Confessions of a One Man Sideshow Rules!

Over the last few months, I've had the privilege of helping David Smith develop his all-new show for the Philly Fringe Festival, Confessions of a One Man Sideshow. Last night, I got to view the results of all Dave's hard work, and I can honestly say that it was the most enjoyable night at the theater I've experienced in a long time.

Dave is a renowned sideshow artist and variety entertainer. He is active in the Philadelphia arts community and was a semi-finalist on the first season of America's Got Talent. Dave's performances interweave juggling, sideshow skills and even acrobatics and dance with storytelling that is engaging, humorous and frequently touching.

As a friend of mine who joined us at the show says, great theater makes you do three things: laugh, cry and think. Confessions does all three, and beyond that, it astounds. Though I am an admittedly partisan observer, I would encourage everyone to make a point to see the show. It plays in the Fringe for the next two weeks. Tickets can be purchased online here.

Totally frustrating nonsense from the world of programming

This is the kind of thing that makes developing software take twice as long as it should.

So I run the function to test if a certain value is NULL (i.e. empty) and this is the error message I get:

"Data is Null. This method or property cannot be called on Null values."

Got that: the function to check if something is a Null value or not doesn't work if the value is Null, which you can't tell unless you run the function.

Actober shoutout to Kurt!

Much respect to OBFBL webmaster and all-around awesome guy Kurt Morris for encouraging his colleagues to vote for our video in the Actober contest.

Actober Finalists

"Everyone Needs a Little Jeter" is one of five finalists in this week's Actober contest. Here's what you can do to support us, its creators

1. Go to http://www.actober.com/Vote.aspx . Here, you can view our video (as well as those of the other finalists, but why would you want to do a thing like that anyway?) Ours is the fourth video on the page.

2. Once you've watched the video, check the "Select" box next to it and then click the "Vote" button at the bottom of the page.

3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 many, many times, thereby expressing your profound appreciation for our artistic achievement (or, failing that, that time we lent you $20 / helped you with your 8th grade term paper / sucked venom out of your rattlesnake bite, etc...). As they say in Chicago, vote early and often!

4. If you genuinely enjoyed our little film, please forward this email to your family, friends, and co-workers (indeed, everyone you know -- we have no shame) and encourage them to vote for it too.

In addition to the vast reserves of good karma your vote will undoubtedly create, doing well in this contest will go a long way in helping us establish ourselves as a force to be reckoned with in the exciting world of Internet Video... or at least as "award-winning" makers of silly videos about baseball.

Actober Entry #2: Everyone Needs a Little Jeter

I'm really proud of this:

Me Simpsonized?

Kinda...

Dirty Tricks on Safari?

So I've been working on a website development project for a client. To test cross-browser functionality, I've been running a copy of Safari for Windows.

Now the interesting thing is when the website captures the browser identity when I connect to it with Safari, here's what it says:

"AppleMAC-Safari 5.0"

Two things about this. First of all, browser identity shouldn't even include a reference to a platform or OS. Internet explorer reports "IE 7.0" Firefox reports "Firefox 2.0.0.6"). Secondly, it's not the right OS.

Safari for Windows reports that it is actually the "AppleMAC" Safari browser. And yes, I do know a separate part of the request header reports the actual operating system, but still... honest error by Apple or attempt to inflate statistics showing Macintosh/Safari for Mac's market share?