According to the HTML spec, nested links are illegal. Good, fine, OK. Personally I am having a hard time understanding why anyone would want to nest links. I mean, why would anyone want to do this:
Blizzo loves
Ajaxian
The problem is, however, that I can see a need for nested onClick events. Consider the following happy little onclickable characters, the box and the link. Go ahead, click them, you know you want to…

As my old drafting teacher used to say, “Peace, Love, Happiness Be”. This is all just great. The problem comes when the the sexual tension that has been building between these two for the last three seasons finally reaches critical mass and they become one. We don’t just get a dip in the ratings, we have a problem:

What if when you click the link, I don’t want the div to change color, because in his contract he states he refuses to do color changes with anyone else on the set at the same time. Prima donna <div>’s. A little JavaScript can solve this problem, like so:

The freeze_js variable prevents the onClick action of the <div> when the link is clicked, but it still changes color when you click on the div outside the link. You, in the back row, come up here and try it out for the class.

So now that we have everyone playing nicely together, we may even get contracts for another 13 episodes. My question becomes… is this icky? Would you expect everything to fire off when you click, or just the one thing you click on? As web UI’s become more complex, how should we handle this problem? Huh, huh, huh?

This got me thinking about software prices in general, but I will stick with Photoshop for this example. My guess is that Photoshop has one of the highest percentages of piracy in it’s install base. Adobe gets nothing from those people. A certain portion of those pirates are going to steal it regardless of the price tag, because that’s what they do. I can’t help but wonder, however, how many people say “$650! Screw that!” and hop onto a file sharing network, cutlass gripped mercilessly between their clenched teeth.

Of that latter group, I would guess that some percentage would be willing to buy it if the price tag weren’t so high. So how could Adobe lower that price bar and net the cash from these pirates? Since the upgrade is $199, and the release cycle appears to be 12 months, you are essentially paying $16.60 for the new hotness. Why not offer a service at $20 a month to use the software, possibly with some larger lump payment to get going ($50). Now someone only has to come up with $70 to get into their product instead of $649.

Now the real benefits kick in. Instead of waiting a year for new features, they can roll them out in real time as they are developed, creating a more agile product for their customers. They could also experiment, tossing in features here and there on a trial basis, without some delicate, long impacting consequences.

If adoption of this practice took off, they could even lower the price to grab ever increasing percentages of those fence dwelling pirates, until the inconvenience of finding and implementing the pirated software overshadows the barrier to just plain purchasing it.

Until then, bon voyage!

Most of you know that I work for Vonage as a web developer. With the amount of attention that Vonage has gotten in the news lately, I thought I would take a moment to clarify a few things. Most of the mainstream media outlets have already pronounced us as dead and moved on. The problem is they don’t really understand the intricacies of patent litigation, and they are too lazy to keep track of what was going on. The Vonage website has a page devoted to explaining how the lawsuits will impact existing customers.

Here is the real deal.

Verizon accused Vonage of being in violation of three separate patents. When we went to court, the judge had little to no understanding of VoIP technology or the services Vonage provides. He was an ordinary judge, chosen at random in a location that would guarantee the case would go to trial in months where it normally takes years. There are reports that the judge actually *slept* through part of the trial. The entire trial took a few hours where most patent cases take days, weeks or even months. The judge decided in favor of Verizon with 100% of the claims, something that I am told has never happened before.

Verizon was seeking damages around $300 million and royalties of our subscriptions at about 25% going forward. The jury (yes, the patent case had a jury) came back and awarded $58 million and 5% of royalties based on the judges “findings”. It is also worth mentioning that the judge did not understand patent litigation to the point that he did not know that when patent cases are appealed they are heard at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. When this was made clear to him, he retracted his judgment and took two weeks to review the case.

After the two weeks he came back and imposed the injunction that freaked everyone out; Vonage would not be allowed to sign up new customers. What everyone failed to note was that Vonage did an emergency appeal and they granted a temporary stay on the injunction (meaning we dont have to comply with it until a later date). On the 24th the federal court will decide if we get an extended stay, and if so for how long. Even after all that, Vonage is developing work-arounds so that there will be no interruption in the process of acquiring new customers.

Verizon doesn’t really care about patent infringement, they see us as a threat and they are trying to shut us down. There goal was to cost us enough money to permanently damage us, and so far they are failing miserably. Even if Vonage ends up paying the 5% and the $58M to Verizon, it will only slow down our progress temporarily.

The last thing I want to comment on is the layoff Vonage had yesterday. Obviously I still have a job, as does everyone else who works for Vonage who is in my personal inner circle. The layoff wasn’t a desperate act of cost cutting, but a strategic move to eliminate those that A) didn’t really want to be here, or B) weren’t contributing adequately. Most of the people that were laid off weren’t really surprised.

On that note, Vonage isn’t going anywhere. My job and the jobs of my friends here are not in jeopardy. Vonage will continue to grow in thrive in spite of Verizons efforts to squish us under a pile of money. Vonage is still the most innovative VoIP option in the marketplace. Lastly, ignore what the media has to say about Vonage, I find most of it uninformed or otherwise tainted.

Anyway, all of that isn’t especially noteworthy, but as my mood improved I realized something. Funk is an extremely positive form of expression. Funk doesn’t contain large amounts of profanity or racial slurs, it doesn’t glorify violence, it doesn’t do any of the negative things that so many other genres do. In fact, if anything funk actively promotes love and understanding. They should be blaring Bootsy over loudspeakers in Iraq. Who could possibly want to fight while listening to “Love Gangsta”?

• Created a visually appealing design for a website
• Converted that design into standards compliant, cross-browser friendly HTML and CSS
• Enhance the user interface with JavaScript via DHTML and AJAX
• Create a database schema to support the application data
• Created PHP classes to interface with the database and the application and implement business rules
• Acted as systems administrator for the project, maintaining and configuring the server and all required services.

Stack that up with the fact that usually you work all alone, with no one to bounce ideas off of or discuss problems, and I don’t really see how non-web developers have come to that conclusion. But they have. Let’s put an end to Web Developer oppression!

Thankfully our world today has a little more justice, and there are no such limitations. However, due to that historical fact, the neighborhood is still predominantly black. Obviously I have no problem with this, I mean, I bought a house there, right? It didn’t take long to realize we weren’t really welcome. While there were plenty of people, regardless of race, who smiled and waved as we went for early evening walks, just as many people, predominately the African-American neighbors, would not only glare at us as we walked by, but continue to glare even after I smiled and waved at them (So much for taking initiative).

On the way to work this morning I was staring absently out the window (no, I wasn’t driving) and we drove past a young black girl who was jaywalking. We couldn’t see her as we approached, and we were nowhere near hitting her, but it just so happened that I made eye contact with her as she drifted past my field of vision. Her face contorted into a scowl and she proceeded to yell something offensive at me as we drove away. I couldn’t make out the words.

I was quite angry about this exchange. I vented to my wife about it quite a bit for the rest of the drive. Guaranteed, if this girl knew anything about me, that would have been a smile and a wave, not a heated exchange. Prejudice is not born of color, but of misunderstanding. What percentage of people make an honest attempt to understand and know someone regardless of first impressions? How do you break the ice with a neighbor who lives not more than fifty feet away from you, who through the course of two years has never offered anything more in greeting than an icy stare.

So what is my response to this treatment? First I feel anger, and then I feel guilt for my anger. If my neighbor were a middle class Caucasian male, I could happily feel angry at him all day. But because of race, I feel like I’m not allowed guilt. Who am I to be angry at people that have been discriminated against by people like me all their lives. Conclusion, I am a racist. A new racist. I am a racist because I am not able to treat others equally. I cannot express my feelings honestly for fear of appearing to be an old racist. Where is this stupid melting pot they kept promising us?

This post is spinning off of a conversation I just had with Jason regarding this article about the upcoming movie version of The Da Vinci Code. Apparently they are so scared of offending certain groups of religious people that they are going to take out references to religious aspects of the book that do not conform to current beliefs of the Catholic church. Has anyone read that book? There would be no point in making it without those references. I’m not a huge fan of the Da Vinci Code as a book, but as I read it I kept thinking what a great movie it would have made. I’m frankly surprised they didn’t release it in screenplay format to begin with.

So what is happening to Hollywood? I blame digital special effects to start with. Like any kid with a new toy, they have been rearranging their lives to find any excuse to use it. Special effects are great and everything, but why not actually, you know, try to write a good story first. They have become reliant on the special effects to distract the viewers from the pathetic storylines.

I don’t really see people putting up with this long-term. Eventually attendance to movies (which is already way down at the moment) will drop to the point that they have to try something else or go out of business. Part of the problem is that movies cost so much to make now. Corporate Hollywood would rather release a mediocre movie that stays in the black than release something that might not be well received. I remember reading somewhere that every major movie studio is something like 5 flops away from going bankrupt. That doesn’t leave much motivation to take risks or experiment.

The independent movie scene has been gaining strength while Hollywood’s wanes. This trend will continue until there is more money to be made in “Independent” films, at which point the corporations will ruin those as well.