My 6 year old Son excitedly told me today at lunch time that today was, in fact, Bring Your Child to Work Day. Last year he found out too late and didn’t get to come, so this year he was quite excited to join me for my afternoon. After informing my wife, we packed up and headed back to the office after lunch where I proudly sat him in front of one of the thin client devices at my desk and logged him in to a virtual desktop. 6 year olds can really bring you smiles.
We’ve subscribed to ABCMouse for a few years now and find that it is an engaging site for the kids to learn and play, and for the cost, getting 3 kids in the subscription is really a great deal. Being flash based, the site struggles a bit on my Surface (v1, RT) but is somewhat playable, just slow. When he asked to play on ABCMouse.com from the thin client, I was intrigued. We got him signed in and he went at it. The Atrust thin client he was connecting from doesn’t support flash redirection, but I knew I had a Wyse Z90SW in my office so I swapped his thin client so that he’d have a better experience.
“Yes, dad, its slow. Lets get a faster computer so it is not so slow!” – Challenge accepted!
Upon swapping the thin client out, I reconnected to the session and found that flash was still not totally fluid. Remembering that flash redirection didn’t occur upon re-connection (in 5.6 at least), I logged off and on a new session to ensure flash had the best chance to redirect. Still, after the relog, no dice.
HDX monitor told me the issue very quickly:
The Flash Player on the client device is not compatible with the Flash Player on the server device. Server-side Flash rendering will be used.
Client Player version: 11.2.202.233
Server Player version: 12.0.0.70
Flash redirection requires the same major version. The problem here is that at some point flash in our VDI image was updated by someone and our thin clients didn’t get the same treatment. Our user base has been living without flash redirection for quite some time and unfortunately (or fortunately? Perhaps they didn’t notice!) a problem report never filtered in to our service queue (perhaps they didn’t call, or perhaps the issue didn’t get reported past help desk).
- Keep your major flash version the same
- Periodically test your environment’s intended features, even if you feel you maintain good image control
- Don’t rely on users to report problems. Sometimes you can make their experience better before they report it!
Suffice it to say, the next time my son is in at work, his flash websites will be screaming fast (again).
Hey there just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The text in your content seem to be running off the screen in Firefox.
I’m not sure if this is a formatting issue or something
to do with browser compatibility but I thought I’d post to let you know.
The style and design look great though! Hope you get the problem fixed soon. Kudos