I had the opportunity to sit down with Windows 7 Program Manager Cordell Jones. Cordell has worked with Microsoft for the past 14 years, with the past 2 years focused on Windows 7. Some of Cordell’s past project include Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Exchange. Cordell now works on the networking side of Windows 7.

Cordell is a graduate of Tuskegee University. Enjoy!

The federal government is looking for reviewers to help ensure stimulus money earmarked for broadband projects goes to the right places. $7.2 billion was included in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to boost broadband growth in underserved areas. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a division of the Department of Commerce, is overseeing grants from organizations and communities seeking funds from the stimulus package.

The call for reviewers is to help ensure an ethnically and geographically diverse pool of people can look at the programs, and is a great opportunity for experts of color to propose programs that can reduce the digital divide.

According to the program’s website, reviewers must have experience in one of the following areas:
1) design, funding, construction, and operation of broadband networks or public computer centers;
2) broadband-related outreach, training, or education;
3) innovative programs to increase the demand for broadband services.

To apply, submit a resume and conflict of interest forms via email to btopreviewers@ntia.doc.gov AND send signed copies via smail mail to:
BTOP Reviewers
Broadband Technology Opportunities Program
National Telecommunications and Information Administration
U.S. Department of Commerce
HCHB, Room 4812
1401 Constitution Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20230

No deadline for reviewer applications is currently listed.

Rapping about Technology is not a new phenomenon. We covered the YouTube hit, Design Coding by Poetic Profit AKA the SEO Rapper and I’ve mention in the past the NerdCore band Monzy with their cult classic Kill Dash 9. Today we bring to you Dale Chase’s Ode to female coders, Coder Girl. Enjoy!

SocialToo, one of the few services that provided a way to auto-dm new followers, recently made a bold move against spammers on Twitter. Much more than just a way to get at new followers on Twitter, Socialtoo is a way to solve many of your social media needs.

What Did They Do?

According to their blog, SocialToo has decided to discontinue their auto-dm service. You know all those Direct Messages you get from people you follow with links to random crap that you probably don’t care about? SocialToo will no longer provide anyone with the means to send those to you.

That’s probably not all that interesting to you. That’s only one of many services that are setup to spam you, right? Well, they’ve taken it a step further:

In addition, starting today, while you will no longer have need for blocking SocialToo users’ automated DMs, we encourage you to invite all your friends to come check the same option you were using to block SocialToo DMs, and we’ll block other sites that do automated-dms.

So, basically, if you go sign up at SocialToo, you can potentially block all automated DM’s from any service. SocialToo has just replaced one of their most recognized features with a very powerful tool against Twitter spammers.

But Wait, There’s More

Besides keeping the quality of the social community in mind, SocialToo has much more to offer:

• You can auto-follow those who follow you on Twitter
• Blacklist those you never want to follow
• Unfollow people based on filters
• Get a daily email detailing who followed or unfollowed you, including the last tweet you sent before they did so
• Poll your network using the Social Surveys feature

You even get a simple URL that points to your Facebook profile so you don’t have to look it up every time (mine is rahsheen.socialtoo.com).

Jesse Stay over at SocialToo is very active in the social media community and responsive to feature requests and user input. Blocking all auto-dm’s across multiple services is reason enough to sign up, but I definitely enjoy a few of the other features as well. It’s clear to me that SocialToo has been listening to the community and is keeping our best interests at heart.

Blackbird, a custom browser for the African-American community launched today to mixed reviews from mainstream users. We were tipped off about the browser a while ago, but this afternoon we actually had an opportunity to “talk turkey” with Blackbird co-founder and CEO 40A Inc. Ed Young.

“Blackbird was originally the brainchild of Arnold Brown, who wanted a way to tie all black content online into one location,” Young says. So Young and Brown decided that the best way to encompass all of this web content was to use the tool that all content has in common, the Web browser. Blackbird was built using Mozilla technology, which gives the browser a similar look and feel to Firefox. And by default, BlackBird imports all of your Firefox plug-ins. But what makes Blackbird different is its custom add-ons, bookmarks, relevant bookmarks, and themes designed to cater to the Black community.

Not to take away from BlackBird as a product, there are some handy features for those who surf the Web in search of Black content, like:

• A Built-in Black video channel
• Scrolling RSS feeds displayed in a news ticker fashion (you can turn this feature off if it gets to be a bit too much for you)
• Pre-determined folders of bookmarks covering a range of topics including: Lifestyle, People and Networks, News and Politics, Sports and Entertainment, Business and Professional, Community and Organizations, as well as Black Colleges and Universities which contains a bookmark to every HBCU website
• The ability to create custom add-ons like we all love to do in Firefox.
• “Blackbird Black Search,” a Google  Custom search engine which attempts to provide Blackbird users with more relevant search results. (If you choose not to use the Blackbird search engine, Blackbird still gives you the standard option of choosing from search engines such as Google, AOL search, and even Black Search Engine Rushmore Drive.)

As far as custom add-ons are concerned, Young says, “Now this is what gives me goose bumps. We are currently working on a developer community that will give African-American developers, both young and old, the ability to create custom add-ons and themes for Blackbird.”

But what everyone wants to know, and what we thoroughly discussed with Young, is Blackbird’s business model. Blackbird is cultivating partnerships with video content providers to provide them with distribution opportunities through Blackbird’s Video Channel, as well advertising is built into the video channel offering. And, Blackbird also has plans to monetize its search results.”

Young also discussed the controversy — particularly as it regarded race — surrounding the browser’s release, originally slated for 6 PM EST today. “Black Bird is not a separate thing, it’s an interest thing,” he says.

While Young wasn’t surprised by the comments he was on sites like TechCrunch, he says that the notion that a browser for African-Americans is separatist is false.  Though he does admit there could be an adoption issue, simply because most Blacks use whichever version of IE is installed on their computer. Yet, he believes “that Blackbird is all about increasing relevancy.” 

From our perspective, the greatest difference between BlackBird and the social browser flock is that it provides users with easy access to the Black experience. What many commentors over at TC FAIL to realize is that there is a Black culture and a Black Experience, and this naturally translates online and into any other medium since we are all a part of the human race.  In 2008 it is not wrong to want to identify with your culture regardless of what that culture may be or how you choose to identify with it.

BlackBird is about as separatist as BlackVoices, BlackPlanet, RushmoreDrive, and heck even Black Web 2.0 is.  Exactly…it isn’t.

If you’re interested in the latest Blackbird news, visit their website, or follow them on Twitter.

If you’re serious about being on the web or any database-driven application, you need the proper professional tool. While anyone can go to Home Depot and, theoretically, renovate their house, hiring the big guns with the best tools, despite the cost, often is the better alternative. While I’ll always be an advocate of free and open-source software, PremiumSoft’s $95 Navicat solution is awesome.

And hey, Google, Adobe, and Intel (all who use the tool) can’t be wrong.

While many developers know that the health of your database is the quintessential backbone to EVERYTHING nowadays, being able to view that data, backup that data, and optimize that data is absolute. You may be thinking to yourself, well, I have phpMyAdmin for that. That may be true for perusing data, but setting up indexes and transferring information between two servers is a pain.

This is where Navicat shines.

You can setup up SSH connections between two servers and do a straight transfer between the source and destination, with progress bar, in Navicat. Even before the transfer, options exist to change the database encoding type, setup a proxy, and test the connection.

Additional features that are crucial to more advanced users include creation of stored procedures for improved querying, setting up views for table definitions, and backups that can be saved in many different places.

Check it out!

This is a short tip, but it piggy backs off my two previous posts to get you guys out of the guise of desktop tools and into the terminal!

Haven’t you ever wanted to do a ‘Ctrl-F’ type search on your web files? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could just find in your web server all the instances of an email address so you could update it across files?

Never fear, grep is here.

Grep is a Unix-based utility that does a simple text search on files that you specify. It then returns to the screen where that text is and where it is used. It works just like the search you’re use to in Windows, except for your files on a particular server.

As alluded to before, this is especially useful if you’re trying to comment out or change text on a website, but you’re not sure how often the text is repeated or in what files it appears!

For example, let’s say my boss asked me to update the email address that is listed on our 100-page website anywhere it’s listed. When I log into the terminal (see my SSH posts, again, for instructions on how to do that), I can simply type:

> grep -l 'example@email.com' *

Breaking that down, the ‘grep’ command invokes the tool, the ‘-l’ (dash lowercase L) says to list only the filenames, the ‘example@email.com’ (quotes included because I am using the @ symbol) dictates the text to look for, and the ‘*’ dictates to look in all the files in my current directory. What outputs is a nice list of files to manipulate!

Bonus Tip: Check out grep for Windows!

With the first public beta release in 2003, 8-year old Skype is a Godsend for anyone who is looking for a low-cost alternative to their home phone. Dubbed as the original mainstream voice-over-ip service, this eBay owned company does more than act as phone. Skype is a window to a suite of tools that we can all use to stay connected through small business.

If you don’t have a Skype account, go ahead and create one. It is free. You’ll need a mic and set of speakers to do the basics of making calls.

The casual observer will note that sitting in front of a computer (or having the computer on all the time) can be a big transition from a regular line, but you can easily take it to the next level with a dedicated VOIP Skype phone. I currently have a Linksys CIT400 (Arstechnica review) and it works well. For $30 a year, you can make unlimited calls to U.S. numbers just like a regular phone…and without the need for your computer to stay on.

A few upgrades I have opted for are Skype voicemail, a SkypeIn number (so clients can call a local number), SkypeForwarding to my cell phone if I’m not available (which requires your computer to be on, unfortunately), and conference calling. In one fail swoop, I have a full-featured suite of phone options for less than $50 bucks a year.

The biggest downside is that if you’re pushing everything through your internet connection. If your power ever goes out or if you want local 911 coverage, you won’t be able to use the Skype service. With the ubiquity, however, of mobile phones, this seems like a moot point, but it is something to consider.

Bonus Tip: If you have a built-in webcam, Skype video conferencing works flawlessly! If you want to talk to someone with a Skype account, it’s completely free!

If you’re a web developer, this tool is pretty well known…at least….it should be. For those breaking into the industry, this tool is a MUST HAVE. Built as an extension to the very popular Firefox web browser, Firebug allows a user to dive deeper into any page as they browse. From the Mozilla plugin website:

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

Installation

As with all Firefox plugins, installation is a one-click process. If you’re using Firefox 2, be sure to install version 1.05. For Firefox 3 users, a beta version of 1.2 is available. I have installed it and it seems pretty stable.

Once installed and you’ve restarted Firefox, simply activate Firebug by clicking the icon in the bottom right of the browser. A green circle with a white checkmark will appear if it is activated.

Viewing HTML

As you navigate, clicking the Firebug icon will show you the HTML of that page in a lower pane. You can expand the each element in the HTML tree and see how all of the (hopeful) divs link together. As you hover over each element, the top pane will highlight the portion of the page that is defined by that element.

Ever wonder how a page is constructed? Ever gaze in amazement on what cool CSS trick an author has used to generate a page?

Firebug can tell you.

Debugging HTML / CSS

On the flip-side, you can debug your own pages by right-clicking them on the page and selecting ‘Inspect element’. This will open the lower pane of Firebug and take you directly to the portion of html that generates it. If that html element has a CSS class or ID, the details of that CSS entity is displayed on the right side of the lower pane.

Even better, if multiple declarations are acting on an element in a CSS file, you’ll see the entire stylesheet build. Perhaps your style.css is making your links blue with no background, while your screen.css is making your links red with a yellow hover. Now you can see which declaration is getting the higher precedence.

Tons of Features

Without a doubt, Firebug is the Swiss army knife for web developers. In addition to simple HTML viewing and debugging, you can view the Javascript included on a page, the element details for embedded Flash objects, and the DOM tree structure. You can also view the speed of how certain elements are rendered. If your site is slow, simply look at the different elements and see which is taking the longest to download.

The single coolest thing, however, that makes Firebug a hands-down favorite is the ability to edit the HTML in the page right in the console.

Curious to see what a site would look like with a different font? Interested to see what your site would look like with a different background image?

Simply change the CSS of the page directly inline in the Firebug pane and the page in the top pane will update. If you’ve got a dual screen setup, you can pop-out the Firebug pane and have your HTML editor on screen and your test site on the other!

Have fun…and Firebug away.