I’ll start with a classic, and one that I first posted here on my blog years ago after tracing the card from a still from the Simpsons. The post still gets tons of traffic each year as Valentine’s day rolls around:

Next up, what nerd doesn’t appreciate science? A fantastic set cards for those types from Ironic Sans:

Economists are huge nerds, too. They can share their feelings through charts!

[Side note: Did you know that Florence Nightingale was a pioneer in the use of data visualization? Amazing!]

If cards aren’t your thing, there’s this great t-shirt:

And of course, what nerd Valentine’s day would be complete without acknowledging the fact that many nerds are forever single. For that, we have Forever Alone Guy. Head over to Canv.as to see what he’s up to this year.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: A late entry, but maybe you can find them next year! These Game of Thrones valentine cards from Chris Bishop are fantastic.

Practices like this hurt our technology companies. Consider a company like Foursquare, that could be extremely useful for restaurant and entertainment recommendations when you visit foreign cities. Their service is rendered useless without mobile data due to these high roaming fees. On a recent trip to India I tried out the Lonely Planet iPhone apps on my service-less iPhone. It worked well enough for the big tourist spots or the few restaurants that the guide book had reviewed, but this practice doesn’t scale well, and the information they contain is quickly outdated. We could have much better recommendations while on the go if we had access to the same data as we do at home.

So I have a question for discussion, and a challenge. If companies like Boost mobile can re-sell domestic calling and data plans for so cheap, what’s keeping companies from coming in and offering competitive international roaming? Why does AT&T charge completely ridiculous rates for international roaming? And finally, what can we do as entrepreneurs to disrupt this market and provide travelers with a useful service?

Post your thoughts at Hacker News.

Soon after I bought my first computer I started building simple websites. I had all of the best animated gifs you could find, along with those awesome water ripple java applets and whatever other bells and whistles I could find. It was awesome. I wanted to push the boundaries of this new thing. To make something unique that nobody had seen before. This led me to Macromedia Flash 4. My new hobby slowly taught me how to program, and over time I got pretty good at it. Eventually I landed in New York City and found a job at a tiny little web design shop, building websites for big corporations and loving every minute of it.

During this time the internet was recovering from the big crash at the end of the 90′s and as browsers slowly evolved, so were the websites we were building. But browsers were slow to update back then, so Flash filled a need to move faster and give us more options to explore and new technology to use (and abuse!). Around this time I wrote a little javascript utility to detect the presence of the Flash plugin and conditionally inject Flash into a website or not, and I watched as it grew over the years and became one of the most used utilities on the internet.

Flash was huge. Everyone wanted a flashy website and the only way to get one that any meaningful number of people could see was to use Flash. As browsers struggled to keep up, Flash charged ahead allowing us to build some truly amazing websites. Admittedly, there was some abuse of this technology, but we still charged ahead, trying to discover and build the next generation of user interfaces. Most older companies still thought of the internet as just another medium to advertise on. They wanted a flashy website to show off to their investors and clients and cared less about building something useful. The ubiquity of the Flash plugin made it an easy choice to build these new kinds of websites. We weren’t held back by the limitations of HTML any more, and that let us all explore wild ideas and try things that wouldn’t be possible with HTML or Javascript for years to come.

But now, years later, the browsers are catching up. Mobile devices are becoming more important than desktop computers (a trend I expect to continue for years to come). As more people use the internet in their day to day lives, businesses have realized that having a useful website is more powerful than just a flashy animated advertisement.

A few months ago I noticed that SWFObject usage on the top 10,000 websites was declining for the first time ever (I believe usage peaked in the summer of 2010). Last week, Adobe announced that they would halt development of Flash player for mobile devices, and refocus their efforts on HTML. Since this news was announced, I’ve seen many sad and nostalgic tweets from friends and colleagues. Some seem to be taking the news better than others, and it’s understandable that some people are sad to see Flash go. But it’s important to remember that no single technology is responsible for this awesome thing we call the internet.

This brings us back to my younger self sitting at home in Arizona playing with Flash and Photoshop, building new things. I’ve always loved making things, and I suspect many web developers feel the same. The pleasure of making something great is what drives us, not a specific technology. So don’t be too sad about Flash evolving, or even dying. Just keep making awesome things with whatever tools you have at your disposal.

Discuss this post here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3227994

Tickets are on sale now to this awesome small-ish Flash and design conference. This will be the third year in a row I’ve given a talk here, and it’s easily the best conference in North America.

My talk will be about building and maintaining the YouTube video players, and some lessons and tricks we’ve learned along the way, so if you are interested in very high usage/high performance Flash apps, this should be a good talk for you.

If you are still looking for a Flash/Design conference to attend this summer, I highly recommend Flashbelt.

The best European Flash conference is heading to the states this spring. Flash on the Beach has been happening in Brighton, UK for the last few years and is such a good time, I think everyone should go.

I’ll be heading down to Miami this year to talk about YouTube type things, so if you are curious about using YouTube for a project, or just interested in hearing some stories about a very high performance Flash application, you should come to my session :).

In case you are interested, there’s tons of pictures and writing about past FotB events all over the place. So check it out, and hopefully I’ll see you there.

What does this mean to you, the average user of SWFObject? It means you no longer need to place a copy of the SWFObject script on your own web server, and can instead link to the copy hosted on Google’s servers.

If you are unfamiliar with the AJAX Library API, you can find more information on the Google code site, or continue reading below for some simple examples to get you up and running quickly. SWFObject may not be in the docs on the AJAX Libraries API site yet because it was just added recently, but the team is working on the updated docs now, so check back later if you don’t see the SWFObject specific information.

Now for the business: I imagine that most SWFObject users most likely only use SWFObject and none of the other libraries hosted on the AJAX Libraries site. So here’s a direct link to SWFObject v2.1 that you can simply place on your site, and that’s it:

http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2.1/swfobject.js

Yep, that’s it. Just replace the path to your local copy of swfobject.js with this one and you are done.

Another option is to use the google.load call which is documented here.

The <head> Conference takes place online (via Acrobat Connect) or in a few local hubs around the world. Its going on all weekend, and there’s a ton of interesting talks, so you should check it out.

I’ll be giving a talk at the San Francisco (actually closer to San Jose) hub all about the YouTube video players on Friday at 11am.

It’s taking place at the San Bruno YouTube office this Thursday, July 10th from 10:30am to 5:30pm.

Here’s the blurb about it:

Powered By YouTube is a developer gathering focused on bringing together developers to learn more about the YouTube APIs and Tools. Spend the day at YouTube’s headquarters and learn how to bring YouTube to your website, share best practices, and get hands-on with the APIs. Meet fellow YouTube API developers across a wide range of companies, YouTube engineers and product managers, and leave inspired to enhance your user experience with the YouTube APIs.

Also: It’s free, and you get a free lunch.

If you visit this page in Firefox and click the “push me” button, you will see simply “Ref is:” but no other text. If you visit in with any other browser, you’ll see:
“Ref is: [http://dev.deconcept.com/referer_tester/]“.

The problem is that Firefox doesn’t properly append the referer header to requests made from swfs embedded on the page. Every other browser I’ve tested sends a referer.

How you can help:

Visit the bug page for this issue and “vote” for the bug. DO NOT ADD A COMMENT SAYING SOMETHING LIKE “Yes please fix this bug!”. This will only annoy the developers. Simply “voting” for the bug is enough. You vote for the bug by clicking the “vote” link on the top right side of the page, and putting a check in the box next to the bug and clicking the “Change my votes” on the subsequent page.

Flash on the Beach is a fantastic conference in Brighton at the end of September, and it’s one of the best Flash and design conferences to check out.

Registration is now open, so if you’re looking for an excuse to head to the UK, this is it.

Also, next week is Google I/O (Flight of the Conchords are playing a show there!), which I believe still has a few tickets available, and just next month I’ll be heading off to Flashbelt in Minneapolis, so come say ‘Hi’ if you see me wandering around either of these events.

It uses the YouTube player Javascript API to synchronize a Google Maps widget with the video (based on the current time of the video). It was pretty easy to throw together, it took maybe 4 hours from start to finish, and I’ve never used the Google Maps Javascript API before.

Check it out.

Yes? Then head over to this signup page and let us know you’re coming. The event is on March 27th, 2008 and will be held at the Google Mountain View campus.

p.s. free punch and pie

The project has moved over to the code.google.com website instead of my blog, so go over there and check out the docs and consider upgrading, as the new version is a lot more flexible than v1.5.

I’d like to give a huge thank you to all of the people who contributed and helped us test out the new release, those no longer with us, and of course to Bobby who is easily the biggest contributor to this new version (and has a new design up on his blog!) and has kept the project pushing forward at a good pace.

Moving foward, we’ll be continuing to work with Adobe to get the word out about SWFObject 2.

1. FiTC: Toronto (April 19-22, Toronto, Canada) – Always a good time Flash conference up in The Canadia. I’ll be giving a talk about the new YouTube API features we announced today, specifically the Flash and Javascript player control APIs and about the new Chromeless player.
2. Google I/O (May 28-29, San Francisco, CA) – A conference all about Google apps and how to use them. I’ll be giving a talk on using the YouTube player APIs and Chromeless player.
3. Flashbelt (June 10-13, Minneapolis, MN) – One of my favorite Flash conferences is back this year with a ton of great speakers. I’ll be giving a presentation on lessons learned while rebuilding the YouTube video players from scratch.
4. Singularity (October 24-26th, Everywhere) – Singularity is a new ‘conference’ that takes place online – all sessions are broadcast over the internet, and there’s a TON of speakers for this thing. It will be very interesting to see how it turns out – I think it has the potential to change the way technology conferences happen online.

I think that’s about it for now. I’m interested in talking about the YouTube API stuff at more conferences. So if you are running a conference and would be interested in having me speak, please let me know.

Here’s some general info on Google intern programs.

If you know a student who might be interested let me know, or you can forward your resume directly to Fred Soriano here at YouTube.

We’re also looking for a full time Flash developer, if you know anyone.

I haven’t posted anything in quite a while, but I suppose I’ve been busy enough to justify it. So, I’ll start with an update to what I’ve been doing over the last few months:

1. Rebuilding the YouTube video players. Nearly from scratch. More on this later.
2. Helping out here and there with SWFObject 2.0 – It’s nearly complete, go try it out. This is a completely rewritten version (sorry, not backwards compatible), but we think it’s an overall better solution to any other Flash embed method out there.
3. We got a puppy.
4. Mostly enjoying San Francisco. The city is a pretty cool place to live. If you’re a nerd. So far it doesn’t quite measure up to New York City, but it’s still growing on me. My main complaint is that everyone here is crazy crazy crazy about the hot new web startups or who you work for and what you can do for them. New York had a little bit of this, but at the same time there was so much other diversity of interests it just seemed so much more interesting. I used to think that a city full of nerds would be awesome, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, enough of the SF bashing :).

In a couple of weeks I’ll be heading off to my first SXSW. Should be very exciting, as I normally just hang out with Flash or Javascript nerd conferences, but this one seems so much bigger.

The new version is a complete rewrite from SWFObject 1.5, so we’ll need lots of testing before we officially launch it and replace the older SWFObject and UFO scripts, and since we have Adobe involved, they will be including this embed system in the Adobe authoring tools in the future.

The SWFObject project is moving to Google Code, where you can download the source from svn, grab the latest build, or file bugs or read documentation.

I’ve also created a new Google Group for SWFObject support questions and discussion.

If you are at MAX today, our presentation is at 2:45pm in room W-196c and it’s called “Flash Detection and Embedding: An open source solution”.

If you can’t make it today, we’ll be doing it again tomorrw (Wednesday) at 11am in room W-185d.