Mission: Revamping The Afro Asian Connection and customizing a dating script

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Technology Used: PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript

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“Excuses are tools of the incompetent”

Last week was a historical one. For the first time in the history of the United States, an African American by the name of Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States. 

Even though his race has always been somewhat of a big deal to some, his intellectual capacity has never been questionned. He has the ability to hold intelligent conversations with Nobel laureates and the grace, to captivate the imaginations of millions of people around the globe. 

One thing that President Elect Obama never did was make an excuse for why he shouldn’t be the next President of the United States, despite the odds being stacked against him. He used technology to fuel his campaign in a way technology has never been used. He visited the most rural areas in the United States to campaign for voters. He targeted the large number of voters that didn’t show up to vote in the 2004 elections in battle ground states like Florida and urged them to come out and vote. He decided not to use a government program that matches campaign funding because he realized that, as amazing as America is, he was going to need to outspend his opponent to get his message across and it was imperative that no limit was placed on this amount.

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This is a cool little animation that shows you how to get into Windows 98 if you’ve forgotten your password.

We are not sure if Microsoft has fixed this issue, but Windows 98 is quite outdated anyways, and we doubt showing this gif, will cause any major security concerns.

Security is a very important concern of software (web or desktop) and it is important to make such considerations in your developmental stages and through rigorous tests. You can hire an security consulting firm or a company like HackerSafe to try to bullet proof your software. However, just like with most thigns in life, if someone REALLY REALLY wants to break your software and has the intellectual capacity to figure it out, then it will get broken. However, you can place as many obstacles as possible to ensure that the number of people that are actually capable of carrying out such challenges, is extremely low (as close to zero as possible).

To learn more about security, please visit the following resources:

Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) - http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page

Penn Information Security - http://www.upenn.edu/computing/security/standards/wwwsec.php

CERT - http://www.cert.org/

Defcon - http://www.defcon.org/

CSRC - http://csrc.nist.gov/

I ran across this cool graphic generator that I figured many of you might find useful:

3D Box Creator is a 3d-box graphic generator. 3d package lets you instantly create 3d-box images online for free. Just upload pictures for cover and sides and then get 3d-box in you favorite image format (JPG, GIF, PNG supported)

Software Mogul (and one of the people I respect the most), Bill Gates has started a new company called bgC3. Is this going to be the next super company of the world? 

No. This is because this company is most likely “not a commercial venture but rather a vehicle to coordinate the software mogul’s work on his business, philanthropic and scientific endeavors.”

via ReadWriteWeb

Even though it’s already out in over 50 countries, the Blackberry Bold is coming to ATT.

The phone will cost a cool $300 with a new 2 year contract (compared to $200 for iPhone 3G)

I am pretty mad because I had waited a long time to get this phone (which would have been so cool.. a bold for a bold CEO? he he) but ended up getting the Motorola Q instead.

This was confirmed by a press release on ATT’s site. I wonder if this will help RIMM, whose stock price has taken a beating (currently trading at ~ $48 at the time of this writing. It had reached a 52 week high of $147 in preceding months)

If you’ve ever developed a web application, you know that Testing is one of the most important (if not most important) aspect of your developmental stages.

After your (or your team’s) many hours of development, you want to simulate multiple your customers/user actions / interaction with your graphical user interface (GUI). How is this achieved since you can’t exactly just write a program to tell a webpage to visually simulate a set of actions.. (eg search for the term Digitalvaliance on google, click the 1st search result and follow the link on the page that says Portfolio) or can you?

The answer is you can. Using a few different acceptance/blackbox testing frameworks, a visualization of your users action can be run. These sets of actions can be saved and executed to simulate how one would actually use your web application. The most popular frameworks include Waitir (pronounced Water),  WinRunner, Test Automation FX(for Windows GUI apps), Framework for Integrated Test (Fit). A newer option available is called Selenium.

We will cover each of these in depth at a later date. 

It is important to note,that acceptance testing isn’t necessarily a widely-adopted practice. Most companies prefer to have actual users testing their software for bugs since a human is likely to capture things that a bunch of automated-browser-based-tests cannot. However, it is our philosophy that you can never run enough tests on your app and the more of it that can be automated, the better.

Have you ever been excited to watch your favorite YouTube video and noticed that only the first two seconds play and then the video stops? 

Well you aren’t alone. This has been a well known issue with Firefox when watching streaming videos (sometimes songs too) that is quite annoying. This is an issue using the Windows version of Firefox. However, at Digitalvaliance, we have noticed this issue happening with Google Chrome as well, whose foundation has humble roots in Firefox (hence is probably the problem)

Apparently both companies/groups (Adobe and Mozilla Foundation) are very aware of the situation and are trying their best to solve this issue. One of the problems is that, Adobe is a closed source company, and will unlikely allow outside programmers / developers to look at their source code to help debug / solve the issue. 

We think Adobe needs to create a strategic arrangement with key developers of the Mozilla foundation to solve the problem, because streaming Flash videos are becoming increasingly ubiqituous.

Apparently , a cure is the installtion of Flash 10, which is still in beta - however, some sites do not yet recognize Flash 10 and actually think you are running an out of date version of Flash.

There are very few times, I personally use Internet Explorer.. 1. To view our clients websites in IE6/7 and 2. To watch YouTube videos that are messing up in Firefox/Chrome.

via CNET

Mission: Ponte NYC LLC needed an elegant and simple website to act as a means to correspond with artisans from South America.

Technology used: jQuery, CGI & HTML

Click here to visit the site!

“I am the Creative Commander in Chief of Digitalvaliance, and I am a PC”

Mac vs. PC - For the past few months, my company had been going through the decision many IT/Technology companies go through at some points in their existence. The decision was whether to delve into the brave new world of the mac or stay mundane, and stick to our good old PCs. Since we consider ourselves a “creative” company, it seemed as though the obvious choice would be the Mac.  Macs were ubiqutious at my alma mater, Stanford University, and so I was exposed to them on a daily bases.

However, we would be lying to ourselves if we didn’t admit that another “allure” to Macs was the culture around their ownership. However, the new marketting campaign from Microsoft is having people rethink their views.  The new marketting campaign (headed by Crispin Porter and Bugosky - the same company responsible for the funny Burger King ads amongst others) is quite brilliant in my opinion and I am surprised they hadn’t done this before. I think one of my favorite lines from their ad is that “I am a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype”. They show that despite whatever “following” Apple might have, that the reality of it is, they are by far the more dominant force. They show that they have aspiring & established people from all walks of life using PCs. They have everyone from children in developed countries to Vera Wang to Pharrell Williams saying “I am a PC”. Even if they paid Pharrell to say that he was a PC (a fact I do not know), the message is very powerful because for a while, Macs have been the way to go for music/artists.

I do not want to come across as a proponent of Microsoft/PCs.. but I did learn how to program on a PC. My dad was always tech savvy and made sure we had pretty much the latest technology. We had a Commodore 64 back in the day but I still credit my humble beginnings to the PC. I am also an avid Linux user, something that I will speak about later. 

I do realize that its very “uncool” to like Microsoft or to support them, neither of which I am implying. They’ve had a series of blunders, they are a big bad monopolistic corporation and they really messed up big time with Vista and seriously, had me looking into getting a MacBook Pro (I have a few friends that work at Apple.. I was pretty much 20 seconds away on the phone from making the purchase since I could get a discount).  However at the end of the day, we end up using PCs a good 70-80% of the time (split between Linux for most of our web development) and the only real reason to own a Mac for us, is to develop iPhone applications.

- We are PCs, and We make cool web sites and applications.