Leese Internet Technology

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.

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, scalable, 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”.

I have been working with Regular Expressions lately and this site is SO handy for testing your expressions quickly.

http://www.regextester.com/

Gotta love it.

Love this blog entry:

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/improved-flash-indexing.html

It sort of feels like, “finally”. I have had to justify to clients why Flash is not going to get them the sort of search results they want, even though it will have aesthetics for those that are already there. And now, we can have both worlds. I still think text is going to work out better for menus and links because of its minimal bandwidth and accessibility options -but for those things that just serve us better as flash – its nice to know that they will be visible to the engines too. At least, one engine.