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  • April 30, 2009

    Handy Federal Election donation limits chart (thanks McKenna Long & Aldridge)

    A friend of ours over at McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP in DC gave us this great donor limits chart (in a business card size). It is a pretty handy tool so here it is for all you campaigners out there:

    Donors
    Recipients
    Special Limits
     
    Candidate Committee
    PAC (1)
    State, District, Local Party Committee (2)
    National Party Committee (3
     
    Individual
    $2,400* per election (4)
    $5,000 per year
    $10,000 per year combined limit
    $30,400 per year*
    Biennial limit of $115,500* ($45,600 to all candidates and $69,900 to all PACs and parties (5)
    State, District and Local Party Committee
    $5,000 per election combined limit
    $5,000 per election combined limit
    Unlimited transfers to other party committees
     
    National Party Committee
    $5,000 per election
    $5,000 per year
    Unlimited transfers to other party committees
    $42,600* to Senate candidate per campaign (6)
    PAC Multi-Candidate (7)
    $5,000 per election
    $5,000 per year
    $5,000 per year combined limit
    $15,000 per year
     
    PAC Not Multi-Candidate
    $2,400* per election (8)
    $5,000 per year
    $10,000 per year combined limit
    $30,400* per year
     

    *These limits are indexed for inflation in odd-numbered years.

    (1) These limits apply both to separte segregated funds (SSFs) and political action committees (PACs). Affiliated committees share the same set of limits on contributions made and received.

    (2) A state party committee shares its limits with local and district party committees in that state unless a local or district committee's independence can be demonstrated. These limits apply to multicandidate committees only.

    (3) A party's national committee, Senate campaign committee and House campaign committee are each considered natinal party committees, and each have separate limits, except with respect to Senate candidates - see Special Limits column.

    (4) Each of the following is considered a separate election with a separate limit primary election, caucus or convention with the authority to nominate, runoff election and special election.

    (5)No more than $45,600 of this amount may be contributed to state and local parties and PACs.

    6) This limit is shared by the national committee and the Senate campaign committee.

    (7) A multicandidate committee is a political committee that has been registered for at least 6 months, has received contributions from more than 50 contributors and - with the exception of a state party committee - has made contributions to at least five federal candidates.

    (8) A federal candidate's authorized committee(s) may contribute no more than $12,000 per election to another federal candidate's authorized committee(s). 2USC§432(e)(3)(B) and 11CFR 102.12(c)(2).

    posted 7:25PM 04/30/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • April 28, 2009

    Boston Globe burys White House related errors!

     

    Which is the true news story here?

    Today's Wall Street Journal front page states:

        "A 'Classified Photo Op Turns Into A Soaring Blunder for the White House
           Mission to Get Beauty Shots of Presidential Jet At Statue of Liberty Panics 9/11-Wary New York."

    This headline is followed by a nice color picture of a Air Force One 747 and a fighter jet flying at low altitude. The article then goes on to talk about the Air Force admitting that the flight was a secret mission of which city officials had been made aware.

    What about the Boston Globe?

    The Boston Globe has a very different take on this story. On the Globe front page, there is a small lead that says,

        "A flyover by two jets sent frightened workers pouring out of buildings..."

    The AP article is printed on page A7 and doesn't mention the fact that one of the planes is an Air Force One 747 until the 8th paragraph, 300th word. Talk about burying the lead.

    The fact that it was a Presidential Air Force One buzzing Manhattan and scaring folks is THE STORY! Why hide it?

    This is not a huge story so why protect the White House in such a heavy handed manner? What else are you hiding?

    And the Globe (owned by the NY Times) wonders why its subscribers are  defecting to Internet based news sources.

    posted 5:08AM 04/28/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • March 26, 2009

    Presidental fundraising: 2008 verses 1976

    While doing a little market research today, we pluged the past 9 election cycle fundraising numbers into a graph. Besides the dip in the 1980 election, we've got a serious growth industry here.

    Note that the Y access is in millions so the total amount raised in the 2008 cycle was $1.63 billion. That buys a lot of yard signs.

    Content Image

    posted 9:46AM 03/26/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • March 26, 2009

    Calling all Australian PHP developers, we need bodies to manage our CodeIgniter/AJAX mashup CMS

    Calling all Australian PHP developers, we need bodies to manage our CodeIgniter/AJAX mashup CMS which we call Tegel: http://tinyurl.com/cg6x4g.

    Candidates must be able to work on-site at our offices in Rozelle, less then 7 minutes for the center of Sydney.

    posted 5:57AM 03/26/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • March 17, 2009

    Twitter for complete and utter beginners

    A client of ours who is not very "new media" savvy wants to jump into the Twitter pool without looking like a total rube. They asked if we could jot down a few notes to help them get started.

    If you are halfway familiar with Twitter, you can stop reading now. If you are new to the Twitter world, the following notes may help you get started. Note that these thoughts were pulled together from a bunch of folks in the office so if there is any plagiarism here, please be flattered ;)

    ------------------------------------

    1. Twitter Basics
    Twitter is a free mass text-messaging service that allows you to send out 140-character messages to a group of followers.  It is used by friends, family and co-workers to stay connected. Twitter utilizes real time updates (referred to as Tweets), which are posted on your web-based Twitter profile and sent to your Followers’ (other Twitter users) mobile phones.

    Twitter is like a casual digital diary and is used for publishing fun facts, useful tools, thoughts, questions, etc.  The 140-character space limit emphasizes a large number of short posts. Twitter posts traditionally consist of:
     

    • Status Updates: “Off to the store for some milk”
    • Musings: “The construction on 95 in Stoneham is driving me insane!”
    • Interesting Links: “Peggy Noonan’s comments today on the economy hit the nail on the head: http://online.wsj.com/peggy-noonan.html”
    • Questions: “Is anyone else having problems with their GE fridge freezing up?”
    • And much more.


    It is not necessary to make each Twitter post substantial. Twitter followers are most interested in what you are interested in or what you are doing now. Twitter should be treated as a fun, slightly self-indulgent broadcasting toy that can lead to a deeper connection with your audience.

    Note that Twitter is not just a way to broadcast messages, you can also reply, “@replies” in Twitter-speak, to your followers. Replies are not necessary but are considered good form in the Twitter world.

    2. Glossary

    • Tweet – a short (I40-character) message.
    • weeters/Tweeple - People who use Twitter.
    • Twoosh - A perfect 140-character tweet.
    • Followers - Tweeters who are following your tweets. Followers will see any updates you make on their homepage of Twitter.
    • Following - Tweeters you are following. You will see any updates (tweets) on your homepage from anyone you are following
    • TweetUp - An ‘in person’ meeting between Twitter users.


    3. Getting Started
    All you need to use Twitter is a computer with an Internet connection or a mobile phone.  Go to http://twitter.com and sign up.  Take a look at who is using Twitter by using the Find People tab.  Some successful tweeters include:
     


    Once you are comfortable with the experience, you can take advantage of all Twitter features.

    4.  Things you should do

    • Post tweets that add more value than the attention it consumes.  Instead of posting “just had a great burger”, post something like “great burger specials today at Joe’s Burger Palace in Cambridge”.
    • Be aware of how often you tweet. Post enough to keep followers interested (at least once a day), but not so much that you flood their feeds with 50 new tweets a day.
    • Use Twitter to provide updates when a new blog post or press release is posted on your website. This can be done automatically provided the content is already in an RSS feed.
    • Use services like tinyurl.com and is.gd to shorten links. Tweet real estate is important because of the 140-character limit.  Tweeters use these services (often built into desktop and mobile Twitter applications) to shorten links like https://www.freestrongamerica.com/contribute to http://is.gd/kHdP.


    5.  Things you shouldn’t do

    • Do not post just news updates. News updates are important, but including personal content in your tweets allows for that human feel that makes social networking and media work.
    • Don’t post and read at the same time.  What happens is that you are all set to make a post, but you see updates from people you follow so you stop to read those.  After a while, you have forgotten what you intended to post, as well as your to do list.  Schedule time to twitter.
    • Do not use an @reply to send a message to someone that you would like to be private. This will show up on the public timeline.


    6. Mobile Tweeting

    • Text Messaging/SMS: You can send updates to Twitter by linking your mobile phone number to your Twitter account and then sending a text message to 40404. You can also elect to receive Twitter updates of other users by allowing Twitter to send their updates to you in a text message. Important: Twitter is limited to 140 characters while most mobile carriers set the text message limit at 160 characters. If you go over 140 characters then your message will be curtailed.
    • Smart phones: Popular devices like Blackberry’s and iPhones have applications that can be downloaded to improve the user’s experience with Twitter.  For the iPhone, try TwitterFon at http://twitterfon.net or Twitterrific at http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific.  Each device and application has its pros and cons, but the general principals of Twitter remain the same.


    7.  Twitter applications for Blackberry users

    • TwitterBerry – The most widely used Twitter application for Blackberry phones, TwitterBerry has its legions of loyal followers. With all applications, TwitterBerry can only pull from the Twitter api less than 70 times an hour. A complete FAQ can be found here: http://www.orangatame.com/products/twitterberry/faq.php.  The supported devices and system requirements can be found here: http://www.orangatame.com/products/twitterberry/.
    • Twibble – The second most popular Blackberry application for Twitter. Twibble will function on any JavaScript enabled mobile device. Pros for Twibble include keyboard shortcuts and minimal amounts of data transferred. A huge draw for most Twibble users is that Twibble can be configured to be ‘geographically aware’ on some devices – this includes updating your latitude and longitude coordinates with each Tweet. For obvious security reasons we would not recommend enabling this feature. More information here: http://www.twibble.de/twibble-mobile/.
    • TinyTwitter – TinyTwitter succeeds in that it will work for any phone that is JavaScript enabled. All of the basic functions are the same, including a number of settings to customize the user interface and data displayed. More information can be found here: http://www.tinytwitter.com/about.html.


    8.  Actions/Features

    • @replies - By using “@username” at the beginning of your tweet, you can direct that tweet at a specific user. It is intended to support back and forth communications. This type of messaging is publicly visible.
    • ReTweet - To re-send a previous tweet or to resend someone else's tweet so it reaches a larger audience. Proceeded with “RT @username” with the username being the original author.
    • Direct Messages - You can send a direct message to another user by using the message link on their profile page, the reply icon from your own direct message, or using the command “d <insert username> <insert text>” message. Only you and the person you are direct messaging will see the contents of the tweets.  You can only send a DM to someone who is one of hour followers.
    • Favorites - You can store any of your favorite tweets by clicking the star icon by the message.
    • Tags, hash tags, and #’s – You enter a tweet that reads: #golf Augusta National GC opening soon.  The #golf is a tag. Users will often include a tag somewhere in their messages if they are relevant to a popular topic. The tags can be searched at http://search.twitter.com/. The search result for #golf is http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23golf.  All tweets with the #golf tag will be listed.


    9. Recommendations

    • Acquire your name, fore example: twitter.com/DavidBeckham: As in domain names, a Twitter account name is important. The more personal you can keep it, the better. Example: WarrenBuffett is a better username than BerkshireHathaway.
    • Use mobile tweeting, but use an application and not the text message service. If someone were to gain access to your account then that individual would be able to access your phone number. Also, an application can allow you to browse tweets easily – the SMS/text message option would require you to subscribe to a user and would also open yourself up to a plethora of text messages.
    • Consider using a service like TweetLater.com to track relevant keywords and hash tags, automatically post pre-written tweets at scheduled intervals, and automate a host of other actions.


     

    posted 1:19PM 03/17/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • February 26, 2009

    Australian Department of Immigration is all kinds of awesome

    Content ImageIt appears that usability standards have not reached Down Under.

    While filling out a 457 Long-Stay Visa application, we were faced with the following pulldown:

    "If you wish to lodge only one nomination application then leave the counter set at "0". Entering "1" will generate two nominations, this nomination and an additional nomination. Entering "9" will generate ten nominations, this nomination and an additional nine nominations."

    The best part was that one of the pull down options had two seperate zeros to choose from. Don't choose the first one becaust that zero doesn't work.

    Calling all usability experts, there are jobs to be had with the Australian Government!

    posted 3:26PM 02/26/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • February 26, 2009

    The wrath of Internet Explorer

    Lifehacker.com header in IE6, IE7, and FF3
    Lifehacker.com header - from top to bottom - in IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox 3.

    If you're involved in the world of web design and developing then you know all about the horrendous family of browsers from Microsoft. The nomenclature is quite appropriate - each labeled as Internet Explorer and then followed with a number that dictates what ring of hell each hails from.

    The awfulness of Internet Explorer (6 and 7 being the presently used versions) doesn't really have all that much to do with the user experience. IE 7 is actually a tolerable browser when you're stuck running Window Updates and downloading spyware tools on your computer illiterate friend's computer. The real evil shows itself when you write up code for a website and you have to insert some annoying workaround to get some simple element to render correctly.

    Case in point: When we want to use images with transparency in IE 6. Or building a Flash application that will run on a https server and the problems that causes with IE.

    In Internet Explorer's defense, other browsers do miss the mark in the same respect. But at least other browsers are grouped somewhere around the bull's eye. Internet Explorer is the drunk at the local bar that's, at times, lucky if it's hitting the wall that supports the dart board.

    Like an idiot I held out hope that IE 8 would make all of this a bit easier. Nope. Recent news from ZDNet is quite sad. IE 8 has a growing list of high traffic sites that apparently are not compatible with how it wants to render them. The best one on the list: microsoft.com.

    And all these browser issues is another reason why we love Flex.

    posted 2:24PM 02/26/2009 by Leif Nordberg
  • January 26, 2009

    My.BarackObama.com used to spread malware

    It appears that our misgivings regarding the Obama campaign and our our online privacy protection posted in our October posting had some merit.

    According to the "Websense Security Labs Threat Seeker" (that is quite a product name), bogus my.barackobama.com user accounts are being used to spread malicious code. Here is the full posting: http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Blogs/3284.aspx. The scary part is that these reports of malware on my.barackobama.com began last spring and have yet to be resolved.

    Don't get us wrong, we believe in the use of technology to bring people and ideas together. Unfortunately, when every you bring large groups of people to one place, there will be opportunities for bad guys to be bad. As in meat-space, we all need to do our level best to make public areas (social networks) safe for everyone.

    In the end, we are responsible for ourselves and for what we download or share online. Embrace change but "hey, let's be careful out there... "

    posted 3:44PM 01/26/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • January 16, 2009

    eNilsson contributes to job growth in Washington, Boston and Sydney

    eNilsson is hiring! Our business is doubling this year and we need your help.

    Boston (Westford) - We are looking for a Project Manager who is comfortable getting their hands a little dirty by working on our PHP based platforms.

    We'd also like to get our hands on a Front End Developer who has strong design skills.

    Sydney (Rozelle) - We need an up and coming star to help build on our existing Flex products and to take ownership of new projects. Strong design skills are a must. Skills and enthusiasm in microarchitectures (Cairngorm), custom AS3 components, states and transitions, AMFPHP and user interface design would be very desirable.

    Washington DC - Are you connected? We need a Business Development Director to help us capitalize on our DC area sales momentum. Can you help us develop clients and new strategic partnerships within the hallowed halls and corridors of Washington? If so, we need to talk.

    Learn more about these positions and how to apply at: www.enilsson.com/careers.



     

    posted 1:24PM 01/16/2009 by eNilsson Blog Team
  • January 08, 2009

    Help, my AWS instance has fallen and it can't get up...

    Our first day back after the festive break was an eventful one! So as we eased back into working life our AWS instance, a nicely optimised Fedora AMI that was serving both our suite of Tegel hosted sites and as the core testing area for our new Struktor application platform, suddenly went silent!!

    While I thanked my lucky stars this didnt happen while I was stuffing my face over christmas dinner, or glued to the TV watching the Boxing Day Test I was none the less perplexed and a little lost.

    The symptoms were strange, the instance appeared to be running when we checked the ec2-describe-instances call but no matter what we did, either via HTTP, SSH or SFTP we couldnt raise it at all. So we checked further, and it appeared that all our S3 data and the Elastic Storage Block (EBS) data appeared to be intact (thanks jeebers for that!), but the EC2 instance was toast.

    So we raised the topic on the AWS EC2 forums and got a fairly quick response which was nice;

    Hi James,

    We are investigating a misbehaving network device that seems to be affecting connectivity to a small number of instances.  We are working to fix or replace that device.  You can relaunch your instance or wait and we should be able to restore connectivity.

    Regards,
    JoeJ

    Hmm, that is strange, well at least it wasnt something we did. As you can imagine we were mentally running through all the things we may have done to bork the server, so it was nice to hear we were in the clear.

    So after some more checking we decided the best course of action was indeed to rebuild the server onto a new instance, however this posed a few issues;

    • The running AMI could not be stopped, it hung in terminating mode indefinately
    • It proved difficult to unmount the storage block from the running AMI, unless we used the force option
    • We had neglected to institute Elastic IPs so the IP attached to this AMI was lost to us, meaning all our domains needed to be repointed to the new server.

    Once we realised what was involved, the disaster recovery proved relatively straightforward if however inconvenient.

    1. Instantiate a new instance of the AMI from the saved snapshot
    2. Mount the detached EBS onto the new server, and test the instance
    3. Grab yourself an Elastic IP if you dont have one already and assign the new instance to it (this article proved most useful)
    4. Make sure all your domains have the new IP address listed
    5. Test

    The beauty of the Elastic IP as we discovered is that if this were to happen again, we can simply assign that IP to a new instance and we can skip step 4, which can be a huge timesaver if you have a lot of domains with different registrars.

    A learning experience to be sure, but now we know the recovery should be pretty quick and painless!

    posted 4:53PM 01/08/2009 by James Nicol

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