The biggest news in Silicon Valley is the un-news of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger. After three and a half months, Microsoft has finally walked away from the deal in disgust.

No wonder. Yahoo tried everything and talked to everyone they could find to avoid dealing with Microsoft. When that failed, they tried to play hard-to-get with a $37/share price tag. If everyone knows that no one wants to buy Yahoo, it takes a lot of moxie to say that $31 or $33/share is not enough. This strategy depends on the buyer not knowing that they are the only bidder, which obviously was not the situation here.

Jerry Yang, CEO of Yahoo, and the Yahoo board are taking the blame, as they should. When you sit in the big office, you get the lion’s share of the credit and the blame. Maybe Jerry really did not want to sell at any price. According to the New York Times, Jerry and the board exchanged high-fives when they heard that Microsoft was walking away. Yahoo is the most successful company that Jerry is likely to be associated with. I am sure that the programmer/engineer in him did not want to give up his favorite toy or his status as top dog and resident genius.

Poor Jerry. Now he has to prove that his company is really a $37/share company. It does not seem like he has any new ideas about how to make Yahoo more profitable.

Poor Jerry. He should have spent some time in Istanbul negotiating for a carpet or even at a user car dealership trying to buy a car. He would have quickly learned some basics of negotiating. Such as when you have a deal on the table, you work hard to close the deal or you stop wasting everyone’s time.

If Microsoft decides that buying Yahoo makes sense (and there are plenty of reasons why the combo does not make sense), then walking away now is the best plan. They can always come back in a few quarters when Yahoo will still be struggling and the shareholders will have given up hope. Then they can offer $20/share and get essentially the same company and assets. That’s the way to negotiate. 

As the speed of the average Internet connection increases, web designers are taking advantage of the higher speed to beautify their pages, which add kilobytes to their web pages. As much as we love those shiny colorful images and bandwidth intensive video clips, some people are still struggling with lower speed connections.

A great free tool for checking how web pages load over slow connections is Sloppy. It is Java-based and extra easy to load if you have Java on your machine already. It is easy to use as well. Just type in a URL address and specify the speed that you want the connection to run at. Then sit back and party with those media rich, Web 2.0 pages of yours like it is 1999.

Technorati tags: Sloppy, website testing

Work proceeds on the new Geogad web site. Some days the frustration level is pretty high, but things should be getting a little easier. Why the optimism? Because the new Flash program is more or less under control.

Flash is a very powerful and very popular way to display images, animation, audio, and video across multiple browsers and platforms. But that power comes with a cost. I am not referring to the cost of the software program. I am talking about the hair you will rip out and the remaining ones that will go white as you battle the program to get it to do what you know it should.

The heart of Flash’s power for developers is Actionscript, a scripting language somewhat like Javascript that dynamically controls the Flash movies. The main problem with Actionscript is that it feels like a kludge. For example, the last few hours I have been trying to figure out why Geogad’s Flash volume slider was working yesterday but not today. It turns out the problem is that the volume slider appears above a movieClip that is on a mask layer that is used to mask the movie on the layer below. All of this is fine and dandy and exactly what Flash and its mask layers were designed to do. Judging by depth of the movie used as the mask and the position of its masked layer, it should not interfere with the volume slider. However, it prevents the mouse from clicking on the volume slider.
The solution was to switch the masked layer to a regular layer. Then I used Actionscript to dynamically set the movieClip as a mask for the movie below (see the setMask property for more info). Now I have my mask, but it is not incorrectly grabbing mouse clicks that belong to the volume slider in the layer above.

As I said, Flash is very powerful. You need that power when you find something that does not work the way that it should, so you have to create a workaround. Luckily there seem to be multiple ways to do most things in Flash. The only problem is the days lost trying to figure out what is not working the way that it should and then figuring out another way to do it.

Technorati tags: Flash, Actionscript, masked layers, incorrectly capturing clicks, dynamic masks

As the new Geogad web site is starting to take form, I sometimes look back in frustration and wonder why it is taking so long. And then today, I got a small reminder.

Part of the new site will use Javascript, in particular, a page that lets the user set dates. The code seemed to be working well until I tested setting the months of August and September. Then the code completely broke.

The key was that the month value was being read in correctly from the input box, but the conversion from a string value to an integer was not returning the correct number. The function that converts a string to an integer in Javascript is parseInt. In my case, instead of getting “08″ or “09″ converting to 8 or 9, I was getting 0. Turns out the problem is that Javascript can get confused in its conversion. It assumes numbers that begin with a “0″ are octal (or base-8) numbers, where I was assuming that everything was in decimal (or base-10) numbers.

Thanks to a quick surf of the Internet, I found that the solution was to specify base-10 in all my conversions. So my original, incorrect statement

number = parseInt(”08″);

is now

number = parseInt(”08″, 10);

Thank goodness for the Internet. It just saves programmers hours and hours of time.

Technorati tags: Javascript, parseInt, string conversion

The nice thing about living in the San Francisco bay area is that you are surrounded by great talks and conferences that are just around the corner.  The problem is that you still need to do your other work. 
A really great conference for web developers and Internet-based companies is the Web 2.0 Expo, which will be in San Francisco the middle of next week.  Web 2.0 has become a bit of an overused term.  I think of it as a new phase in the Internet.  In Web 1.0, web sites tended to dictate to users what content they could have with a small amount of user feedback.  Web 2.0 might be called “The Revenge of the Users” in that the users are creating and contributing their own content to the web sites.  Basically, users can now generate their own niche specific content without having to worry about the potential marketing opportunities, as the web sites do.
I will try to attend the Web 2.0 Expo, but I am not sure if I will be able to make it.  If you attend the conference, please let me know what you thought about the conference.  

Technorati Tags: Web2.0, Web2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Moscone Center