About Cyber X Designs

This was the topic John Andrews was discussing when he referred to CXD’s New Jersey website. He seems to think that we did a pretty good job with our copy. Thanks John! We worked pretty hard on it and had a lot of laughs writing it. Allie and Grant were primarily responsible for it. They seem to have the best sense of humor about these things. We tried to draw on our personal experiences growing up and living in New Jersey. I grew up in Weehawken, Grant Hansen grew up in Ridgefield Park, and Allie Gaddy is a transplant from Charlotte.

We designed three or four run of the mill website design company websites for ourselves. Each time feeling frustrated and bored. We heard the song on our website and that sparked a flame in Allie’s creative head. So we found a theme. Many many many revisions later, we developed that theme into the content and design you see today. And it was a lot of fun! It was a lot of work to not build a typical web site design company website like this company. The example company talks about making an impact and establishing an identity, but their website looks like 100’s of other web design company websites. The only thing memorable about it is there isn’t anything particularly memorable.

It seems there is a lack of courage in the design world. We dealt with the fear that our Pharma clients might not like the design. We over came that fear because we are confident in the relationships we have built and the referrals we get from our clients. There would be far fewer spammy websites from web design companies and companies in general if they had the courage to develop something fresh and engaging. Maybe, something provocative that gets people talking.

I understand some clients will not go for it. They have an idea of what they want and that is what we will execute. But when we are our own client, we can not settle and go spammy to earn a good placement in the SERPS. We wanted to take the high road and it has worked wonderfully for us. I have heard some of our clients have spent an entire afternoon reading the site and laughing out loud. We have all had a Jersey hairdo.

Cyber X Designs, our New Jersey based web design firm,  is fanatical about securing its client’s code base. And for this task we love SVN. SVN is a version management system. We use it to control the source code for our projects. For lay people, it is a database of every change that was made to any file saved in the version management system. Using SVN we can review the history of changes to a file, see who changed it and restore old versions. One of our favorite pharma clients is located in Florham Park and they have no less then three of their projects managed in SVN.

There is no worse feeling then having lost a bunch of work because of a hard drive crash or a fat finger. So yesterday while migrating a repository for one of our New York based clients we discovered that trying to export a large repository over a Samba share to a Windows storage solution was a no go.

The error we received was: svnadmin: Can’t write to stream: File too large. We were running the following command: svnadmin dump /foo/bar/ > /mnt/storage/backups. Our SVN version is 1.4.4 and our version of Apache is 2.0.59. Our exported repo is about 4GB. It seems the export was failing around 2GB.

Our first suspicion was that we had the wrong APR or there was no large file support in our version of APR. So we recompiled Apache and Subversion a handful of times. Each time no success. Finally, it dawned on us to try and export the repo to the local file system. That worked. So the final resolution is that we are exporting the repo locally and then compressing and copying the dumpfile to the storage solution using a bash script.

We searched for a solution to this problem all day yesterday and never happened across the fact that there might be a problem when exporting a large repo over Samba. Hopefully, you will find this post in your search and it will save you some time.

Cyber X Designs (find us in Google under New Jersey Web Design) chooses to build websites and web applications using open source applications because they are extensible and provide an excellent foundation. A great example is Robin Rolfe Resource’s website which was developed using Joomla, Flash, PHP and MySQL. Robin Rolfe Resource (RRR) is in Fort Lee, NJ, we love our New Jersey customers!

We developed a handful of custom Joomla! modules to control things like the flash navigation (yes, Cyber X Designs provides custom Flash design services). The custom flash module directs flash to load the appropriate background art and display the correct navigation based on where you are in the site. We choose this approach so that the flash would be very light weight and fast loading, yet their could be a single navigation swf file for the entire site. This made development and management of the Flash much more efficient. The mixing of Flash and Joomla provides an excellent user experience for both the site maintainers and their customers. There are other custom modules on the RRR site but we can’t really talk about them as they are proprietary to Cyber X Design’s customers.

Since we launched our now-famous “New Jersey Web Site” at CyberXDesigns.com, we have received positive praise for our New Jersey theme. Along with the praise come questions, especially questions about the New Jersey trivia and the New Jersey scenes on the web site.

One popular topic is the New Jersey Flash animations on Cyber X Designs. There are several New Jersey images represented in the Flash image, and you’ll need to revisit the site to see them all. They are classic New Jersey images, but exactly what are they? Where are they? One is a New Jersey high-rise construction site, which could be Jersey City, New Jersey, or Atlantic City near the expanding boardwalk. Or, could it be a revitalized Asbury Park skyline? On closer look, you may notice those towers are actually smoke stacks, which grow natively in New Jersey, up to 21 stories high! So, where are those new smoke stacks anyway?

Another image our Flash developer incorporated is more obvious - the beautiful brownstone town homes of Hoboken, New Jersey. We cropped that Flash animation closely because we didn’t want to include the cars parked right up against the brownstone stoops. Of course our web designer included a Flash image of the Trump Taj Majal, because, well, it is so typically New Jersey, right? I mean, an Arabian Palace painted bright red, blue, and gold with neon. Where else but New Jersey?

And of course, what New Jersey web site design would not include an image of the (over) crowded beaches of the Jersey Shore? Thousands of people, beach umbrellas, and an old-fashioned wooden life boat. Classic New Jersey (with a conspicuous absence of $7 wrist bands). But where exactly is that? Point Pleasant? Avon-by-the-Sea? Wildwood? Belmar? Ocean City? Or, again, Atlantic City in front of the boardwalk?

We love New Jersey, and we like to show it.

Cyber X Designs was awarded a 2006 Global Awards Finalist Certificate for Healthcare Communications, by the Global Awards. Cyber X Designs of Denville, New Jersey ( a web hosting provider, web design and web application development company) designs and develops websites and interactive media for pharmaceutical marketing campaigns. With past successes for ALTANA, Nycomed, Wyeth (interactive email campaigns), Abbott Laboratories (interactive development of sales training system), Common Health, Ketchum PR, Boomcom Communications and Pace, among others appreciating confidentiality, Cyber X Designs helped advance the GAPP Survey website on asthma treatment practices.The Global Award recognizes excellence in Healthcare Communications, Video, Audio, and Interactive Media:

The Global Awards are recognized as the only awards dedicated to excellence in healthcare communications on an international basis. The Globals have achieved the status of the world’s most coveted honor in this field. By broadening the focus beyond advertising alone, the mission of The Global Awards is to lift the perception of creativity above clever headlines and smart design, and to explore the feelings and emotions transmitted between a message’s creator and its recipient. The intellectual and emotional achievement of communication transcends the barriers of distance, language and culture. The Global Awards honor this profound connection.

According to the finalist list and award winners, Cyber X Designs is the only New Jersey Web Design Firm to achieve this status in Healthcare Communications.

We’ve developed another CMS (content management system) for another important New Jersey website!

Joomla is a PHP based Open Source content management system, formerly known as Mambo and now advanced several generations from the old Mambo CMS. The Property Owners Association of New Jersey (poanj.com) wanted a CMS to help them manage their web site content. Since PHP/MySQL on the Open Source LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is our primary technology, we’ve developed quite a depth of expertise in Joomla! here in our Denville, NJ offices. Our Denville team has launched Joomla projects for Robin Rolfe Resources, ALTANA, and Nycomed, among others.

New Jersey is a biotech state (one of the Top 5 Biotech markets) and home to many pharmaceutical companies. It’s no surprise that Cyber X Designs develops pharmaceutical websites and interactive media for pharmaceutical clients. Wyeth Fibercon and Abbot Labs Ultane, for example. Also the anesthetic drug marketing work on an innovative tablet PC, the interactive field sales training tools, interactive multimedia projects… innovative applications of web technologies.

It has come to our attention that some people are still experiencing trouble with FreeBSD 5.3 and DST. We dealt with a little trouble ourselves. We developed and maintain some very time sensitive web applications for our clients. Two examples of our work come to mind: the reservation system we developed for Bering Air and the medication reminder software for OnCellRx. In both cases the time stamps and the delivery of messages need to happen at the right time and the DST change could have really caused problems. The OS, PHP, MySQL and the NTP server all need to play nicely together and they didn’t.

In our case the NTP server we rely on at Columbia didn’t get patched properly and at the time of the publishing of this post it is still 1 hour off. That should remind everyone, be aware of who you are relying on. Even reputable institutions make mistakes.

We also had a little trouble with our FreeBSD 5.3 installations. So a New Jersey web development firm went looking for a fix and wanted to tell you about it. You need to patch the zoneinfo file on your server. Our server displayed the wrong time when we used the date command and to get the server to show the right time we had to put it in the wrong time zone. So we applied this FreeBSD DST patch found here: http://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-EN-07:04.zoneinfo.asc.

The patch says it was only tested against 6.1 but it worked nicely on our 5.3 machine.

Today at the PHPQuebec Conference Cyber X Designs’ own Chris Hendry co-presented with Hans Zaunere, President of NY PHP, on the topic of developing a PHP based web application to replace a 25 year old AS400 / RPG Green Screen application. Hans and Chris spoke about methods developed by Cyber X Designs to discover, extract and load data from the legacy system. They also discussed how we leveraged open standards, core PHP5, PHP extensions (PDO and SPL), enterprise architectures (Message Queuing & Tiering), and agile strategies to slay the mainframe beast.

I am happy to announce that McAfee SiteAdvisor has deemed our website safe for users! I was Googling “cyberxdesigns” tonight because I am completely vain and I want to see who lives in my neighborhood and I found, to my delight, the SiteAdvisor link as the 5th primary result. How excellent! At first I was concerned, however after clicking the link I found, to my relief, that not only is my site safe, it seems sites affiliated with CXD like, w3c.org, nyphp.org, beringair.com and imaginativelearningtools.com are too.

So for all you out there who are looking for web design, web hosting, PHP development or general moral support, give us a call, McAfee says we are safe. So stop by, we are located in Denville, NJ. Our site will not harm you, it will just entertain you and hopefully entice you to call us and use our services. End of the hard sell.

So what is the value of this service? Who is using it? How much value am I providing McAfee? How much are they making off my hard work? When you visit the site, McAfee hints that the owner of the site should respond to their rating, after registering, and then verifying who you are. Seems like a good way to crowd the SERPS with a little bit of junk and collect my, or some unsuspecting web master’s, contact information. It is interesting that by collecting the contact information and using their affiliation mapping, they can start to build up a social network map. Hmmm…. I can only imagine the marketing value. They can easily determine just how involved in technology their list of web masters is by monitoring their affiliations. Maybe do some further web marketing to them. Kudos McAfee.

Do you use this service? I wonder if their content filtering software uses the results. Does your site or your affiliates sites have poor ratings? If so, did you respond? I would love to hear from you.

In the spirit of full disclosure, McAfee didn’t get it totally wrong with the affiliates. New York PHP is a user group in NY that I am a member of and link to extensively and the other three sites are our happy customers.