Leese Internet Technology

It is mostly about Customer Service. What is? Software. It’s all about customer service in fact. I mean, you build a User Interface so that your users can interface with it. And if that interface doesn’t make sense (BTW, that was your first line of customer service) then they call or email you (your second line of customer service). In fact, all software serves, and most of the time, serves its human customer. So you have to have people skills and a heart to serve, or you aren’t going to make it. If you only love the engineering side of it, then get into mechanical or some sort of physical engineering …software is for people.

Ruby may be the proverbial “diamond in the rough” but I am having difficulty justifying all the mining equipment. I know, the metaphor is weak, but bear with me.

I definitely need to buy a book on it. Examples that I have found on the web have been less than adequate. Having been involved in OO (Object Oriented) programming for almost a decade, the concepts are not foreign to me. What is foreign is the non-programming “feel” to the language that I have already. It “feels” more like a tricky type of shell scripting than a language and it “feels” more like hacking than engineering. I’ll give it time and report back on it, but so far, its uncomfortable.

Maybe not ALL things. But there are a ton of things to consider as a freelance programmer or leading programming shop. And a few have come to my attention recently, so that is the driving force of this post.

1. Copyright/Ownership - on this project, who will own the code when it completes?
2. ITAR - Is it legal, and do I have the correct licenses under the US Dept of State Rules and Regs, to sell or exchange this technical data?
3. Programming Language - which one fits this solution?
4. What existing technologies should we use?
5. What custom technologies should we develop in-house?
6. In what areas will the customer experience growth? Engineer your software appropriately.
7. Scalability - set them up for success.

If you are unfamiliar with ITAR, I recommend looking into it if you plan on doing any work overseas, or in the defense industry. You don’t want to get fined.

There are many more things to consider. This list, is just a start.

Concurrent development. Why pray tell would I want to discuss concurrent development? Well, its going on right now. We are developing shopping carts for 6 sites right at this very instant, and they all have peculiarities about them. Some are retailing products, some are software downloads, unique each in their own right - but have many similarities. Our organization has built dozens of shopping carts, and it would be very easy to just copy the code from previous developments, but its very easy when building a custom script to build it narrowly focused and slightly less reusable. This time we are going to build the system using strong polymorphism and inheritance. Its a great opportunity to build a solid, custom shopping cart that is capable of porting over to PHP 4 or 5 with very little trouble.

Concurrent development is valuable and with a good source control system (like Subversion) and a good development package (including Aptana, Eclipse and PHPEclipse) we’re all set.

Stay posted to view the sites in action - we are really excited for our clients’ new websites.

I have been searching high and low for development software that meets the following criteria:

1. Connects to web based version control
2. Has functional reference for PHP
3. Runs on multiple platforms (PC/Mac)
4. Easily manipulates and assists with CSS/JavaScript/(X)HTML

And the good news is, I have finally found a solution… (more…)

My dad and sister once wrote a movie that was loosely based on an old western by Clint Eastwood - and it was named “Cheaters Always Win”. You will never guess who came up with the title…*ahem*.

Anyway, thanks to this page:

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/cheat-sheets/

you can win too!! These pages are great! I especially like the php and mysql versions. But they all seem equally invaluable (invaluable meaning “more than valuable”). So thanks to Dave Child for sharing.

No, not that Ajax®. You know, “AJAX” Asynchronous Javascript And Xml

Is it really as scratch free as they claim?

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PHP Security is like manure, if you only do it in one spot - it stinks, but if you spread it around, it will grow wonderful things.

When I used to hear about different php packages being compromised (see netcraft.com regarding phpBB for instance) I would immediately brush it off as a fluke or the work of some nerd with WAY too much time on his/her hands who was instigating trouble. Sometimes that profile fits. Sometimes not. Sometimes the hacker doesn’t do any harm, they are just using the exploit as a jumping off point to do damage to other sites. Sometimes that have truly malice intent.

I also thought that the only things being hacked were extremely high profile open source products or Microsoft products. Bear with me, my naivety worstens. Then I thought it might only happen to eCommerce sites.

Dead Wrong.

Someone hacked my personal website (a few years ago, and which is no longer running) just because I had cool movie quotes on it. Seriously, when you look at the server logs, it was simply an attack on a php page that I wrote in my early days of learning PHP and they completely overloaded the server. They exploited one little page to bring down an entire shared hosting environment. And all because of one little security bug I overlooked to make life easier while I was writing the code…in this case: register_globals on

The moral of the story, if there is one, is don’t think your scripts are safe just because they are only used on one little page on a site that hasn’t peak 1000 hits a year. You are vulnerable. And you may luck out, and the bad guys may never find out…but what if they do…

Be secure in all your form processing, variable loading, sql using and watch your website grow.