marlene S. Dooner > Senior Vice President - Investor Relations

Officer Since: 05/29/2007
Bio & Compensation - Reuters
D Arcy F. Rudnay > Senior Vice President - Corporate Communications

The RIAA lost their case against defendant Debbie Fosters and was ordered to pay up $68,000 in court fees.

Always classy, the RIAA has so far refused to pay up.

Debbie has been forced to ask the court to enter judgement against them in order to be able to send a collection agency after the RIAA.

Re: supporting artists - the best way is probably to go see their concerts, buy merch (if they even get a cut), etc.

For one, that it doesn’t require some fancy MVC framework ( ) to build an app that reaches hundreds of millions of people.

Facebook code for searching and homepage code.

I am by no means knocking it, but the code does not stand out as remarkable or some kind of work of staggering genius. It simply works — and works well.

That being said,

• No one can argue with Facebook’s scaling ability
• The real genius / scaling code behind Facebook was not in the released pages.

If anything, I’d love to see the FBML parser / FB Applications module.

Awesome comment found in the facebook source:

// Holy shit, is this the cleanest fucking frontend file you’ve ever seen?!

Lulz.