Justin Carmony » Web 2.0

WhiteHouse.gov YouTube Channel Hacked?

Justin Carmony — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:08:05 +0000

I’m not sure exactly what this is, but its strange. I wanted to add the whitehouse YouTube channel’s RSS feed to my Google Reader. I might not have voted for Obama, but I think he is using new technologies to communicate with people in a very good way. I’m excited for the precedence that he is setting in the government, and for future leaders, on how to leverage the Internet, video streaming, etc.

When I added the RSS feed to my Google Reader, I saw a weird post titled “MPEG FOUR DOJ” with one view. Not sure how it got there, but I highly doubt it was published by Obama’s office.

This brings up one point that Obama’s administration is going to have to face. The whitehouse YouTube channel is has become a highly valuable target for people to hijack. So many groups, from the harmless to extreme, would love to have 5 minutes of fame by compromising the account and posting their own videos. There have been issues with Sara Palin’s email account during the election campaigns. It will be interesting to see how things will shake out.

My Tumblr Blog For My Randomness

Justin Carmony — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 20:59:32 +0000

I’ve been contemplating making a second blog for what I would consider my “non-technical” stuff. Random YouTube videos, funny websites, etc. Things my friends and family would enjoy, but not things I would not considered a part of my “profession.” I like trying to keep things on my blog on the professional side. However, I still want to share the funny things with friends, family, and co-workers. Today I found my solution:

I created my tumblr blog today at set it up on my own sub-domain, tumblr.justincarmony.com. Its basically a blog that is great for posting random snippits. I’ve added a sidebar widget with the feed so if you want to keep up with it. I’ll see how it goes.

The Dangers of Twitter!

Justin Carmony — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:00:34 +0000

Over Christmas my wife and I visited my father in San Diego, CA. Several members of my dad’s side of the family were there, and one day we had a discussion about being “wired.” What does that exactly mean? Well, how fast would a person respond after any form of electronic communication were to be sent.

We decided, that hands down, my father was the most wired. One evening my wife and I stayed in the car while my father ran into a grocery store to pick up something quickly. I made a tweet about our trip to Barnes & Nobel, and how I spend so much money there. By the time my father came back to the car three minutes later, he commented to me about my tweet. He had set up that all my tweets are sent to his phone. I laughed and told him he definitely was the most wired.

Fast forward to January 8th, 2009, where I’m performing some database maintenance on the database for Dating DNA. For those who don’t know, I work for my father as the VP of Engineering for Dating DNA. Well, turns out that during the problem, one of the tables gets hosed. I had made 4 local backups and 2 off site backups (I’m paranoid, okay?). Turns out the off site backup to my local server at my home got corrupted during the transfer.

Being 1 AM, and none of my friends being online to congratulate me on my data redundancy, I hop on Twitter and post the following:

Wow, I’m 100% grateful for database backups. *watches his boss freak at he gets this tweet*

I then think that I better follow up so Kevin doesn’t totally freak. Within seconds I post this second tweet:

Just an FYI Kevin (my boss), we’re 100% good, no problems

Before I can hit “update” I get a txt message from Kevin: “What happened???” I woke up my boss with the auto-txt from twitter, and made his heart skip a beat reading something about database backups from his VP of Engineering while he is working on DB maintenance.

Word of caution: know who is following your Twitter account! You might give your boss a heart attack!

Why I like Twitter

Empowering JavaScript Through jQuery

Justin Carmony — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:31:27 +0000

Once I discovered jQuery, my life as a web developer changed. There are few libraries, tools, etc. that I can honestly say have completely changed the way I code. In all honesty, jQuery makes the difficult aspects of JavaScript and turns them into a strength. I recommend it over any other JavaScript library I know. It is smaller, leaner, straight forwards, and more powerful than anything out there. Large companies like Google, Microsoft, and Dell use it. Microsoft is now including jQuery in Visual Studio, their powerful IDE for making websites. If anything, I have yet to meet a person who has used jQuery and has gone to anything else.

Learning anything new can be challenging, so I thought I would share my resources on learning jQuery. First off you need to check out jQuery’s tutorial section. I recommend just about every tutorial on there, and each will help you understand jQuery a little better. Once you’ve gone through the tutorials on how jQuery, sit down and make something meaningful with it. Don’t just follow the tutorials, but actually try to use it in your next project. Soon you’ll see how amazing jQuery can be. Last but not least, my absolute favorite quick reference is Visual jQuery by Remy Sharp & Yehuda Katz. When ever I need to look up quickly how to do something, I use can find it within seconds on Visual jQuery.

I’m going to try to post at least one tip or trick with jQuery every week, not only to help me keep a history of my tricks, but to help others solve common problems. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I’d be more than happy to answer any questions.

Blog WordPress Theme Experiment – Grunge Style

Justin Carmony — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:42:39 +0000

So I if you looked at my website within the last few hours or so you might have seen a very different theme. It was a grunge like style. My goal was to try and use PNGs for different layering and styles. Evenually I wanted the background to dynamically change depending on a post’s categories and tags. However, I ran into some obvious drawbacks.

Here is a screenshot of the design:

It was a refreshing change to play around with from my previous web design work. However, I soon found my pages approaching 2-4 MB in size due too the large PNG files used to gain the transparent look. The problem is basically that a image with large dimensions is going to be a great deal larger than a GIF or JPEG. Of course you get the great alpha transparencies with PNGs, but to be sligly glutonous with dimensions can be extremely costly in file size.

I didn’t finish the layout, just the general parts, when I realized I had designed it all wrong. When I sliced up my images, I should have designed and planned to use jpegs or gifs for 99% of the design. That way I could just use PNGs for the very few times it was absolutely necessary. Seeing how I didn’t want to keep this design permanately I decided not to go back and fix it. I just reverted to my old theme.

If anyone is interested in how I did some of the styles, I’ve zipped up the PSD and Theme files for download. Feel free to use them as you see fit. I also relyed on this article for textures, fonts, photoshop brushes, etc. to use on this design.

Files

Web Development 10-Years Ago & Now

Justin Carmony — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:43:55 +0000

This week’s blogging challenge was our computer software now and then. Lorelle talked about the different versions of WordPress over time. I thought it was an interesting article.

10 Years Ago

I started web development back in 1997. My tools back then were:

Notepad – That right, the one and only. It was how most people did their websites back in the day. It hasn’t changed much over the years.
Adobe Photoshop v4 – The must have program for image editing:
Dreamweaver 1.0 – Thats right, I’ve been with dreamweaver since the beginning! (Sorry, I couldn’t find a screenshot)
ws_ftp95 – This old school FTP program was the bomb in my eyes since day 1. Boy have things come a long.

Technology wise I was serving up static HTML pages. When I had mastered Dreamweaver’s template system, I was able to run a website with 20+ pages not too bad. It was definitely interesting. Every time I made a change, it would go through and update every single page, and then I would upload every page to the server.

Website wise I started off piddling with the Knights of Honor’s website (Web Archive: http://www.knightsofhonor.org/). It is no longer up, but it was for a guild for one of the very first MMO’s called The Realm. It was a lot of fun for a long while.

Knights of Honor Website:

I then started my own website called RPGLegacy.com (Web Archive: http://www.rpglegacy.com/) where I did reviews for video games. It was a lot of fun and I had about 20-30 visitors a day. I was really happy with the traffic. I did it under my writing alias of Kevon McCoy, because I was only 14 or 15 at the time.

RPGLegacy Website Archive:

Up until this point I had done everything with static HTML pages. It was a nightmare looking back now. So ineffective and tedious. However, it did add a level of accomplishment and self-reward. Running your own website was a lot of work.

In 2001 I started a website called Counter-Hack. It was a website dedicated to the education and protection against illegal video game cheats. At the time I was playing a game called Counter-Strike. It was plagued with people using programs to see through walls, auto-aim, run super fast, etc. This was running the fun for the rest of us. I started the website like my others, with static HTML, until my friend Anthony Ouwehand (a.k.a H3X) introduced me to a wonderful language called PHP. He spearheaded the new design of the website.

Within a few months, due to some luck and great SEO, we started to have 1,000-3,000 visitors a day. I was astounded! We continued to have success throughout the years. We were even mentioned in an article of Rolling Stone Magazine about hackers. We have had a great staff there and I’ve been lucky to work with such great people (Anthony, Nick, and the rest of the CH gang!) While Counter Hack is still running itself, it has slowed down a lot. However, my current projects are anything but slow.

Counter-Hack Website:

Web Development Today

Today I have more tools and utilities than I know what to do with. It is amazing how different developing for the web is now.

Zend Studio 6.0 – This PHP IDE has been a time saver. While there are some other good IDEs for PHP, this is my personal favorite. With features such as debugging and intellisense, I’ve come a long ways from the days of just Notepad. I mainly use this for coding PHP. I use other tools for CSS and HTML Layouts.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 – This program has come a very, very long way. While many parts of the layout have stayed the same, Dreamweaver is a good WYSIWYG editor. I use this mainly to create HTML templates before cutting them up into their PHP parts. It also has great CSS editing capabilities. I mostly use it in the split mode, so I can code by hand quickly and see the results below.
Notepad2 – While I don’t use Notepad, I love Notepad2. It is a free program with code lines, syntax coloring, and a few other features. It makes for a great lightweight editor. If I need to do something quick, I find myself using Notepad2.
Visual Studio 2008 – While some people dislike .NET, I will have to say ASP .NET has it’s situations where its quick and fast, especially for larger corporations who already have Windows Servers.

The technologies of today for developing for the web have also increased greatly:

PHP 5.1 – I’m a avid PHP believer. Its a very scalable and affordable.
MySQL 5 – I love this database. Its a great open source database that is getting better every version.
JQuery – The best Javascript Library in my humble opinion.
CSS – Cascade Style Sheets, the new way to design websites.
XHTML – The new HTML.

With all the new technologies, web developers have never been empowered as much as now. Many websites are approaching near “rich-application” experience. With the new ideas of “Web 2.0″ breading new ways of sharing and presenting data, the imagination is the only limit (well, almost).

The current websites I’ve been working on have been pushing my personal limits of knowledge and creativity. I always enjoy the challenge and experience.

CEVO – Cyber Evolution – Online Video Game Competitions

http://www.cevo.com/

I’ve been working with CEVO since March of 2005. It is a service geared towards video gamers to provide a venue to play their game competitively for prizes, glory, and fame. We’ve successfully served over 17,000 teams and over 70,000 members these past three years. The technology behind CEVO is pretty complex and demanding due to the fact that 95% of all of our business runs through our website. It is the lifeblood of our organization. We use PHP and MySQL for out website, and have been including more jquery and AJAX techniques across the website.

I’ve learned a lot about managing a mid to large sized websites. We’ve had a lot of bottlenecks with inefficient MySQL queries and structures. Its different when programming with millions of rows, not hundreds. We’ve had to do a lot of optimizations over time and we’ve done 4 different version of the site in 3 years. I know, a lot.

WhySecurity.org – Security Resource for Regular People

http://www.whysecurity.org/

This is a small project I’ve whipped up real quick with the goal of being a site on PC security. We’ll see if it takes off.

DatingDNA – Social Network Dating Website

http:/www.datingdna.com/

I’ve very excited to be working on this project with some great people and a lot of potential. We’re working on some cutting edge stuff and positioning to be a very popular website. I cant say much, but it is a very fun project.

Hopefully you’ve found this all intriguing and enjoy this blast to the past.

Blogging – Meeting up with Family

Justin Carmony — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:42:39 +0000

This weekend I was in Las Vegas for the LT Pact (you can read about that more below) and I was posting on my blog that I was in Las Vegas. A cousin I hadn’t seen for about 5-6 years stumbled upon my blog and let a comment asking how I could possibly come to LV without saying hi. I had totally forgot she lived in Las Vegas so I sent her an email, and that night my wife and I went to dinner with her and her husband. It was a lot of fun. It is just amazing how social networking tools, like blogs and twitter, work so well and can be very useful to keeping in touch with people you know.

No related posts.

LT Pact ’08 – Overview of Experience

Justin Carmony — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 22:52:45 +0000

I just left the last session of the LT Pact ’08 conference and it has been fun. I’ve learned a lot and there were a lot of common themes among the conference. I’ll briefly touch on the themes and over the next week or so I’ll be writing more in-depth on each one. Besides, I need to enjoy Las Vegas while I’m here and not just blog.

Virtualization & Cloud Computing

Virtualization is the future of server hosting. It won’t be optimal for all scenarios of course, but there are so many advantages to virtualization that they can’t be passed up:

Backups & Snapshots
Allocate hardware resources appropriately
Fast deployment
Easier management of data centers
Scalability

The abstraction of an Application’s OS and the hardware offers so many different options and empowers engineers to successfully utilize their hardware to it’s fullest power. There is a very large emphasis on viewing utilization on a per application level and not per server. This allows for many servers to be deployed with only one “role” for the organization, properly spec’d for their function.

Cloud computing is the next step of Virtualization. Instead of just properly allocating resources to virtual servers, cloud computing allows for organizations to “tap” into a Data Center’s cloud and utilize their CPU, Memory, and Disk Space, pay for exactly what they use, and then walk away. This allows for very agile development. Not only scale as you go, but some times in a blue moon you need access to extremely large amounts of CPU and Disk Space, use it, and then move on. It isn’t practical to buy all of that horsepower to only be used once. They gave a story of the New York Times and how they used the Amazon web services to perform an incredible task that just needed to be done once. To be honest, it was incredible and paradigm shattering.

The Forrester Researcher that spoke warned of avoiding the “hype” of cloud computing and keeping things in a realistic expectations. Hype creates unreal expectations and customers find themselves in a state of “disillusionment” once reality hits them. In short, cloud computing is the future, but keep it in a realistic context.

Sun & MySQL

The team is managing to turn eyes. While sticking true to open source roots and looking at open source as a friend, the Sun & MySQL partnership is starting to look very promising. I’m actually going to download and try out OpenSolaris. From what it sounds like, a dedicated OpenSolaris machine could be the perfect high performance database machine with MySQL. Only time will tell, and we’ll see if that trent catches on.

Blogging: The Software, The Community, and The Business of It

Wow, did they talk a lot about blogging. While most of it I already had a hunch about, there were some serious perspectives that I saw, especially from Matt Mullenweg, that were very insightful. Matt explained that blogging is so much more than just a publishing platform, that “[it] is about people talking to people.” The other two panelists were very insightful, and it was interesting many of them had different views on almost any topic. how

Personal blogging should be, as they said, personal and can be just about anything. To keep it interesting personally, it should be just whatever your mind is on. Now this doesn’t mean to blog every single thought (that for some twitter people… sheesh), but to blog what you feel is important. It should be something you do for yourself first and your readers benefit is a byproduct of that desire to write. Whether for no readers or millions, your blogs should be motivated personally.

Business blogs are more important to stay on topic and put a personal face on your blog. Being relevant will help your customers know what your company is about, and will help in SEO. There were a lot of pointers and I’ll put them down in the upcoming weeks.

My only complaint was that throughout the entire session members of the audience repeatedly raised their hands, but not to ask questions, but just add “comments” which were basically saying what the panelists in different words. It was frustrating because it constantly happened, and we were only able to make it through about 1/3 to 1/2 of the questions. I didn’t sit down so I could hear the audience just agree with anything, but to here what the panelists had to say.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t realize how influential Layered Tech has been in the server hosting world, and how large of clients they have, like WordPress.com. They are pushing the boundries with 3Tera and other companies. I hope that I will be able to attend next year and if so, I look forward to it.

Why I like Twitter

Justin Carmony — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:33:09 +0000

Alright, I’m going to have to join the ranks of twitter users and say that I like twitter. I’m actually pretty shocked because I didn’t think I would enjoy keeping it up to date. However, its nice to use to keep tabs on my friends, co-workers, and even respected programmers in fields I study/work in.

The secret to twitter, I believe, is that it is very opt-in. You choose how much you want to do it. I was worried I would feel forced to keep it up-to-date, but it isn’t that hard. I only “tweet” semi-big things that I do, things that are interesting and someone might be interested in, but doesn’t warrant a blog post. This way I can help people find what I find on the net easily and without any hassle.

I usually update Tweets either trough TXT messaging or Twitteroo. Its easy, fun, and actually worth while.

OS X and Tabs – Skipping Drop Down Controls