Leese Internet Technology

This blog has been a long time coming.  Well, the blog hasn’t, but a good place for me to discuss my ideas and vision for the future of our businesses has.  I am just a regular guy out here trying to make a living doing things I enjoy.

I have a family, a dog, a house, a couple cars and I regularly attend church.  These things seem irrelevant for someone trying to start a business, perhaps, but for me they are integral.  Everything the business does is simply an extension of what I am and do, therefore, if it doesn’t have the backbone and integrity of the way I live my life – it has no chance of being successful.  I have no expectation of creating the next “pet rock”.  I believe that working hard and being diligent and fair are the only ways to grow a legitamate business from the ground up.

So, without any more ado, welcome.  This blog will serve to be my outpost for all ideas.  No holds barred.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not an economist – just a small business owner out here trying to earn a living. I noticed about 8 months ago that things were slowing down, but no one was talking about recession back then. So with an 8 month lag, here we are and business is picking up. Not so much for our retail clients but for
business to business services, things are chugging along nicely. It will be interesting to see how Q1 of 2009 goes. I know I’ll be watching and participating with eager interest.

Well, the more i have played around with setting up instances in “the cloud” the more I have liked it. Simple enough and completely scalable as necessary. The next step is to have load-balancing going on and robust database servers backing it all up. For almost every application we build, databases are a vital part of the solution – but if we just needed to serve up media or throw cpu cycles at generating/processing video – its definitely the way to go. You can run pretty much any platform you like and only when you need it. Its brilliant and I am still discovering all the ways we can use this and offer it to our smaller clients. We considered using it for our SVN repositories, but anything like that (with versioning and dynamic data) is probably not a great candidate. Although it allows us to get our setup right and build out some cool implementations that are robust and powerful and take them back offline while we work out the kinks. Nice.

We are looking forward to another upcoming holiday. Although it has been a tough few months. Not so much from a gaining new business perspective, but mostly from a business management perspective. We have setup automated backups – had a few websites hacked and had to upgrade several key pieces of hardware and software. Its been expensive and time consuming. Hopefully the wave of trouble is over for a little while now. Especially because the last thing we need with the holiday around the corner is lots of trouble with our business.

Enough complaining – we have worked with several great pieces of technology, assisting in building translation layers, data object delivery solutions, firefox toolbars and other interesting integrations. We are getting ALL too familiar with XML and the idiosyncrasies of using it as it gets served from MS SQL, MySQL, FLEX and many other technologies. Its been a big year, but it is exciting for what is in store after the new year. Good luck and blessings to everyone.

For anyone working on a firefox toolbar/add-on here is an important tip. I have found that if I name my preferences manager (which is based off Components.interfaces.nsIPrefService) with the same name as another toolbar is using (specifically, another one that I built) the last one executed will retain the ability to use its preferences. In other words, the original one, because it has the same name, gets overwritten or re-used and loses its connection. I figured that since it gets instantiated on its own that it would not be stored in the same memory location, but since it definitely was the problem during my simultaneous development of two toolbars I can only conclude that it is global and has visibility across toolbars.

What does this mean? This means you can access the preferences of other toolbars. You can even check to see if the value is available before you use it (using a getPrefType call). This seems like a really big problem giving the open-source nature of the plugins and the security used for Yahoo!, Facebook or StumbleUpon toolbars. I don’t plan on hacking them anytime soon, but it sounds feasible given this architecture.

Back in april I wrote a post about how you need to write more things in order to get published more. Well, that is partially true. If you write articles, you will be published more than if you never wrote an article. But don’t be surprised if a few occasions render themselves fruitless. There may be times you are writing and no one is interested in reading or publishing the information. Sometimes they just don’t have room for you. In any case, don’t be disheartened and enjoy the good times when they last.

I had heard about this some time ago, but was wondering how it applies. Like, it looks great for setting up test/dev environments and turning images on/off quickly and deploying scalable testing scenarios. But, what about the risk of losing data? Or privacy? They are the biggest obstacles. I’d love to see a white paper on a large scale use of the service. In any case, I found stormpulse.com today (living in the panhandle has me curious about hurricanes) and noticed it hitting the amazonaws website. Hmm, scalalble, data dependent, looks like I found a case for studying.

I am very excited to announce that my second article has been published in “Coastal Christian Family”. The first one was about Podcasts and this one is about Blogs. It seems relevant to post on my blog that I wrote an article about … “blogs”.