One of the nice things about working at Acsys is that we're an interactive agency, not just a tech shop. We have some of the most skilled designers I've ever met on staff here, and they do some amazing work.  Because they're so good, they frequently win industry awards, and here's the latest batch that came in from the Horizon Interactive Awards:

Gold (Consumer goods):  Sikorsky.com

Gold (Flash category): Sikorsky aircraft tour

Bronze (Consumer goods): Timex.com -- Sleek, iControl, Diamonds, E-Instruments

Bronze (Flash category): Timex.com --iControl, E-Instruments, T-Series

The Sikorsky aircraft tour is particularly impressive -- check it out at http://www.sikorsky.com/sik/index.asp (it's the main flash section on the home page).

Way go go, guys! 

 

Did you ever wonder how you can do TDD with Linq to SQL, since there are no IOC interfaces to play with? Well, neither did I, quite honestly. However, Matt over at the Wayward Web Log did, and he puzzled out a way to do it. It's pretty zany stuff -- he plays with remoting and reflection to pull it off -- but it looks like it would work. Not an article for the faint of heart, but good to have in your toolbox if you need it.

 

The Wounded Warrior Project is a non-profit organization that provides support to our wounded veterans. "The WWP seeks to assist those men and women of our armed forces who have been severely injured during the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other locations around the world.Many of the injuries are traumatic amputations, gunshot wounds, burns and blast injuries that will retire these brave warriors from military service." It's a great group, and they deserve our support.

I first read about this project through Scuba Diving Magazine, of all things. 

Turns out I'll be spending the second week in July going for Biztalk training. Though the subject matter may be a bit dry, I think it's going to be an excellent course.

Biztalk, for those of you not in the know, is a Microsoft server that's designed for application integration. It's used to transfer data between disparate systems, through XML-based messaging. The central Biztalk engine has a few major components:

• a Messaging component, which allows communication across a wide range of software. It offers pluggable adapters for different types of communication, such as FTP, STMP/POP, web services, etc.
• an Orchastration component, which allows the creation and execution of business processes in a graphical environment.
• a business rules engine, so you can change business rules on the fly (as opposed to compiling and deploying a .net assembly)
• an enterprise single-sign on (SSO) tool

We're going to be using Biztalk a lot in our upcoming SOA projects, so I'm thrilled to be able to get this training. Better yet, it's in Waltham, MA, so after class I can take a trip to Jacob Wirth's for a pint of Jake's Dark!
 

I don't know much about electronics, but I can tell that this is huge. Scientists have created a fourth basic electronic circuit element (joining the capacitor,  the resistor, and the inductor). The new element is called the "memristor", and is able to remember the amount of charge that has passed through it.

The initial applications of this is pretty basic -- it can lead to instant-on PCs, for example, and non-volatile RAM. It also will have applications in machine learning, as it can function much like a synapse in the brain.

The big deal, though, is that it's a paradigm shift in electronics -- a whole new way of looking at the world. It's like suddenly adding a new physical law, or adding an extra state in a binary bit.

I can't wait to see how this shakes out.

FBI wants widespread monitoring of 'illegal' Internet activity

Robert Meuller, the FBI director, called for new legislation that would let the FBI monitor the internet for illegal activity. All internet traffic. 

Mueller said the proposal  "balances on one hand, the privacy rights of the individual who are receiving the information, but on the other hand, given the technology, the necessity of having some omnibus search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity as it comes through and give us the ability to preempt that illegal activity where it comes through a choke point."

How in any does letting the government sniff all Internet traffic even nod at an individual's privacy rights? That sounds more like China than the USA. 

I wish they'd quit kicking the corpse of the 4th amendment -- it's dead already, let it rest in peace.

 

 

Jeff Atwood has a post today talking about coding BASIC on old-school computers (specifically, the Atari 2600). It really made me nostalgic for when I got started programming on my Commodore Vic 20. Ahh, what a system that was.

It was a great machine. It had a whopping 5 K of memory (yes, Kilobytes, not megabytes), and the "operating system" was Basi, burned onto the ROM. About 1.2K of the system memory was taken up by basic, so you had 3.8 k left for programs. Once you typed in your code, you could save it to the external tape drive (a cassette recorder). 3.8 K took around a half hour to write to tape.

I spent hours and hours on that little machine, putting it through its paces. I played through the Scott Adams adventure games, and the family still chuckes at the magic words "Say Yoho" from Pirate Adventure.  I learned basic, and just about memorized memory locations for poke and peek. That little machine started me on my way to geekdom.

 

I was overjoyed to find  the Vic 20 programming manual online. Check it out, nostalgic geeks!

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are my favorite technical bloggers hands down. They write clear, cogent, and frequently amusing posts that really get me thinking. They're so good, and so prominent in the community, that if an interviewee can't talk about their stuff I tend to grade them down. Hell, Jeff and Joel are largely responsible for the existance of this blog.

That's why I'm so glad to hear that they're working together on a new project, called StackOverflow.com. In short, stackoverflow.com will be a free and open community for developers to ask and answer questions. Per Jeff it'll be "sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit." Sounds like a great project, and should be really useful to the developer community.

So far all they have on the site is a podcast talking about the vision. I look forward to seeing what comes down the road.

Hrmm, I wonder if the site will be built  "in a proprietary language they created themselves"?

A fraternity brother contacted me through LinkedIn, and told me about a tool his cousin is working on called "Semanticator". I checked it out, and it seems like it could be a powerful marketing tool for websites.

In a nutshell, Semanticator helps you profile your website visitors based on other sites they've hit recently. That allows you to target the content you display to them, with the aim of increasing conversion and decreasing bounce. Their online demo shows a car dealer showing targetted ads based on which of thier competitor's sites they had seen (if they were looking at trucks, they'd see a comparison of trucks on the home page). Pretty neat stuff -- check out the demo for yourself.

I can see this having some real value for a few of our clients. For example, we're working on a Commerce Server implementation for a publishing company. If they knew in advance what the client was interested in, they could tie in to the Commerce Server marketing system and pop up highly-focused discounts and offers, and likely clear more sales.

I like to think I'm fairly up to speed on techie stuff, but Thomas Ptacek just posted an synopsis of a Flash exploit that I can just barely comprehend. That is, he analysed a whitepaper by someone really, really smart (that I couldn't possibly understand), and summarized it (marking himself as really smart, at least) in a way that I could begin to understand. Scary stuff, that.

Key extracts from the article (which I recommend as a great, if bewildering, read):

 

The evidence is now overwhelming that Mark Dowd was, in fact, sent back through time to kill the mother of the person who will grow up to challenge SkyNet. Please direct your attention to Dowd’s 25-page bombshell on a Flash bytecode attack.

...

Look at the details of this attack. It’s a weaponized NULL pointer attack that desynchronizes a bytecode verifier to slip malicious ActionScript bytecode into the Flash runtime. If you’re not an exploit writer, think of it this way: you know that crazy version of Super Mario Brothers that Japan refused to ship to the US markets because they thought the difficulty would upset and provoke us? This is the exploit equivalent of that guy who played the perfect game of it on YouTube.