Earlier this month, the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America relaunched their website, Whitehouse.gov, using Drupal. This week three members of the White House new media team presented at the Washington, DC Drupal users group. New media director Macon Phillips, deputy director of technology David Cole, and creative director Nik Lo Bue talked about their use of Drupal.

Watch the screencast here: http://vimeo.com/7669508

A few days ago, I took 10 seconds to fire off a question to John Carmack of iD Software, who basically INVENTED modern gaming as we know it, over Twitter. This guy is solely responsible for gaming today. He created Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, and Quake (not to mention causing me to log hours and hours of gametime) and spawned countless games in their wake like Half-Life.

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2009/11/05/john-carmack-on-doom-classic-development-fan-questions/

John Carmack, the legendary godfather of gaming answered my question from Twitter. I guess I ought to put Doom on my iPhone now, or at least die happy.

I’ve been using Twitter to connect with industry leaders, celebrities, and everyday people. If you’d like to know how you can utilize Twitter to build your business or online persona, we’d be happy to train you or your staff on Twitter, CoTweet, TweetDeck or a host of other Twitter solutions. Just give us a call at 302-856-2802, or tweet us @inclindinc.

“those new shirt designs are the last ones to come out through our old merch deal. they are contract fulfillment, bound to be collector’s items. so pick them up even if you dont like them…i did. working on the art for CC still, its turning out amazing. chad’s in town and we have some meetings. a lot going on. spoke to james murphy yesterday, he will be engineering and mixing the WUB record if things go as planned. if anyone’s interested, the japanese release of carver city is available for pre-order on amazon.com. its expensive, but if youre a collector and familiar with japanese cds they’re pretty cool…its our first japanese release.“

And why are Japanese CD releases cool? The extras:

No-one packages a CD album quite like the Japanese. Known as a culture for elaborate and excessive packaging, their approach to the CD album is no exception. From the visual delights of the artwork and packaging, to the content itself, you will without doubt get your money’s worth here. The inclusion of the famous ‘obi-strip’ not only adds a uniquely intriguing aspect, but is also a great marketing tool for the Japanese labels. The term ‘obi-strip’ is derived from the name of the piece of wide fabric – the obi – that a geisha woman wears around her waist over the traditional Kimono dress. An amazing amount of information is packed onto this little wraparound piece of paper, often noting special tracks, concert dates, discography information and release anniversaries. And, as this information is intended to be read in the home market, it’s all printed in Japanese kanji and ~kana script! Whilst they are safely sealed on new release CD’s they are often discarded once opened, so they should be considered a real bonus when intact on out-of-print CD’s. In recent years we have seen the obi-strip occasionally replaced with a sleeve sticker, no less attractive and equally unique to the Japanese pressing.

Japanese CD albums often benefit from extra music and new video-style content, to further entice the Japanese public to buy their native release and not an import. Non-album tracks and exclusive mixes often feature and there are a huge amount of ‘Japan-Only’ releases that do not have an equivalent release elsewhere in the world. Japanese pressings will nearly always include a lyric booklet or fold-out lyric sheet. These are dual-language, printed in both the ~kana script and in English, the latter often having some wonderful mis-translations!

• Andy McKee
• Cream
• The Who
• Charlie Parker
• The Fucking Champs
• Minibosses
• Buckethead
• Daniel Lanois
• Wu-TangClan
• In Flames
• Tuck Andress
• Duran Duran
• Depeche Mode
• R.E.M.
• Electric Light Orchestra
• Journey
• Clifton
• Caliban
• Spacehog
• Pink Floyd
• Between the Buried and Me
• Creedence Clearwater Revival
• Clutch

Go on… mix it up!

I had a lot of time to think during the convention, comparing and contrasting us from other developers. It wasn’t until I took my car into Jiffy Lube this weekend that I put it all together.

You see, like Jiffy Lube, we provide a service. You bring your car to them, they dissect and analyze the cars performance, problem areas, etc, and discuss the solutions with you. They complete all of this in under a half hour. You can take your beater, BMW, or tricycle. They are qualified to service any vehicle. In a way, its not that different from developing websites.

When a client comes in the door, they have an idea. Whether its big or small, its an idea. We’re here to help that idea become a reality, to provide a value added service for you. Of which, we employ many of our programming toolsets and human talent in order to execute the idea to its fullest extent. It doesn’t matter what idea you bring to us, we’re going to pursue every possibility in building a solid, stable working relationship with the client so that both parties get what they want and more importantly, have fun while doing it. Everyone working in unison, a well oiled machine, just like a Jiffy Lube team.

When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re going to see some serious shit.

Small town, small company. Big talent, big ideas. You don’t have to be some fifty plus sized company in a NYC loft to be big time.

If you think small, you’ll be small.

Folks know value when they see it too, which is why they come to us. There are a lot of patchwork web companies around the world. What is a patchwork web company? Well, in simplest terms, a patchwork web company is one that slaps together images and premade code for a cheaper price just to complete a contract. This leaves the customer unsatisfied long term, and their website is a house of cards waiting to implode. For example, most people are content getting by by selling someone a Wordpress site with a design template for $2000 or less. Short term, it pays the bills for the shop, and feels good for the client to pay so little. But as time moves on, they will see they got what they paid for. Locked into the framework unable to scale or adapt new ideas, unreliable hosting uptime, and no true ‘ownership’ of their website.

If you can’t change aspects of the site, then you don’t really own it!

In these terms, it always reminds me of my favorite Tom Green skit, Undercutters Pizza.

There’s always someone out there somewhere, ambulance chasing, bidding low to win your favor and screwing you in the end.

That’s heavy, Doc.

Right. So what does it all mean? Caveat emptor, you get what you pay for. We may be a little bit higher than other companies, but we’re going to stand behind you and your site because that’s what you deserve. Inclind has a vested interest in your future, not hitting the road once you’ve paid us. Your future is our future. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

We’re poised for big things this year. You’re welcome to join us.

Hit it, Marty.

New York, NY – CKY has completed mixing their 4th record, tentatively titled Carver City, set for release on Roadrunner Records on May 19. As with all their previous albums, Carver City was produced by the band’s guitarist Chad I Ginsburg. The album was recorded at Studio CIG in the band’s home state of Pennsylvania and mixed by Chad and Phil Nicolo at Studio 4 in Conshohocken, PA. Some of the eleven tracks set to appear include: “Hellions On Parade,” “The Boardwalk Body,” “…And She Never Returned,” “Karmaworks” and “Woe Is Me.”

Singer Deron Miller comments, “Literally all the things that have been keeping CKY strong since our last album – the undying hardcore support of our fans, our unorthodox musical approach and a brand new partnership with Roadrunner Records – have restored an enthusiasm within our band that has never been this extreme. Sobriety, hard work, patching up inner turmoil and a love for what we do has undoubtedly made this the most collaborative and focused CKY effort to date.”

Ginsburg concurs: “The album is more inventive and more layered than our past releases, with the most melodies, textures and riffs of any CKY album. It is by far the most inspired album we have ever made.”

According to Miller, Carver City carries with it a “dark summer vacation vibe,” nostalgic of the band members’ childhood trips to the East Coast beaches. “The fabled town of Carver City has a history of bad luck and misfortune, all the while giving the impression that it’s a pleasant family getaway. Much like CKY’s town of Hellview, Carver City’s events are depicted in the songs, with story lines coming from real life events.”

CKY are planning to tour in support of their Roadrunner Records debut in the spring.

Exciting news for my pals. Our new website for them is going to kick ass.

Do you want to be a rockstar too?

For those who don’t know, the iPhone and iPod Touch are identical (the iPod has no phone capability, obviously). As long as iPhone is on AT&T, I’ll never have one. I don’t think I would want my phone and iPod as one anyway for various reasons, but I digress.

The AppStore boasts a few hundred applications with more on the way. Apple is encouraging developers around the world to develop for the iPhone, and even make a little money too (some apps are free, others cost anywhere from 1.99 to 99.99).  The SDK has been available for some time now, and there are tons of unique apps on AppStore. Ironically, its the free ones that seem to be the best (the paid ones are poorly to mediocrely scored). Users weigh in on AppStore apps with reviews, for usability, performance, purpose, stability. It’s like a condensed version of an Amazon product page.

I browse the AppStore daily for new apps or updates. My only complaint with it so far, if not the only one, is that there isn’t a section to see ‘New’ apps.  I can’t tell if these are mixed in with the listings, but they are not easy to spot unless you have a pretty good memory. Perhaps a future update will make this easier to view.

I am an avid music lover, so I was quite thrilled to find the following apps on AppStore. Incidentally, they are what I consider the best current apps on AppStore so far, basically because they saved me from having to invest in Sirius or XM Radio (I have a huge disdain for FM radio- its disgusting crap that never changes because the industry is so messed up, but thats a whole other topic). Now with these I have immensely supplemented my playlist of ~3000 mp3s with free streaming music:

1. AOL Radio – Besides AOL Instant Messenger, this has to be hands down the best thing AOL has ever put out, period. With tons of stations at your fingertips, there is always something brand new just a tap away. So long as you have a data connection, you have music, and its all totally free. On top of that, you can mark favorites, or tap to purchase the track from an online store, and see a list of recently listened to songs for purchasing. This alone is worth the investment for an iPod Touch / iPhone. But wait, theres more.
2. Last.fm – Last.fm was another internet service that I was a heavy user of. It works based on delivering songs to you from picking genres you like. The userbase tags songs and artists so the results that stream to you are fine tuned. I used this a lot last year to discover new music and now its on the iPod Touch / iPhone too. It also keeps complete logs of what you’ve listened to on your account page. Can’t get any better than that.
3. Pandora – I remember when Pandora was an technical demo of sorts back in my first year of college (2000). I was quite impressed at the level of accuracy and the algorithm behind Pandora that makes it such a great / unique service. It’s very simple: Pandora lets you input your favorite bands, and based on what you put in, it creates playlists for you of music it believes you will enjoy. There are so many factors and ways it indexes music its insane- and for me, it’s rarely off the mark. Over 400 different musical attributes (see List of Music Genome Project attributes) are considered when selecting the next song. These 400 attributes are combined into larger groups called focus traits. There are 2,000 focus traits. Examples of these are rhythm syncopation, key tonality, vocal harmonies and displayed instrumental proficiency. It’s almost like Pandora can read your mind.
4. Tuner – Tuner is very similar to AOL Radio, but with full listings of Internet radio stations, or ShoutCast radio stations. These are indie stations created by users and their own playlists. There is just so much music here its insane. Comedy and talk as well. I heard this app was pulled from AppStore though, but I cannot confirm.
5. WeatherBug – Normally I wouldn’t dare ever suggest to anyone to put WeatherBug on their computer, due to its bugginess and spyware/adware it throws on your PC. But for a portable device like the iPod Touch / iPhone, it’s indispensable. If only the device’s Weather program was more robust I wouldn’t need this. But when you live at the beach, this is a must have- especially for the Google Map Weather Radar mashup.

This is just the start for what AppStore will have. It will only get better as time goes on. The top 5 apps above are free, with the exception of Tuner ($5.99).

The games are great too. One game, Super Monkey Ball (first released as a GameCube title, unbelievable) uses the accelerometers to guide the ball through the mazes. Just a glimpse of what is possible with the future of handhelds in general. It’s been said that the iPod Touch alone is as powerful as the Sega Dreamcast, a console from 2000/2001 which saw its demise when the Playstation 2 was released. That is pretty damn powerful, as most fans (including me) still have/use the Dreamcast from time to time. Mine is loaded with 800 classic Nintendo games. Child of the 80’s.

Get one of these. You’ll be glad you did.

It is uncertain how fast craft beers will continue to grow, but Herz said the indicators are good. After a shakeout in the mid 1990s, the nation’s remaining 1,400 craft brewers have a stronger hold on shelf space and restaurant menus. Anheuser-Busch and Coors are making their own line of full-flavored beers. And the Brewers Association’s book “Start Your Own Brewery” has sold more than 1,000 copies. “A brewery in every town is not so crazy to think about in the future,” she said. “It all goes back to the movement of consuming products that are locally produced.

“Who would have ever thought that Denver, Colo., would become the Napa Valley of beer?” she said. More than 60 breweries lie within in a 100-mile radius of Denver.

Their small size gives craft brewers the freedom to explore the outer limits of beer, and they are being rewarded by consumers who value good flavor, said Sam Calagione, founder of Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton, Del.

“This hasn’t happened because of some half-billion dollar advertising campaign on behalf of the big brewers,” he said. “It’s truly the consumer becoming self-educated.

“It’s a kind of a blue-collar connoisseurship. Anybody can afford to buy the world’s best beers. But if you wanted to buy a bottle of the world’s best wine, you’d have to spend thousands of dollars.”

Look for a brand new feature rich custom website for Dogfish Head Brewery this Fall. Meanwhile head to downtown Rehoboth Beach, DE and enjoy food and drink at the Brewpub, or take a tour in their Milton facility.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1826878,00.html

Using the internet should be fun, not a hassle. It’s only going to get better from here. Lets take a look at some of the new features of Firefox 3:

From lifehacker: The newest version of our favorite open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox 3, offers dozens of new features and fixes, but only a handful will make the most dramatic difference in your everyday browsing. After 17 months of alphas and betas, Mozilla’s finally made a feature-complete release candidate available, so it’s time to spotlight the biggest improvements that will make “Gran Paradiso” the browser to beat. Nearly everything in the open-source app has gotten a second look from the minds at Mozilla, from back buttons to bookmarks, address bars to add-ons, passwords to performance, and the changes will make Firefox 3 worth the upgrade come its official release date, slated for sometime next month. Let’s take a look at the 10 best upgrades in Firefox 3, and how they’ll bolster your browsing, after the jump.Note: Firefox 3 hasn’t been officially released yet—a public preview release is available and intended for testers only. While it’s a very stable preview, only use it if you’re willing to deal with bugs and instability as the Mozilla teams ready the official release.

That said, our favorite Firefox 3 features include:

10. Souped-up Add-ons manager

A big part of what makes Firefox so special to power users is its extensibility with extensions, add-ons, plug-ins and themes, and Firefox 3’s Add-ons dialog got the attention it deserved. The Fox’s Add-Ons menu is more robust and intuitive on at least two fronts. You can search and install extensions and themes right from the pop-up box, no browsing required. Also, a new plug-in manager lets you enable and disable third-party helpers like Flash, QuickTime, and anything else that makes content work (and causes you grief).

9. More intuitive interface overall

Mozilla tweaked and updated a whole lot of little things here and there throughout Firefox 3, which amounts to a big overall boost in usability. Most noticeably when you first switch, the Back button only appears on the address bar if there is a page to go back to, and when it does, it’s bigger and easier to click. Users who want to make sites with small text more readable permanently are in luck; Firefox 3 can increase the size of images and text, or just the text, on hard-to-read sites. In addition, Firefox 3 applies favicons more consistently to bookmarks, you can click a site’s favicon to get extended site identification information, you can resize the search box to hold more than two words, and the find-on-page search box automatically grabs the currently selected word, just to name a few new UI improvements.
In the long term, once webapps catch up, Firefox 3 will let you do really neat stuff in your browser, like register your favorite webapps to open certain file types, and access your online data even when you’re not connected to the ‘net. To get a taste, see how you can configure Firefox 3 to launch Gmail for mailto links.

8. Stronger phishing and malware protection

Firefox 3 has stronger filters and protection against malware, phishing sites, cookies, and other tools that compromise privacy and security. A malware warning shows up when you visit sites known to install malicious software, Firefox 3 doesn’t show the content of knock-off sites (like PayPal “Update Your Account” phishing scams) by default, and Firefox 3 checks against Google’s ever-growing blacklist of phishing sites. Now you can feel even better switching your less tech-aware relatives over to the open-source browser.

7. Improved download manager

Never wonder where a download came from, or went to, again. Gran Paradiso’s download manager lets you search through recent files, resume big downloads after a crash or restart, and lets you keep an eye on your transfers in the status bar.

6. Native looks for every system

Your browser is a serious part of your computer time, so having it look like nothing else on your system can be seriously annoying. Firefox’s designers made system integration a priority with this release, and it shows—even Windows XP’s and Vista’s button layouts have subtle differences in color and shading. There’s differences at deeper levels, too, with Cover Flow-type styling in the add-ons manager for OS X, transparencies in key places in Vista and OS X, and other tweaks that make your browser feel like a natural extension of your system.

5. Streamlined “Remember password” handling

No more guessing whether you’re saving the right password or clicking “Cancel” on unnecessary pop-up requests. Gran Paradiso only asks you to utilize its password-saving function once you’re already in and sure everything worked, and it won’t block you from seeing the logged-out version of a page if you don’t want to sign in.

4. Smart bookmarks

Much like iTunes’ Smart Playlists, Firefox 3’s new Smart Bookmarks function can analyze your browsing habits and create lists of links based on it. The default bookmark toolbar only comes with three standards, “Most Visited,” “Recently Bookmarked,” and “Recent Tags” (more on that later), but it’s none too hard to make your own.

3. Places Organizer replaces the Bookmark Manager

Previous versions of Firefox’s bookmark organizer have been pretty utilitarian affairs that make you drag and drop your links around nested folders. With Firefox 3’s new Places Organizer, those with reams of URLs can find them using boolean rule searches and multi-column results, as well as keep them better organized with a tagging system. Better still, you can save those smart searches for when you next need them.

2. Smart Location Bar learns how you browse

Like a personal assistant who telepathically knows when you’re going to need just the right phone number (or Starbucks fix), Firefox 3’s address bar, now dubbed the Smart Location Bar, helps you get to your frequently visited, or recently discovered, sites in super-quick fashion. That application you just read about on Lifehacker, but can’t remember the name? Type “li” into your address bar, and Firefox instantly pulls the relevant sites from your history. The bar also learns through repetition, so the next time you start searching with “li,” it knows you’re looking for Lifehacker, not Linux.

1. Insanely improved performance

It’s not flashy, and it doesn’t have any social networking features, but Firefox 3’s actual performance is the best reason anyone should consider upgrading, or making the switch to the ‘fox. Firefox’s engineers claim that their third major release is 9.3 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 in JavaScript performance, and 2.7 times faster than Firefox 2. This means snappier browser performance when you’re using webapps like Gmail, Remember the Milk, and more. Even more important, especially for Mac users, is the improved memory usage and more than 15,000 improvements that make for a less crash-prone browser. I’ve seen noticeable speed-ups in page loading in Linux, XP, and Vista, but the real reason I’ve switched over to using Release Candidate 1 is that I haven’t had to cross my fingers every time a Flash-based video loads. Graphed comparison of memory use amongst browsers in Vista courtesy of John Resig.

As you can tell, we’re completely geeked out about the upcoming Firefox 3 release. For more about the new version of the browser, check out our continuing coverage:

• The Complete Field Guide to Testing Firefox 3
• Make Your Extensions Work with Firefox 3
• Firefox 3 Robots Easter Egg
• Set Firefox 3 to Launch Gmail for mailto Links
• Firefox 3 RC 1 Portable Edition Now Available

Source: Lifehacker

http://www.delawarewebdesigner.com/rants-raves/protecting-your-computer.htm

http://www.delawarewebdesigner.com/blurbs/the-information-you-should-never-share-online.htm

Recently I have been advising clients on certain basic steps they can take to ensure they do not become a victim of identity theft. It has happened to me before, and it is a complete pain in the ass to reverse everything. Fortunately I caught on fast on the day it was happening (while my bank account was being drained, when 5 figures goes to 2 you know something’s up.) and was able to reverse and resolve the situation in 2 days, recover my money and my good name. I did however have to obtain all new bank account, credit card numbers, checks and the like. Others haven’t been so lucky.

Identity theft is the fastest growing cyber crime in the world. The Internet is still a very young technology, and all things considered, still somewhat of a lawless frontier. With so many ways to remain anonymous online, its easy for people to hack, steal, and dupe people out of personal information such as financial info, credit card numbers, bank accounts, or even simple address and phone number. Almost 99% of the time, unless its easily traceable and/or major damage, law enforcement does not have either the time or resources to help you.

If you think you are safe while using services and sites like Paypal, Ebay, Amazon, or online banking, think again.

The most common way people lose their identity is through an email phishing method. Occasionally you will get an email that seems legitimate from a well known company, like Bank of America, Paypal, WaMu, or Hotmail. Check the ‘From:’ field, the email address looks real. Hmm, so you open it up, and it reads something like:

“Please update your personal information for our records” … with a lot of other corporate sounding reading material. Typically followed with “http://www.somecompany.com/login”. It’s second nature for us IT people to just click delete, but most people will believe this is a real email, and click whatever link it tells you to click. A simple hover on the link with the cursor will display where that link ACTUALLY links to, so, while the link appears to be “http://www.somecompany.com/login”, its actually masked and ends up at a hackers website. You can easily tell by hovering on the link, because most fraudulent links will look like jibberish or not even have the correct parent domain.

For example, ‘http://somecompany.secure.foo.bar.2.com/login/index.php’ would be the actual destination of the link in the email. What does this mean? This means that, while you think you may be clicking a link from SomeCompany, and going to SomeCompany’s website, you are actually being directed to another place, most likely the site has been setup to look just like where you intended (or thought) you were going in the first place. What happens then is you try to log in on the fake website, and it tells you login failed, check your password. Really, what just happened was you sent your login credentials to the hacker running the site, who then goes and uses it to log into your account at the real website, change your password, and bam you just lost your account to someone who is going to do whatever they want with it. This is quite common with PayPal and eBay, as I have seen many emails like this (I frequently use both services).

So, how can I protect myself?

There are a few simple steps you can do to protect yourself.

1. Email
   If you receive an email from a company advising you to update account information, or to verify your identity, the best thing to do is go directly to their website (don’t click any links in the email, do this yourself in the browser), log in, and check your account yourself. Especially for something like PayPal, this is the quickest way to determine if any account activity has occurred or administrative messages/alerts are pending for you.
2. Validate the Website
   If you wind up at a login page, check to see that it is SSL secured (most, if not all, are) who issued it, and what the URL is. If something seems strange, don’t do anything further. Your best bet, like above, is to go to the parent site and log in from there. Don’t follow any links from other sites or search engines which can easily be spoofed.
3. Use a Secure Browser
   By default, most users use Internet Explorer 6 or 7. You can take additional steps to protect yourself from various types of hacks by using Mozilla Firefox or Opera browsers. For example, when visiting a secure web site, Opera encrypts data using either SSL 3 or TLS, both of which are highly secure encryption protocols. It then adds information about the site’s security to the address bar. Users may also click a button on the address bar to check if a web site is a fraudulent or “phishing” site. Both companies ensure the browser actively protects you, and are extremely quick to patch any vulnerabilities found. In comparison, Internet Explorer was left to sit over a year before receiving any security patching or updates.
4. Invest in Software
   You should have some form of protection on your computer to guard against malware, spyware, and adware. Like phishing, these are other methods that hackers use to not only get personal information, but gain backdoor access to your PC and execute commands. Typically they include keystroke loggers and other things that retrieve data and send it back to the source. Norton and Symantec are the most ‘known’ names, but there are more alternatives out there that surpass both. Trend Micro, LavaSoft, AVG, and Panda Security all are excellent solutions for anti-virus and *ware handling. Add in a firewall like ZoneAlarm, and you’ve stepped up security by a huge degree. Don’t simply rely on Windows Security or Windows Firewall (Windows XP), it simply cannot protect you enough.
5. Consider a Monitoring Service
   Services like LifeLock will protect you against someone attempting to use your name or social security number in order to do things like apply for credit at a bank. LifeLock is awesome.

I will have part 2 ready in a few weeks, where I will cover software usage, and what software to not use to protect your identity.