If you engineered a bridge you wouldn't leave the guardrails off and hope nobody goes near the edges; engineering security for software is the same. But while valuable and important, security is a difficult thing for many clients (or potential clients) to analyze, and a fairly thankless task for an interactive company to do well.

On January 28, we stopped using sIFR to replace headings on the Clockwork site. Instead, we moved to Typekit. For you web type geeks out there, here are a few of the reasons why we changed as well as some comparisons between the typefaces.

On Wednesday, Dries Buytaert announced that Drupal Gardens is now available in private beta. Drupal is an open source content management system (CMS) built by and for the developer community. However, it is difficult to install, configure, and deploy for the average user—virtually every site requires a collection of third-party modules to provide all the functionality needed. Dries, Drupal’s founder, aims to change that by making Drupal’s functionality available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

All the nerds and geeks at Clockwork were so excited for the Apple announcement today that we all brought our lunches to the table and watched the event unfold together.

For many people SEO is a subject that is shrouded in mystery, but it is one of the leading factors in having a successful website presence. Making things more complicated is the fact that the SEO landscape is littered with shady providers, which can make it a difficult task to tackle well. Still, there are a lot of things you can test for, and best practices to help guide you.

Testing interactive design is one of the most difficult and challenging assignments for a Quality Assurance team.  Interactive is a mashup of beautiful design, user experience layouts, carefully constructed semantic markup, clear and powerful client content, branding, relationships with other websites and (usually) a solid amount of custom back-end programming and database design.  Part of my role at Clockwork is building testcases and testplans, which both capture the subtleties that define a great user experience (and a successful website launch) and ensure we can reliably repeat that success for all clients.  This series of posts gives you a glimpse at some of the things that a solid test plan must address. Many of these are things people never remember to ask for, but require careful consideration.

Apple's Snow Leopard OS completely changed how they're calculating KB, MB and GB! A Kilobyte is no longer 1024 bytes... now it's 1000 bytes.

Apparently the new way to refer to 1024 bytes is a KiB, or a Kibobyte. (Which sounds like dogfood to me.) Correspondingly there are MiB, GiB and TiB. Apparently hard drive manufacturers have long used these definitions, but AFAIK, Apple is the first OS to adopt them.

This morning at the Clockwork kitchen table, Marty and I had an argument centering around the Flip camera. It went something like this:

I just read someone proclaim loudly in the comments over at Gamasutra that as of the Android 1.6 SDK, you can officially use C++ to develop your Android applications.

Some digging reveals that it's not the SDK, but the NDK (native development kit) that allows for C++ with android.

The Obama Administration recently chose to migrate WhiteHouse.gov to an open source content management system (CMS), Drupal. Chris Wilson, assistant editor at Slate in Washington D.C., posted a response: “Running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster.” Contrary to Chris's opinion, I believe moving to Drupal is good for the White House.