Yes. It’s 1:26 am, and I’m working on stuff. Really, I’d like to be in bed. Asleep. And I’d like to stay there for three days.

But alas, instead, if you are having problems with dropdown JavaScript menus appearing BEHIND a Flash object, try adding this to the parameters you’re passing to the Flash object:

wmode="transparent" 

Or if you’re using SWFObject, you can do something like this instead:

var so = new SWFObject("crappy.swf", "crappy_swf", "100%", "100%", "9", "#ffffff");
so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.write("flash");

Maybe that will save you some headaches. It saved me some.

UPDATE

Apparently it might be better to use

wmode="opaque" 

Apparently it’s less CPU intensive, and it seems to do the same job (that’s how it worked for me, anyway). I believe the differences are as follows:

Opaque makes Flash behave like any other page element, allowing you to easily float content over it using JavaScript and DHTML.

Transparent makes the page background underneath the Flash video appear through any transparent areas of the Flash video.

About a week ago I received an email from PayPal which contained the first donation I’ve ever received for JarIndexer. I immediately sent a thank you note to the donator, and received this response:

I really support people like you who share tools and things like that for the rest of us, especially when it removes pain. So, thanks for JarIndexer. It saved me so much time and it was very easy to use. So, keep up the good work.

That means a lot. JarIndexer is a super simple program, gets about 30-50 downloads a month, and was very easy to write, but I’m extremely pleased that it has been of use to someone, and managed to relieve a bit of pain.

I suppose this provides me an opportunity to say my thinks as well, to the open source community in general – and to all the folks out there who provide great software that make our lives easier as developers. I suppose I could specifically mention people like James Duncan Davidson (ANT), Rod Johnson (Spring), Gavin King (Hibernate), Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby), David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails), Thomas Fuchs (Scriptaculous) and Sam Stephenson (Prototype). In my day-to-day coding life, when thinking of people who freely give their software to the community – these guys have made me the happiest I’ve been in years.