What is The Bongo Virus???
What is The Bongo Virus???
www.thebongovirus.com Virtual Dating
A friend sent through the link below - hours of fun for those true geeks at heart
;)
http://arianeb.com/dategame.htm
Comon lads, its fun, but not as fun as the non virtual kind ;)
 Original Anti-Piracy Ad - CLASSIC!!!
Love it!!!
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477,49292857-2,00.htm
And check out the other ads - some classics!!!
 DJs - I prefered their earlier stuff
:)
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1775925
 Just Launched: Buy a Day for Dad
Next Digital sponsored the Alfred
Hospitals 'Buy a Day for Dad' fund raising campaign by delivering a fantastic
web site. Built on Umbraco, it's a great initiative:
http://www.buyadayfordad.com.au/
 Kewl Desk
Made from a heap of old CPUs...
http://matttovey.blogspot.com/2007/08/in-march-2007-project-to-upgrade-one-of.html
Nice :)
OK - last post for 3 weeks, so see you all on the flip side...
 Umbraco in Codeplex Top 25
Saw this though a Slashdot post,
but Umbraco, our favorite
open source .NET CMS is in the Codeplex Top
25 projects. More details here:
http://www.plentyofcode.com/2007/08/most-active-open-source-projects-in.html
Nice work Niels and crew!
PS - off to Italy for 3 weeks, so don't expect many posts in the coming weeks!
 Got quoted in the Herald Sun today
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22272046-663,00.html
 Launch: Docklands
Missed this one until now, but we recently
launched the new Melbourne Docklands site:
http://www.docklands.com.au/
Build on FatWire, we have developed
a platform to help rapidly deliver sites like these to market in rapid time. Nice
work team!
 Rocca made the NFL
Nice punt Sav :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cerDBOd_zlg
Funny - coped a cheap hit afterwards, but bounces up and keeps walking! All those
tough NFL guys with all that padding and those helmets!
Come play AFL - we'll show you how its done!
 Just Launched: Rio Tinto Procurement
Just launched from the Next
Digital Brisbane
office...
http://www.procurement.riotinto.com/
 Did you know...
I didn't!!! VERY interesting and well worth a watch!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U
 The Age gets a new skin
Looks OK to me, liked the previous one better though...
http://www.theage.com.au/
 Our first site in China
Fabian and the guys in our Shanghai
office did a fabulous job getting our first Chinese site up and live:
http://soulfire.cn/
Nice work guys!
 The Oval
As the business end of the season begins in the REAL footy (the AFL :), Next
Digital has just relaunched 'The Oval' site:
http://www.theoval.com.au/
From the Simon...
"As part of The Oval Phase II implementation for Ford Australia, the team has just
launched the 1 Vs 18 footy game. The game is based on a TV commercial where Barry
Hall plays a game of football Vs an entire team of kids."
 Just Launched: New Mazda 3 MPS
Next Digital just launched
the new Mazda 3 MPS site for Mazda South Africa...
http://www.gotbite.co.za/
Based on Umbraco, Mazda wanted
to attract some user generated content, so people are free to upload videos and text
messages, and after approval, they get published for the whole world to see :)
 Me is Google
A few sites are a little dubious in their presentation of data to browsers (like the NY
Times and Experts Exchange for
example) and show full page contents to GoogleBot,
but not to normal browsers. Someone blogged about having the same problem:
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com/index.php/2007/07/30/experts-exchange-should-be-removed-from-google-search-results/
I find a lot of interesting info on EE, but have never wanted to pay for the membership.
So I found this neat way to change the User-Agent of Firefox to more 'accurately'
view content on EE ;)
http://lifehacker.com/software/featured-firefox-extension/mask-your-browser-identification-with-user-agent-switcher-277458.php#c1859352
 Microsofts new 'Google Analytics' competitor
Since Microsoft bought Deep Metrix,
I wondered what they would do with it. Well, some details have eventually come to
the surface
http://www.liesdamnedlies.com/2007/07/microsoft-gatin.html
Gender based metrics could be very kewl! We currently use Google Analytics for many
of our clients requiring basic analytic services, and we have a full blown WebTrends
hosted solution for our large clients, so it will be interesting to see the end result
of this project...
 Whats Akamai you ask?
In my last
post I mentioned a caching technology called Akamai. We use
it for a number of our global clients to help (significantly) improve performance,
especially when we host multiple country sites on one core set of infrastructure.
They literally have 1000's of servers all over the world, and these servers cache
data and have special DNS servers that choose the physically closest server to deliver
the content. Works a treat with pre fetching of cached data, shortest path, multiple
failover paths and routes etc. Very kewl stuff.
How big are they? Check out some of their stats here:
http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html
-
250,000 active streams
-
21,000,000 vistors / min globally
-
1,600,000 hits / sec globally
Very nice ;)
 Web Developers best friend - Firebug
I have used a tonne of tools to help me debug web sites on the client side. Even 4
years ago proper HTTP debugging was very difficult and the tools very simple, but
a number of tools have come to the rescue. I used to use Firefox
Web Developer Toolbar as well as the IE
Web Developer Toolbar. But today, I had an issue with a large flash site we deployed
for a client in China (http://www.excitechina.com.cn/)
running REALLY slow even though its hosted on a heap of servers in 2 separate
data centers and has Akamai on
top to cache the whole package. Both the Firefox and IE Dev Toolbars fell way short,
so I went hunting for something better ... and found it :)
Hello Firebug! This little
ripper of a plug-in helped me track the contents being pulled in by the Flash container,
and debug a configuration error with Akamai - one happy client (and an even happier
client ;)
PS - Been at the Next Digital Shanghai
office this week - we're really building a great team with some awesome skills.
Took some digi pics and hope to post them next week...
 A few new Next Digital launches
We design, build and deploy web sites and web applications at a rapid rate, so I thought
that I would post our work here as we release it!
This week we turned out two new Umbraco sites:
-
Supercheap Auto (http://www.supercheapauto.com.au/) -
built on the fabulous open source CMS, with a great design and some nice flash elements
(like the online catalog)
-
FleetPartners (http://www.fleetpartners.com.au/)
- I love the clean user interface of this Umbraco site. Also fully integrated the
lease calculators with Umbraco data - nice!
 Franky makes the front page of Digg.com :)
Franky Arrigo just made the front page
of Digg.com - nice work Franky ;) Link is here:
http://digg.com/microsoft/Microsoft_Accepts_it_Ignored_the_Web_Standards
 Photoshop of Horrors
We are a creative agency (as well as being highly technical) so I love seeing the
work that comes out of our very talented
team!
Here is an interesting view on what some other agencies are doing ;)
http://jezebel.com/gossip/photoshop-of-horrors/heres-our-winner-redbook-shatters-our-faith-in-well-not-publishing-but-maybe-god-278919.php
 New web metric bad for Google?
Read it first on /.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/0012209
I do like the concept of rating a site's 'importance' by the time spent on the site
rather than page views. Would be interesting to see if there is any correlation in
the two. Hopefully, will stop news sites from splitting news articles into multiple
pages just to bump the page views ;)
If this is the way forward, Googles addition of DoubleClick is even wiser - their
more 'intelligent' page ads (flash, java etc) are more than capable of delivering
ads based on page view duration...
 MS, Michael Howard and Security
I'm a keen observer of security patterns and practices, and I truly believe Microsoft
is getting it right. I subscribe to Michael's blog religiously, and read it with a
passion. He is interviewed here:
http://howsoftwareisbuilt.com/2007/06/24/michael-howard-microsoft-interview/
It reads like so many of his blog posts, so its well worth the read....
 We'll miss you Franky!
Franky is off to the US of A:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FrankarrOnMSDN/~3/131754430/from-little-things-big-things-grow.aspx
When I traveled there earlier this year, I got an understanding of how different
the US is to the Australian market, and can totally understand why he would get excited
by the idea ;)
Good luck Franky, keep in touch!
 4 Aussies beat speed camera
LOVE IT!!!
http://www.davesdaily.com/pictures/908-mischievous-aussies.htm
 WDG and family becomes Next Digital
Over the last 10 years, the digital landscape has changed dramatically, and so
have we. We now have 5 separate business divisions, 180 staff in 5 offices
covering 3 countries.
As such, the 'WDG' name no longer reflects the large range of services we offer, so
we have decided to wrap up all of our businesses (WDG, SMSi, ResultMedia, Alfresco
and Advantric) and rebranded ourselves as:
http://www.nextdigital.com
We strongly believe that the new name and brand essence will assist us for the
next 10 years of growth in this cutting edge industry.
Very exciting times :)
 MySpace to become part of Yahoo!
While catching up on the news, also noticed that News Corp was looking to swap MySpace for
25% of Yahoo!:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Business/News-Corp-to-swap-MySpace-for-Yahoo-grab/2007/06/20/1182019185485.html
Consolidation may be a wise move truly challenge Google. Will be interesting to see
how this one pans out...
Also, if my email was anything to go by, Facebook is
rapidly becoming more and more popular. Wonder who may snaffle that ;)
 Gunman surrenders
The gunman who shot 3 people, killing one, right in front of our office has surrendered:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/gunman-surrenders-to-police/2007/06/20/1182019184872.html
This is good news! I was at my desk when I heard the shots, then walked up to see
the 3 people shot on the ground. All very scary stuff...
 MacBook Pro: Day 1
Well, had my shinny new MacBook Pro for
almost a day now, and I must say IT ROXS! I love it. Such a sexy, solid lappy!
Things achieved day 1:
- Played in Mac OSX land for a while - its nice, just different, will try and
get used to it a bit more
- Installed Boot Camp -
allows you to dual boot OSX and Windows / Vista.
- Installed Vista - this is my first full time use of Vista, so will be interesting.
Install went off with out any issues at all (SWEET!!!)
- Installed the Boot Camp drivers for Vista
- Installed Office 2007
So what are my thoughts?
- This thing is AWSOME! Windows Experience score of 4.8 (Processor = 5.3, RAM
= 4.8, Graphics = 5.9, Gaming graphics = 5.5, Hard drive = 5.2). I'm waiting on a
RAM upgrade to 4GB, so this score should increase. I also picked the fastest drive
(160gb) and I'm glad I did.
- Keyboard layout takes a bit of getting used to and to right click, you need
to put 2 fingers on the touch pad and click. Hard at first, but getting used to it.
- THE SCREEN IS AMAZING. 1920 x 1200 BABY!!!
- Its blindingly fast and for all the power packed in, very light
- Keyboard backlight is unreal!
A few issues that I hope to resolve in time
- Couldn't get wifi working (WAP-PSK) at home - authentication time out - will
need to look into that.
- Built-in iSight camera drivers are not yet working
- Boot Camp only has 32 bit drivers - would love to run 64bit on this thing!
- Power usage in Windows was a bit poor, but just installed this so
we'll see.
- Can't access Mac OSX partition yet, but apparently drivers exist, so will
play with those
All in all, a absolutely amazing machine, I can't express how happy I am. Nice job
Apple ;)
 NEW LAPTOP ARRIVED!!!
Its taken a long time since I lost me laptop (link) but I eventually ordered and received
my new laptop! An Apple Mac
Book Pro! 4GB RAM. 17 inch HD screen. Very exciting! Native Vista with DirectX
10 is top of my list ;)
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