While looking for web standards coding tutorials on YouTube for a friend, I came across this hilariously interesting rap video by a guy named Poetic. The rap is entirely about the benefits of following proper web standards. His flow is really average but listen to the lyrics, I think all front-end web designers/developers will identify with this one.

Earlier this week I was stuck on the Metro rail due to a train malfunction one stop away from my destination. After ten minutes of just sitting there looking at the ground trying not to make eye contract with strangers, I decided to pull out the “old spare time killer”, my cell phone. Currently I am caring around the HTC mogul my provider is Sprint and I go with the unlimited data plan, it doesn’t make much since to me to have a smart phone and have to worry about data charges. But anyway the mobile version of the online video site, YouTube has never worked on my phone; however I hadn’t tried for awhile so I returned to the site via my Windows Mobile phone to check to see if YouTube mobile had been updated. I had no luck viewing YouTube videos from its mobile website, but I was pleasantly surprised with a download link for a YouTube application for Windows Mobile users. Read more »

The Conficker Worm is back and scheduled to attack Windows based computer systems on tomorrow April 1st! Microsoft is so desperate that they are offering $250,000 to anyone who can stop the spread of this virus. If the worm infects your computer it creates a “zombie computer” which can be controlled by the virus’s creator. Once the virus is on your computer it supposedly will prevent your computer from being able to access websites that provide security updates such as Windows Update. Rick Ferguson, Senior advisor at Trend Micro, when asked if this computer virus might be a prank said, “The people behind this worm are very skilled programmers and very well informed, these are very skilled cyber criminals.”

About two months ago a co-worker and friend of mine told me about a news article I’m sure most of you have read by now, about a 13 year old girl who sent over 14,000 text messages in one month. I will admit at first I brushed it off and thought, “big deal that’s what kids do these days”. But recently I began dwelling on it, thinking how out of control it was. 14,000 text messages? Wow can you say carpal tunnel syndrome in the making? She must have even texted people that were right next to her or in the same room. Just thinking about this story made me wonder about the generation that it is right after mine, the “millennials”.
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Recently I was having a discussion with a fellow web developer on what is becoming a classic argument, as a web designer/coder is it taboo to use Adobe Dreamweaver? The guy that I was discussing this with is one of those, “I’m a web designer who codes from scratch with amazing standards and breaths awesomeness from my nostrils, blah blah” type person. You know the type of person who was hit with some magic wand and now knows everything about web design, past, present, and future. My biggest concern came when a family friend who is still in college (studying information systems) sat with us listening to our whole debate.
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A few years ago I found out about a Windows based file compression tool called Alzip back in 2007. Alzip is a zip utility that handles almost every compression file format known to man. After downloading an installing Alzip I was allowed to say good bye to popular zip tools like WinZip, WinRar, and yes “Stuffit”. In my experience Alzip has also made the compression size for Zip files smaller than that of WinZip or even Microsoft Windows’ built in utility. But wait, the magic of Alzip doesn’t stop there you can also compress and decompress files that are in disk image formats such as .iso and .bin.

Recently Altools, the company responcible for developing Alzip has dropped AlZip 7.0 beta which offers built in anti virus detection especially for zipped files, password recovery for zip files, and a tool that will allow users to automate repetitive zipping task.

If you haven’t done so already, be sure to download Alzip from its website or download.com today, trust me you’ll thank me later

Every now and then we at Miracle World Media like to take two similarly designed software applications, developed for the same purpose and put them head to head in a no holds bard death match to see which one is left victorious. This time we have chosen two economically friendly image editing tools that we affectionately call ICAPS(I Can’t Afford Photoshop). The softwares being compared are Pixelmator and Gimp. We will be of comparing the fore mentioned on 6 key points, platform compatibility, usability, selections tools, filters and effects, retouching tools, and pricing. First lets briefly discuss each software’s history.
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Alright so I come home from the office, turn on my computer, attempt to login to Twitter and I get a page that says, “That page doesn’t exist!”. Now I have heard complaints on various message boards concerning this issue, but had never experienced it myself before today. My first thought was to clear all private data in my browser (I’m using FireFox 3), including browser history and cookies. I gave logging in another shot but failed miserably. Now I am getting annoyed, I have all these fresh twitts on my brain, guaranteeing that I would please and enlighten my followers and I couldn’t even login to the thing. Read more »

Recently members of the Miracle World Media staff have been keeping up with the newest innovations in cloud computing, one project in particular is the Bespin internet based web editor. The Bespin project is brought to you by the folks at Mozilla Labs, and based on their video they seem to be very excited about this experiment. Front-end web developers understand that this is not the first attempt at an online based XHTML editor; however the Bespin team claims that this one has the potential of bringing the same power of a desktop code editor to the web. Currently Bespin is still in beta (version 0.1) and is available to everyone for testing.
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The FOSE Technology EXPO is right around the corner. During March 10 - March 12, hundreds of exhibiting technology companies will be attempting to amaze Government agency employees with their products and services. FOSE was founded over 30 years ago, it stands for “Federal Office Supply Expo”. This name no longer applies. Today FOSE is said the be the largest exhibition of cutting age technology in the world. Many high profile military and government technology heads will be in attendance giving these companies chances to land huge contracts. I am particularly interested in the educational opportunities that will be provided by Adobe during the expo.


On March 10th from 10:00am -12:00pm Adobe rep Lynn Grillo will be giving a presentation on the strategic advantages of Adobe CS4 Design Premium and I intend to be there. Another top attraction to FOSE 2009 is the 2nd CloudCamp, an “unconference” where early adopters of cloud computing trade notes and share ideas. I am hoping to learn a lot from this year’s FOSE the anticipation is thick enough to fog my monitor.