Event Overview:
One day without accessing the internet. One day to show the big corporations that we can exist without them. The fat cat needs to go on a diet, and you can help. We need to take a stand and show the corporations that we are not just sheep. We are more than a status on a social network. More than a six figure annual bonus.

Your rights, your freedoms, your very essence as a human being is being sold to the highest bidder, and all anyone ever cares about is sharing with the world that they just had toast, or they’re dying their hair red and they hope it doesn’t turn out shitty, or what studid show is on and what they think about it. You have so many opinions about people, shows, books, movies, school, haircuts, pets, drama, rumours, funny pictures, sad pictures, that you fail to realize that all of these things are necessary for you to remain oblivious to the fact that it’s only a matter of time before everything that you own and cherish as a human, your basic human rights, and everything that they mean will soon be a denomination folded up in somebodies wallet!

Ryan: “Invite your friends. We need to show the world that the cashcow known as the internet is sustained by us, and us only. Maybe then big money-making companies, who make their money from us using the internet, but wish to control what we think, say, and do on it will get the hint that we aren’t fucking around anymore. Think of this as an Occupy Wallstreet for the internet! We need to take a stand on the streets, and on the wire! Time is running out.”

We hope you will join us in this decisive strike.

Best regards,
Nito

Subject: FDIC notification
From: no.reply@fdic.gov
Message: Dear customer,
Your account ACH and WIRE transaction have been temporarily suspended for security reasons due to the expiration of your security version. To download and install the newest installations read the document(pdf) attached below.

As soon as it is setup, you transaction abilities will be fully restored.
Best Regards, Online Security departament, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Subject: ACH Payment 2318207 Canceled
From: account.manager@nacha.net
Message: ACH Payment Canceled

The ACH transaction (ID: 51800395),
recently initiated from your checking account (by you or any other person),
was canceled by the other financial institution.

Rejected transaction
Transaction ID: 8574210513218
Reason for rejection: See details in the attachment
Transaction Report: report_082011-65.pdf.exe (self-extracting archive, Adobe PDF)

13450 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 100 Herndon, VA 20171 (703)561-1100 2011 NACHA – The Electronic Payment Association

These emails contain an attachment. Do *NOT* download or open this file. It will install a variant of the Zeus or ZBot trojan on your system. They aim for account information, mostly regarding banking. Again, if you receive an email do not open the attachment. If your email provider allows you to mark it as a phishing email, do so and then delete it (if it hasn’t been already).

First: Click “Account” at the top-right of the page, and then “Privacy Settings”.

Second: Find “Apps and Websites” at the bottom of the page, and click the link entitled “Edit your settings”.

Last: Find “Apps you use”, which should be at the top of the page, and click the link entitled “Turn off”.

After confirming, you should now have an app free news feed on Facebook. Enjoy.

So what is SolaceNet?

We hope that it will become the number one destination for gamers world wide. Social networking for gamers, by gamers is pretty much the basic concept of it. Now we know there’s hundreds of ‘gaming social networks’ out there, but none of them can actually pair you with other gamers you may know from specific games (and we don’t even need your email and password to find them!(Sorry, I just really dislike that type of spam – which is what it is)).

But why reinvent the wheel?

Good question, and the answer is pretty straight forward.. If you have no competition, there is no real motivation to improve and expand. That’s the philosophy that all businesses *should* have, though they usually don’t.

Do you see companies like Facebook or Twitter as competition?

In some ways, yes. Facebook and Twitter are two great social networks, but they’re not really setup for gamers. If I wanted to post that I just earned an achievement on XBL, I’d have to connect a third parties web application to post it for me.

So you’re opposed to using third party applications?

Not at all, I encourage the integration between websites. However, having multiple social networks do the work that could be done by one is wasteful in my opinion. Centralizing all data without having to create, set up, maintain and keep track of multiple accounts sounds a lot easier and cleaner, doesn’t it?

Dennis Fong has already created two gaming social networks. How do you plan on competing with someone with that much experience under their belt?

Yeah, Dennis created two of the largest and most well-known gaming social networks, but it comes back down to the motivation to improve and expand. He has virtually no competition. XFire was purchased by MTv, and hasn’t had any major overhauls since. He then turned around and developed Raptr that trumped XFire in every aspect. So aside from that, there’s no one to compete with. A few social networks here and there, but they’re all platform specific – XBOX here, PS3 there. We have quite a few things on SolaceNet that will make us a strong competitor with Dennis and his team of developers over at Raptr.

Can you be more specific when you say “a few things”?

At this point in the development stage, I can’t disclose every part of SolaceNet. Competition is all about knowing your competitors and creating something bigger and better after all.

Where can gamers go to check out SolaceNet?

Gamers can head over to SolaceNet.com and sign up. We’ll be giving everyone who signs up now exclusive access to our alpha and beta versions of the website and software.

What can wait, and what can’t?

Sticking strictly with the original idea(s), notes and layout(s) is always the best way to develop a project, but there may be times when you sit down with your team or client and more ideas come up. You have to decide what can wait, and what can’t. There’s a few things you need to consider before you make the decision to archive the idea for after release.

Is it a necessity?
Does it need to be integrated in order for the website to function correctly?

How long will it take to write and integrate?
Time is always a big deal in the development stage. If it’s going to push your projected release back more than a month, you should make sure it’s something that has to be there prior to launch.

Will the database and SQL statements need to be edited or rewritten?
Having to go back and edit or rewrite SQL statements may seem trivial, but after your application is live you’re looking to decrease downtime. Changes to the database structure can prove to be more of a problem than it would be to spend a little more time on the initial development.

These are only a few questions that you should be asking yourself, your team and the client.

Your undivided attention.

Each project should get your undivided attention. This is why smaller web companies and teams tend to thrive more than their larger counterparts. Taking one project per team at a time will put you and your team(s) under a LOT less stress, and allow for the fastest completion of a project. Dealing with client’s one at a time is a lot easier than having an inbox or voicemail full of questions or ideas for multiple and then trying to sort them out in a timely manner.

Wait, what? I didn’t get that email..

Make sure everyone’s on the same page. It’s not fun trying to explain to a client that you’re behind because of no communication or someone not completely understanding what needs to be done.

Large companies make me lol irl.

Big companies tend to take mass projects at once, which put their developers (if they aren’t outsourcing to another country, which at least 1/3 do) in an extremely stressful situation as they’re usually assigned to more than one project at a time. Large companies tend to only see clients as dollar signs. Have you ever actually read some of the contracts these guys make you sign before they agree to developing your dream? Most have clauses stating that even if you back out of the development or postpone it, full payment will still be due. This – in my professional opinion – is wrong. I understand the need for profit, and that when a client cancels a project, you’re potentially losing out, but charge for work completed, not as a whole. This brings me to my next topic – source rights.

Source rights are the rights to the actual source code, images, etc. Many companies will charge you an additional fee for this, starting around $1,000 (lowest I’ve seen). This is mostly used for free advertising, as they can (and most likely will) place their companies name and web link on your front page. For the people that understand the basic concept of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), you know that free link placement on your index is never something you want, unless it’s reciprocal. Even then, it depends on the quality of the web page yours is on.

If I were to create a social network right now, ask you for your name, home address, telephone numbers and email accounts, then go on to say “All information entered within this network can and will be broadcast to whomever asks for it.”. How many people do you think would enter any information? Social networks are not meant for sharing personal information outside of its own network. People do not want their information shared, and if you do so without consent of the user, you’re liable to all sorts of lawsuits.

His points were all directed towards the “openness” of the internet – being able to access all points of information without restriction. This is still done to a point – yes, even on social networking. See, there’s this little thing called personal security settings.. A user can choose to allow information to be picked up from search engines, and any other crawlers that may scan that site, but to allow for all of a users personal information to be shared.. Well now, you may just as well create a new database account, post the credentials for it on your front page and let everyone have at your members table.

And his views on Apple, although I agree with him, are pointless. You don’t sign up to Ebay to shop for goods sold on Amazon, do you?

Seriously, some people need to think about the foolish things they say before they talk – especially when it’s going to the media, and ultimately on to the web where it does what? Gets shared freely without restriction to the whole of the web.

Good game, dumbass.

You can view the article expressing Tim Berners-Lee’s views here.

Our original projection had been the end of this year, but that was back in the beginning of the year. Now it’s the end of the year, and the entire website is undergoing a complete rewrite – front and back-end. I guess we’ll take it one day at a time. I just hope it doesn’t become to overwhelming, because we can’t afford to hire additional developers at this point…

Public modifications that are deemed fit by the community and the phux dev team, may be added to the phux releases (granted that the publisher gives us permission). Enjoy, learn and share.

Link: http://forum.phux.org/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=20

Open sourcing the world, one app at a time.
~Nito @ phux Development

Here’s how calories work… Contrary to popular belief, there is no average based on normality ie. 2,000/daily. It ranges based on four aspects, which are age, height, weight and your exercise routine. I found a few websites that offer visitors to view their estimated daily calorie intake, but any that allow you to manage it so that a user can manage weight loss are all paid membership websites.

I’ve started writing a script that will allow individuals to do the above, free. Because, why should you have to pay cash to use something that you will be inputting all the numbers yourself? So as most of my scripts, this will be completely free, and completely open source for others to learn, share and modify as needed to fit your needs.

You can find the script in ZIP format at http://phux.org/downs/calories.script.06072010.v0.0.1[www.nitobelmont.com].zip.

You can also find the script in readable format in a post on the phux forums: http://forum.phux.org/index.php/topic,316.0.html

Feel free to leave suggestions, feedback or comments =)

First we need to create a function to determine the page we’re on.
function getCurrPage() {
return substr($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],strrpos($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"],"/")+1);
}

Next we need to check our this against the menu.
$thisPage = getCurrPage();
if($thisPage == 'index.php') { $navHome = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navHome = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'search.php') { $navSearch = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navSearch = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'about.php') { $navAbout = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navAbout = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'faq.php') { $navFAQ = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navFAQ = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }
if($thisPage == 'contact.php') { $navContact = '[Current Class]'; } else { $navContact = '[Noncurrent Class]'; }

After everything’s been checked, you can simply set your menu as-needed.
echo $navHome . $navSearch . $navAbout . $navFAQ. $navContact;

If you’re dealing with a dozen or more menu links, it would be more efficient to create an array to scan and verify the current page, but this will work fine for smaller menus. Enjoy.