An Oscar Zezzatti Design for the Frist Center in Nashville, TN

More of Oscar’s work can be seen at his website, oscarzezzatti.com.

Project Glass from Google on YouTube

The ammendment is a response to information that has surfaced about organizations requiring applicants and employees to “share” their social networking passwords. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D – Connecticut) says, “There is nothing voluntary about an employer asking a job applicant for login credentials or passwords.” He moves on to say, “It is coersive, and unnecessarily invasive, unreasonable and intrusive into personal privacy.”

SEC. 5. PROTECTING THE PASSWORDS OF ONLINE USERS.

Nothing in this Act or any amendment made by this Act shall be construed to limit or restrict the ability of the Federal Communications Commission to adopt a rule or to amend an existing rule to protect online privacy, including requirements in such rule that prohibit licensees or regulated entities from mandating that job applicants or employees disclose confidential passwords to social networking web sites.

The ammendment was defeated on Wednesday by a vote of 236 to 184. The underlying bill; however, was approved by a vote of 247 to 174 but has not cleared the US Senate. The republican party says they aren’t sure the bill is necessary, but said they would be open to addressing the issue in separate legislation.

Still yet, sharing your Facebook password or soliciting a password is against the social network’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. The social networking giant, Menlo Park, said it is looking to take legal action wherever necessary to protect users from employers demanding access to their account. Menlo Park did make a point to clarify that they have no plans to sue any employers at this point.

Although I support utilizing public online information to determine whether an applicant fits the culture of the company, I don’t support invasion of privacy. Demanding access to an applicant’s private information may give the employer access to information which is illegal to ask in an interview and which may be used to disqualify an applicant on the basis of religion, age, marital status, or numerous other reasons. To me, logging into a job candidate’s social network to gain private information is no different than stealing, opening and reading mail from their mailbox. Furthermore, if it’s legal to ask for social media passwords, what’s to stop an employer from requiring your online banking password as well?

A word of advise: Users of social networks need to be smart too. The information you post publicly can be used for or against you when being considered for a job. From photos and posts to likes and basic information, your Facebook is much like an online resume/character reference. Simply changing your privacy settings can mean the difference between getting that dream job or not.

Today, we found that yesterday’s blackout had a major impact on not only users, but also government officials. This leads me to wonder if we will see a rise in the use of the Internet to issue a general strike against policies and regulations in our government (or anything else for that matter). From Wikipedia’s full blackout to Google’s Take Action page, and Wordpress, Tumblr & Flickr’s messages offering users the ability to either promote the cause or blackout their own page, Internet users everywhere became aware of the struggle to maintain our freedom of information.

What happened yesterday was much like a general strike. In a general strike, organizations and unions help make it easier by providing organized pickets, food, signs and so forth … but it’s the people who take action and walk off the job that make it happen. These black spots across the web yesterday led to the following political reactions, as documented in the NY Times article, In Fight Over Piracy Bills, New Economy Rises Against Old:

First, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, took to Facebook, one of the vehicles for promoting opposition, to renounce a bill he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who leads the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign efforts, used Facebook to urge his colleagues to slow the bill down. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina and a Tea Party favorite, announced his opposition on Twitter, which was already boiling over with anti-#SOPA and #PIPA fever.

Then trickle turned to flood — adding Senators Mark Kirk of Illinois and Roy Blunt of Missouri, and Representatives Lee Terry of Nebraska and Ben Quayle of Arizona. At least 10 senators and nearly twice that many House members announced their opposition.

This indicates a new era in protests and strikes where technology may rule the an age old form of opposition. It’s pretty darn interesting, if you ask me.

Using Actions, you can record ‘actions’ that you take on the art, by recording as you make the transformations. Then, you can easily run the same filters and transformations on multiple projects or layers with the simple click of a button. This tutorial shows you how!

Enjoy the video:

Website Piracy Laws, SOPA & PIPA, threaten freedom of speech and freedom of information. Through this legislation, the US Government will be given full power over the accessibility of Internet content.

As Wikipedia and several other websites go dark today in protest of Anti-Piracy Legislation, we are left to wonder what our lives would be like without free information and freedom of speech. Wikipedia’s main page today says, “Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge.” Should the SOPA and PIPA bills pass Congress, anyone may be able to censor free speech through a simple copyright complaint.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are two bills currently residing in the US House of Representatives and the United States Senate. These bills aim to prevent foreign websites from copyright infringement, but as with many laws, they do so in a way that infringes on freedom of expression and ultimately harm the Internet.

SOPA and PIPA place ownership of user-contributed content on the website owner. Small websites will not have the resources to defend themselves and larger media companies will simply cut off funding sources for foreign competitors, even if there isn’t a copyright infringement. Foreign sites may be blacklisted at the discretion of our government, which means they also will not appear in search engines. Not only does this allow our government to control our access to information (which is scary enough), it also establishes a framework for future restrictions. Imagine if we no longer had access to the BBC website?

On January 17, SOPA’s sponsor stated that the bill would be discussed in February. Although not certain, there are signs that PIPA may be debated on the Senate floor next week. Both of these bills are indications of a larger issue. Individual civil liberties are of little concern, while overly-broad copyright laws promoted by power players are given higher priority.

What can you do? If you are in the US, Contact your representatives and tell them you oppose SOPA and PIPA, along with any other similar legislation. Go here to find your representatives. Emails and letters are okay, but a phone call will have the most impact. If you are not in the US, contact your local State Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or similar branch of government and let them know that you oppose SOPA and PIPA, along with any similar legislation. SOPA and PIPA affect everyone. Calling your local government officials will also let them know that you stand against similar legislation in your own country.

GovTrack is a system that will allow you to follow these bills throughout the legislative process: SOPA can be tracked here, and PIPA here.

The Nashville Promise Neighborhood is a collaborative network of services and supports which result in the following:

• Successful students
• Healthy families
• Vibrant neighborhoods
• Graduates moving on to college and career

Everyone loves retro these days. So, I thought I’d make a quick video to show you how to make these cool retro rainbows in Illustrator and Photoshop. I’m just showing how to make the rainbow in this tutorial, which you can use in a variety of designs. Of course, you’ll want to grunge it up a bit to give it that true retro look, and as you can see in the example above you can resize, and play with the perspective for even more retro awesomeness.

Enjoy the video:

Retro Rainbows & Design in Illustrator and Photoshop

There has been much hype about Dart, the new client-side web programming language from Google, for some time now. Aimed at replacing Javascript, which is often seen as “fundamentally flawed,” Dart has been described as a “Javascript Killer.” Just last week Google debuted Dart at the annual GoTo conference in Aarhus, Denmark.

Some may recall Google’s attempted “java killer”, Go, from not that long ago which seemed to lose momentum after it’s debut. Go is more closely aligned with C & C++ languages than Java, because it is a classic compiled language which outputs binaries as processor-native machine code.

Google Dart on the other hand is a VM-based language that seems to have much more in common with Javascript than originally anticipated. Dart is not only intended to run in the web browser though, it’s also able to run on servers via a standalone VM. Still though, most Dart code will be client-side, and for the time being the way to run it is to compile it into JavaScript code that can be executed by modern Web browsers.

While Dart may be a “middle-man” since is essentially outputs Javascript code, the benefit may not be immediately obvious. The answer though lies in Google’s description of Dart as a language for structured web programming. This is something we’ve never really had before. Javascript was originally built to add small pieces of interactivity to web pages and has evolved over time. It was never intended to build full-scale modern web applications. Dart is intended to encompass all of the great things about javascript while addressing the not-so-great things.

For example, Javascript allows you to treat a numeric string as an integer and perform arithmetic on it. In a large scale application, it is very easy to lose track of which variables are of which type, leading to data corruption and hard to trace errors. Instead of limiting flexibility, Google decided to simply make debugging easier.

Declaring data types in Dart is completely optional; however, if you define data types, Dart generates compile-time warnings (not errors) alerting you of potential problems. You can also run Dart in debug mode which generates errors and halts execution at runtime if type conflicts arise. In this way you can speed up production while adding your type declarations later.

Dart also is written in object oriented style. This allows programmers from various backgrounds to more easily interpret and create Dart code. In true OOP style, each instance of each script has full control over it’s own state.

Google is taking a much needed stab at improving upon a 15 year old language (Javascript). I believe that Dart is certainly worth the attention of web developers, and we’ll just have to see if it has a greater impact than Google’s previous attempt with Go.

Chris Chabot, a Google developer advocate, announced, “I’m super excited about how the Google+ project brings the richness and nuance of real life sharing to software, and today we’re announcing our first step towards bringing this to your apps as well by launching the Google+ public data APIs.”

Chabot continued, “These APIs allow you to retrieve the public profile information and public posts of the Google+ users, and they lay the foundation for us to build on together – Nothing great is ever built in a vacuum so I’m excited to start the conversation about what the Google+ platform should look like.”

A look at the Google+ Developers Site shows that we are in the early stages of development. As the site states, “This initial set [of APIs] is focused on providing read access to public data. We’ll be adding more APIs over time to build on this foundation and help you create more types of integrations”

Google+ currently has a restricted usage quota and some functionality is currently disabled, until we move further out of the Beta period. Currently Google is using this period to evaluate the APIs and gather feedback. Google says, “This should provide enough access for you to check out the APIs and to start integrating Google+ with your apps.”

The Google APIs Client Libraries are available as betas for .NET, Java, PHP, and Python. They’re also available as alpha code for the Google Web Toolkit, Objective C and Ruby. Much like Facebook, when you access this data it’s sent to you in the familiar JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) encoded format.

Chabot continued, “Because we’re starting with public data only, you simply need to register your app before making requests. And if you aren’t yet sure which Google+ user is running your app (for example, because they’re installing it for the first time), then you can use the new plus.me OAuth2 [a security protocol that enables users to grant third-party access to their web resources without sharing their passwords]-scope to ask the user who they are.”

In addition, Chabot states that “Our API methods are RESTful [REpresentational State Transfer] HTTP requests which return JSON responses.” And, “Our payload formats use standard syntax (e.g. PoCo (Portable Contacts) for people info and ActivityStrea.ms or activities).”

Chabot asks that you keep in mind, “three simple guidelines that we aspire to in our own products, and that we’d like all applications built on the Google+ platform to follow also: put the user first, be transparent, and respect user data. The goal behind these guidelines, as with all of the features and fine print, is to work together to build products that our users will love.”

So, what are you waiting for? Google+ Code!