Incase your curious, this indicates that the site has been hacked. The code in the image above loads malicious Javascript to redirect users from your site to somewhere else. This type of attack is pretty common place, with only the URL changing.

I very quickly learned from the WordPress forum that this is a wide spread issue for many Media Temple subscribers. Note that I didn’t refer to them as “users”, instead as a “subscriber” these people are paying money to Media Temple for the hosting facilities.

Further information from Media Temple confirms that several of their servers have been hacked, through no fault of the people who have their sites hosted on Media Temple’s Systems. People affected by this can find out information here : http://weblog.mediatemple.net/weblog/category/system-incidents/1404-wordpress-redirect-exploit/

But that is not enough to solve things, Media Temple. If it’s your servers that got hacked and many accounts have been affected through no fault those customers, it shouldn’t be fall to those paying customers to clean up YOUR mess. If a car company sells a car contain a defect which allows someone to easily get into and drive away, would it make sense for the car manufacturer to tell it’s consumer to pay to get it fixed on their own dime? Or to grap a toolbox and work on their car’s electronics themselves? Of course not.

Add onto this the fact that there is no guarantee that the hackers haven’t altered other files in our websites, other than WordPress, and this becomes a very worrisome issue.

I’ve been with Media Temple for a lot time, and I’ve even met some of their staff at the OFFF festival – I like their service and their good attitude, especially toward design-centric sites. Unfortunately the exposure to security risks and lack of a proper solution on their part has really damaged their credibility to me as a customer. I’m hoping they are working on a better fix in the next day or two, otherwise you may be seeing this blog served from a new host.

One thing that I love about this piece is that it’s much truer to what I feel is Augmented Reality than most applications just by using the BP logo. What I mean by this is that as a user of AR Apps I’m sick of being required to print out a logo that looks like some kind of half finished cubist painting and position it somewhere to get a virtual object to appear. At this point am I really augmenting reality? It feels more like I’m augmenting a piece of paper in an environment of my own choosing. I understand this proceedure is required to overcome huddles involved in the technology,  however it seems that Ad Agencies and Developers of AR applications seem to forget that this typical process destroys much of the illusion that is so key to their idea.

I’ll give you an example brief that I’ve seen many times. To promote a product an agency wants to create an out of doors event where people will use a mobile device to present a virtual representation of a that product layered onto the real world. To do so the user must point their device at the stereotypical AR marker.

The intention is that viewer is Shocked! Amazed! that there is a crazy, unreal object right before their eyes! The problem is this : at the point which the user is required to point the camera at a symbol which is clearly not a part of their normal surroundings, that user already knows that something is out of the ordinary. And so why would they be surprised when something virtual appears above it? The user already has a big hint that “Hey! something out of the ordinary exists right here!”

“The Leak in Your Home Town” avoids all this by using something that is naturally present in the environment. That’s part of what makes this project so excellent to me, and I’m sure it’s been done before and will be done often after this.

What are some other alternatives? A simple one is to have the app respond to a logo in a billboard 50 feet away. Hand the phone to the user and give them alternative task – “Can you take a picture of me and my girlfriend?”. When a car leaps off the billboard and is chased by a giant T-Rex, I can gaurentee you the view will be suprised then!

Disclaimer : My friend Billy Burgoyne has reminded me that it is unsafe to use your cell/mobile phone in the vicinity of a gasoline pump. Be careful people!

After a quick read and some investigation, it looks like this technology is finally at a stage where we can start adopting it without too many issues. During my lunch break I spirited away to the Google Font Directory, it’s a repository of free to use fonts with examples using Lorem Ipsum paragraphs of different sizes and styles – very handy to pick and choose what you’d like to use. I settled on Droid Serif, by Steve Matteson – it had nice readability and a good look to it, not to mention a good combination of weights and styles. After you choose the font you’d like to use it’s as simple as clicking on “Get the code” and adding it into your HTML. For those Word Pressers out there you can add these in via the admin tools of your blog under Appearance -> Editor. I found it easiest to add the “font-family” CSS into style.css and the Javascript “link” into header.php

And voila! The blog now has a fancy new font.

There are a couple things that I think Google could do to improve their font directory service further :

1. A tool could be written to allow users to preview a page with a different font. This could be done by loading the a target page the user inputs in a background div, and in a div above display a drop down to select a font displayed on the page and on the right have a font fromt he Google Font Directory to replace it. In this way a user could test what their site would look like with the new font in real time
2. If Google is for some reason inaccessible, it would be good to have a local copy of this font to gracefully degrade to, and currently I don’t see an simple explanation from Google on how to achieve this.  I’ve been thinking about this since I recently read a tweet from Stuart Lowe, previously of The Jodcast (http://www.jodcast.net/) that raised the issue :

@astronomyblog Sites that use externally-hosted popular Javascript libraries should fall back to local copies if the remote one doesn’t load.

Altogether though this new ability to define fonts is exciting and long overdue on the net. For years we’ve been using jury rigged solutions such as sFIR to achieve what HTML should have been able to do on it’s own. I’d like to hear any feedback you have on the new font, and any experience you might have had with Embedding Web Fonts. I’m also considering putting together a “best of” list to showcase sites that use Embedded Web Fonts in creative and useful ways.

Need to show the same video on your site to people on an iPad as well as Firefox 3.6, IE7? Want to support HTML5 Video but don’t know where to start with which browser supports which video format and how to detect properly? If so I’d suggest taking a look at the solution by Camen Design,  Video for Everybody.

A quick summary is that Javascript writes in the player that their platform can handle starting with HTML5′s various formats and working it’s way to Flash. For example on an iPad it will swap over to H.264 but on Firefox 2 it’ll swap in the Flash Player.

Video for Everybody supports Flash (Your player or a default), OGG, MP4 and the newly announced WebM formats. More info here on compatability : http://camendesign.com/code/video_for_everybody

While I’m not a fan of treating Flash as the last player it tries to use as it arguably has the highest penetration of all the formats, this is a project that could become very important in the comming year. I’m already hearing clients ask for their Flash website to start working on the iPad as well – and while we all know there isn’t any simple way to do this, knowing the tools available such as Video for Everybody to produce alternatives will help greatly.

One last note is that the code is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, so just ensure to give credit in the code where credit’s due.

I’m always looking for alternatives as well, and if you favour any please list it in the comments of this post.

Processing is a programming language, development environment, and online community that since 2001 has promoted software literacy within the visual arts. Initially created to serve as a software sketchbook and to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context, Processing quickly developed into a tool for creating finished professional work as well.

If I had to sum it up I’d say Processing is a simple programming language targeted to visual people, with an emphasis on allowing the programmer to quickly sketch up visual results. What really excited me when it was released is that designers and developers took it and started creating wonderful visual art and interfaces with it. Check out work by Robert Hodgin and Jared Tarbell to see what I’m talking about. Processing never went away, but I did until lately. I’m going to be checking it out again though due to 2 projects that I think are really exciting.

Open Processing

Open Processing is a site dedicated to sharing your sketches (Processing projects) with the world. Your sketch is shown running and interactive with it’s code displayed below. This is all done under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License which allows people to remix the original work and share it with others as long as you attribute the work to the original author and share your sketch under the same rules. What has resulted on the site is over a year of people sharing, learning and remixing in quite a nice little community. If you’re new to Processing, I think this is a great place to start and learn from countless other examples ranging from very simple to complex.

Processing.js

The other project I found that’s got me fired up is Processing.js, which is Processing that has been ported to Javascript and will run on browsers capable of rendering HTML5. Currently this means Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and the beta of Google Chrome. If you checked out the Josh Nimoy Google Chrome Experiments version of Ball Droppings, then you’ve already seen Processing.js at work. What I like about Processing.js is that it’s going to make some of the new HTML5 Javascript functionality a lot easier for people to get into without worrying about a lot of the cross browser issues and the complexity of Javascript. From a business point of view I can imagine Processing.js could also be used to quickly sketch up DHTML prototypes to get clients excited about creative solutions. Another bonus is that it runs on the iPhone, albeit slowly on my 2nd gen. With the new iPhone and future versions having quicker processors, Processing.js could very well take off.

All in all, Processing to me has just received a new lease on life and I’m quite interested on where the future will take it.

Well I’ll have to Google Hunt no longer now that I’ve found Sharingbuttons.org, which lists (at the time of writing this) 30 different Social Network sites each with a description of the site and breakdown of the proper format and parameters to create a sharing button.

For example, here is the entry for Digg.com :

This becomes incredibly handy when you’re asked to support lesser known sites like for me Mister Wong, Dzone, Fark, etc.

We found through much investigation that this is because the Microphone.getMicrophone() method required it be sent -1, which is undocumented in the Flash CS3 help. It is however documented in the livedocs for the method : http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/Microphone.html#getMicrophone() .

One thing to note though, through testing we noticed that calling the method with -1 caused the Windows machines to not record properly. Macbooks and MacBook Pros still worked with -1. Windows seems to prefer that you call the method with no argument. So to enable both platforms, it’s best to do an if statement to check which platform the client flash is running on, and then run the appropriate code.

I was unable to find this issue listed in the current release notes. So far the only information I’ve found has been posted by Adobe employee Mike Chambers who has posted an article on his blog about the issue.

While this may just be Release Candidate 3 (a beta) of Firefox 3, it was released on June 11th, and the finial release of the full product is scheduled for June 17th. One can only hope that Mozilla and Adobe can work to fix this issue.