Leese Internet Technology

I don’t want to sound condescending, but it was something that was bound to come up. I ran into it working with the Tactical Sensor Model (also called the Common Sensor Model, and finally, Joint Sensor Model) working group. In that situation, the API needed to grow as the abilities and capabilities of the Sensors (and their Models) improved. And how do you progress an API (or in this case, specific Standards) and maintain backwards compatibility? Some people who are smarter than me are working on it which is good but I can tell you that we never came up with a solution that satisfied everyone. In this case, if I were developing a browser, I would NOT be interested in handling version cases for rendering a page. It means that the engine will grow and grow and grow and although there won’t be alot to maintain because each version will build on the last and once a version is released, its not going to get modified but what about NEW browsers? Really, they are going to test each version’s engine and move forward? So basically, if you are not in the browser market now, you will have a huge-uphill battle if this goes through. Ick, its a nightmare and its easy from the server side of the problem to sit back and go, “You, client-side people REALLY have your work cut out for you”. If that is the case, I hope the open-source community likes testing (as opposed to developing) because that is going to be where time gets spent.

The alternative isn’t pleasant either, what with all kinds of progress moving forward with standards AND browsers. It isn’t an easy puzzle to solve. Good luck. To everyone.

I recently read a SitePoint Newsletter (Tribune #387) that was titled, “Why This Industry Sucks”. It outlined some points that I have been thinking for a while. Things like, how to prove you are a good developer in a sea of bad developers. I look at other people’s code all the time (when we get hired to take over a project from a failed effort) and some of it is really crap. I mean, its not modular (or object oriented) it doesn’t have any (or many) security measures in place and in general, its just thrown together. And people just want the cheapest solution possible and frankly, you get what you pay for. And it ends up costing more in the end when someone like me has to come in and try to fix it. Anyway, head over to SitePoint and check out that article, it makes a lot of sense. And the last line, “…the same challenges every business faces. We need to adapt, and make it work, or fizzle out” is true because in the light of the very challenge they describe we have found that getting certified by the vendors we trust and recommend to our clients, gives us the credibility to be hired and trusted as a new developer for our clients.

Defined here: http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm. . Fantastic article and emphasizes its point by being viral itself. I highly recommend anyone interested in making money with the web, read this.

Great presentation for those considering table based layouts. I think its an old link, but still VERY relevant.

http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/

In case anyone is searching around on Google or Yahoo! for a character encoding format that works for iTunes - I have found that UTF-8 works great. And I use htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, “UTF-8″) to get the text formatted properly.

Also a note, that if you leave the length field empty, iTunes doesn’t display the file as an option to the consumer. It makes sense, but I just want to put it out there because after we fixed our encoding issue, we realized we had to fix a filesize() error that was occuring.

Free tip from Uncle Leroy

For me, it is very refreshing and brings a sense of newness…at least during January. Once we get past February, the newness has faded and when I write the date on checks, it is more of a habit to write out the new year. But for now, lets settle into newness. And to go with that, we are launching a new website design. Thanks to Riotta.com and RyanFidler.com for helping us get this new site launched. Our hope is to bring our website look up to par with the quality of work we deliver. We had many new clients launch successful new websites and we have many more projects in the wings right now. We hope 2008 is prosperous for all our clients and wish you well.