Doing it and doing it and doing it ...WELL!

We are back!

Fresh with another launch, A1Infrared.com is alive and kicking. After a little fussing with HostGator,

I believe that is unacceptable

we were able to get ionCube Encoder working. Yes, we do support open source, but our core framework libraries are not open source. So, we want to give thanks to HostGator for meeting our requirements.

In other news, we are moving strong with Lease2Buy, approaching the finish line. With the last cup of Gatorade crushed and dropped a few miles back, we are leading the marathon. See, most of the other web companies start off fast, but they're quickly wheezing in the back. Not us, not here at ProjectSkyLine. We set a pace and keep to it. In fact, we're starting to set a pace for a lot of *stuff* that's going on. We going strong.

Keep in touch.

- psl

Google to police the net, ProjectSkyLine to write better code

Greetings,

Yup, totally unrelated. Google will begin to police the net and we will write better code. As you know, we started the port from PHP4 to OOP PHP5, along with using a MVC inspired design and smarty templates. All great things.

We just read in a slashdot post that:

For some time now, searches have displayed 'this site may harm your computer' when Google has tagged a site as containing malware. Now the search engine giant is is further publicizing the level of infection in a paper titled: The Ghost In The Browser. For good reason, too: the company found that nearly 1 in ten sites (or about 450,000) are loaded with malicious software. Google is now promising to identify all web pages on the internet that could be malicious - with its powerful crawling abilities & data centers, the company is in an excellent position to do this. 'As well as characterizing the scale of the problem on the net, the Google study analyzed the main methods by which criminals inject malicious code on to innocent web pages. It found that the code was often contained in those parts of the website not designed or controlled by the website owner, such as banner adverts and widgets. Widgets are small programs that may, for example, display a calendar on a webpage or a web traffic counter. These are often downloaded form third party sites. The rise of web 2.0 and user-generated content gave criminals other channels, or vectors, of attack, it found.'"

Now, at first glance that is great. Besides the common posts about, "won't we be shutting out %10 of the web?".

I see an immediate tactic of malware distributed through 3rd party applications to contain code that will *hide* or disable the exploit code that injects the malware when it see's a google bot querying the page.

Pretty simple for them to do, since google bot advertises itself. In fact, writers could just have it not displayed on any OS/Browser that it couldn't effect. If it needed Windows IE Version 6 to run the exploit, programmers could only serve to that browser.

But then of course bots could start serving fake URI data.

We'll see, won't we.

In other news, we've just completed a case study of our current, *exciting* clients.
Take a look at it here.


We also started working with the World Food Prize, modifying our RSVP software, Project-Contact, to account for a special event they are organizing. Because it is a
government function, special attention must be paid to securing the data and its'
transmission. This project is currently being tested. Stay tuned for more.

We've also been working in depth on WARP2, beginning the complete wireframe and SQL transaction specification. Programming seems easy compared to this!


Also, our lead designer Ben has been working on a few skunkwork projects, including data mining, scripting, automation and emailing. Ha, fill in the blanks.

More to come!

- PSL

Back in Brown

- Primus.

Welcome all!

Its been sometime since our last info dropping session, but we have some great, GREAT, news.

First off, we just secured a project to develop a high end, feature rich, "z0mg web2pt0" application.
Our client is based in sunny CA., and has hired ProjectSkyLine to do the impossible.

And yup, we will do it.

In other news, we've secured another large, custom application, with Vaupell. We've spoke of Vaupell in the past, and have done work for them as well.

We had performed a 'code audit' on a very messy, and error prone piece of custom software. WARP is the name. ... And now we've been hired to bring WARP into 2008, a la WARP2. heh.

We've also been hired by HotGovi, to create the layout of their new site. Devin, our Creative Director, is taking charge of this project, and providing some excellent UI's and pallettes.

We look forward to seeing Devin's finished work.

The SECOND campaign of Project-Contact begins Monday, April 2nd. This sales campaign will be aided by Travis, our newest sales associate. We'll keep you posted with updates!


- psl

Funnel of Love

Greetings All,

We recently dropped Mantis and the use of our own pCal and adopted SugarCRM. This contact management software includes its own bug tracker along with providing all the CRM features one could dream of. It is just easier for us to have everything in one central location (software) then using separate tools. Say hello to the new and rm -rf to the old.

How's the business:
Thanks for asking. We just landed an exciting job for Vaupell, who is a large manufacturing company with offices throughout the US. The branch we are working with specializes in rapid prototyping, stereo lithography and short run production. They also have a full machine shop for mold production. We are building an online quoting application that will allow users to upload .STL CAD/CAM files, select material type, finish and delivery time, then create a PO. Woah, cool right. Well that's not even the half of it. We've just started the database design and will be revealing more about this project in the coming posts.

TechTrax, what is that?
We should have our first articles in TechTrax, an online E-Zine next month, March. Ben, ProjectSkyLine's chief engineer is going to be writing a paper about common web-based application security problems which includes plenty of sample code.

RSVP Mash up:
Our RSVP software aka pRSV aka Project-Contact is nearing prime time. We've recently constructed our postcards that will be used in targeted mailings. We will also be doing a round of Google PPC advertising to coincide with the February release. We are very excited to be launching our first product. Project-Contact has some great features:

• Events created are given a unique URL
• Customization of events via HTML, color changes and company logo
• Events can have multiple sessions allowing users to choose whichever they please
• Event creator can export event data directly into Excel
• Attendees can import the event directly into Google & Yahoo calendars
• Plus a whole lot more
• Project-Contact Homepage

Procedurally Porting To Object Oriented (PPTOO, heh):
We've begun porting all our procedural PHP 4 & 5 code to OOPHP 5. So far we are very happy
with the outcome, which is making the code much more readable and actually creating less overhead in the main files, moving much of the logic to the library or support files.

We've been super busy working with some new clients on some possible great projects. Stay tuned for more!

- psl

Write Software or Die Trying

Open Sores:
ProjectSkyLine supports open source software. While many of the applications we create are closed source we balance those releases with tools and open source libraries to aid developers.

Much of our daily development takes place on the LAMP (Linux – Apache – MySQL – PHP) platform, all of which are open source applications. And all these applications work exceptionally well.

Folks say, “you get what you pay for” and in LAMPs defense its sooooo true. We get software that is FREE from bullshit, FREE from show stopping bugs, FREE from limiting EULAs.Open source has it place in all marketplaces and development environments. Thinking back to a story an employee of ProjectSkyLine told once, he recalls being at a Linux Users Group meeting sometime in the late 90's. He asked if RedHat would ever have an IPO. He was laughed at.

Peas in a Pod:
Bugs and software development go together like PB&J. It sucks to hear, we know. Its just the sad reality of dealing with such complex systems. We utilize Mantis, an open source bug tracking database (mySQL) with a browser independent user interface (PHP). Its great. Its relatively lightweight in comparison to Bugzilla and setup is a breeze.

Content management Content schmanagement:
If your a LAMP developer we can be assured at one time or another you have had a client who requests the use of Joomla, or the need for a custom CMS solution. We have too. Simple apps don't always need the entire weight and unnecessary bloat of the CMS frameworks. That's why we developed an open source tool that JUST WORKS. Its smart enough to read into the database your looking to edit and fetch the tables. It allows you to update and remove rows, plus add new content. This amazingly simple tool is called pCMS and we use it. A lot.

Check out our 'Open Source' section for additional info.

Please, support OS or you might get hacked!

- psl

Second wind

Real programmers do real things:
Yup, a 16+ hour day for the pioneers of ProjectSkyLine.

Who doesn't love things that are fast and small? Motorcycles, missiles...png's?! If your a web developer and you need to support IE 6.0, 5.5, etc you have undoubtedly had a run in with
the infamous png-24 problem.

After searching Google and trying various bits of javascript, css and other kludge fixes, we still had not reached a STABLE (Visual Studio was catching IE 5.0 crashes) answer to the png-24 problem for ALL browsers. So we may not be using .png's as much as we'd like too.

A STABLE fix is to use .gif images w/a matte background to match any color of your choice.
Transparencies will also work but we've found small images distort when transparency is added. IE7 fixes this error as well as FireFox and Opera (v9).

Take some source give some improvements:
We designed pCal to help connect ProjectSkyLine's workers across states. Its been invaluable to us. Today we released updates to the pCal package and clarified the installation process.

Another open source project we find of great use is bfExplorer. It enables remote users to connect to our development server and manage files through an easy to use 'explorer-ish' interface. One point of improvement was needed in the file list code however. The application had plenty of space to display full file names but was stopping after 16 characters. Yeah, this makes it a bit difficult when you organize your files. So here's a quick fix for anyone wanting this changed:

Inside /files/config.php change $names_chars from 16 to 30;

Yup, that's it! And now you have your file names...in full!

- psl