About Cyber X Designs

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.

Cyber X Designs is a Joomla website developer, and 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.

So tonight Cyber X Designs took the leap and installed Internet Explorer on yet another machine here. I know we are late to the game for a technology company, but we are wimps when it comes to new MS software. Well our fears were well founded. Our friends at QuickBooks and Microsoft aren't playing nice together. QuickBooks Pro 2005 is incompatible with IE7. When QB loads up it gives you a nice error with instructions on how to uninstall Internet Explorer 7. Are you interested in how to uninstall IE7?

1. Click Start
2. Click Control Panel
3. Click Add or Remove Programs
4. Select Windows Internet Explorer 7 - Remember it is "Windows" Internet Explorer, I didn't and couldn't find it in the list for couple of minutes.
5. Click Remove, wait wait wait.
6. Restart, again.

I uninstalled IE7, which went rather smoothly, and now QuickBooks is working again. I am going to keep my eye on the system for odd behavior. I will also list any other incompatibilities I discover here.

Not any more. I was searching around the web, before I had to create an SSL certificate, and I found this - how to create SSL certificates. Horshack provides lots of useful scripts and code for the sys admin. I used his bash scripts to create self sign certificates. I am sure I could have written the script but the hallmark of a good sys admin is one that finds the right utility for the job and saves himself the time of writing it. Happy signing.

There is a show about a Canadian contractor that goes around and works for families that have had chronic problems in getting their home built or remodeled. The host is the actual contractor and he goes through the home and explains where the last contractor went wrong and what the right solution is. He clearly outlines how the short cuts that were taken end up costing the customer much more than it would have originally.

I find myself in a very similar position when consulting for our customers on their interactive projects. Time after time we get called in to fix problem projects or to redevelop projects that have failed. The common thread in many of these projects is an attempt to save money initially by choosing the least expensive vendor. The discount vendor starts the project and is not able to finish it. Or worse the vendor delivers the piece and the client can't use it because the workmanship is so low it would damage their image.

Let me share a recent experience. A client of Cyber X Designs' elected to use an SEO firm based in India. They choose the firm because they were the 'right' price and the client wanted to move pretty quickly on the SEO efforts. The SEO company developed code for integration with the client's existing web application. Per agreement with our client, Cyber X Designs was to audit all the code before it was integrated with the application.

What we found was amazing! The 'SEO' development company provided PHP code that was dangerously insecure for a website that accepts credit card information or any website. The first error we found was un-escaped and unfiltered data being sent directly to MySQL. This was a huge and very simple SQL Injection vulnerability. It could have been avoided with just a small amount of work.

The second major error was that the web form posted content directly to the client's website. There was no, count it ZERO, code dedicated to managing or staging the posts. The SEO company had promised that functionality but upon delivery it was missing.

The last major problem was that content was being displayed directly with out having any of the html or JS escaped. This made the scripts venerable to XSS and it would have put all the users at risk.

The short of it is, the SEO company broke every basic rule in the book! If they had attended a single New York PHP meeting, read a PHP Security book, read any PHP blogs or attended any conferences, it would have been painfully clear to them what they were doing wrong. The moral of the story here is that it is worth it to have your code audited and to invest in a respectable developer. You will save money and heart ache in the long run.

Some PHP Security Resources:

• Chris Shiflett's book Essential PHP Security
• Chris Snyder's and Michael Southwell's book Pro PHP Security
• PHP Security Consortium

Just a quick note, we upgraded MySQL from 4.x to 5.x on our main hosting machine recently. In the process we found out that Cerberus Helpdesk version 2.7.x is not compatible with MySQL5. So it looks like we will be upgrading Cerberus to the 3.x branch. We reached out to WebGroup Media, the makers of Cerberus, and found out that Cerberus will only apply the amount we paid for the original license to the upgraded version. We don't just get the upgrade. So anyone looking to upgrade MySQL with a Cerberus installation consider yourself warned. I should add that we are very happy with Cerberus. It was installed for one of our clients in the beginning of the year and it has been running very smoothly and meets all their requirements. They tell us they are saving a lot of time and are able to serve their clients much more effectively now that they have the help desk software.