We are proud to announce the opening our new sister company, Lextech Labs. Sure, a sister company may not be a sibling in the traditional sense, but there are some commonalities.

When connecting to remote systems, it’s often easy to overlook a very simple fact; many methods of communication are not protected in any way, shape, or form. Even as you read this post, the data is being sent in cleartext and anyone with the desire to watch over your shoulder, can. Data is the foundation of the internet and businesses in general, and not all of it is a big deal if someone else gets it. However, there is a lot of information that should be protected, and there are a lot of ways to protect it.

Social networks dedicated to niche groups focused around a common industry, interest or cause have been spreading like wildfire. Creating your own social network is now extremely easy using freely available tools such as Ning.

I can’t think of any nice way to put this, so I’m just gonna say it: I really hate your website. Looking at it makes my eyeballs bleed. The pain and suffering that it inflicts upon the world has caused me to question my belief in a benevolent God. I just finished writing a letter to the Hague requesting that the creation of your website be prosecuted as a war crime.

Apple’s iPhone has radically changed the mobile applications landscape by opening up mobile application development to any web development firm using Web 2.0 standard technology. No longer is a specialized team who know the intricacies of proprietary cell phone software development necessary. This allows much faster development of mobile apps and also removes the dependency on a mobile carrier to approve software on their wireless network.

I’ve been tinkering around with Canonical’s Ubuntu (Oo - boon - too) since the first release 4.10 “Warty Warthog” all the way up to their latest release 8.04 “Hardy Heron”. Since then I’ve flirted with other distributions, but I always end up back with Ubuntu for several reasons. The top three are as follows…

How many web browser windows do you have open during the day? Have you ever tried to dedicate a window to a specific web application only to have it overrun by a link to another site? Site Specific Browsers (SSB) might be the answer you are looking for.

Web based systems typically require an investment in hardware, hosting and management to get them off the ground once they’re beyond a prototype. That is starting to change with things like Google’s App Engine being released.

If the phrases “fault tolerance” and “load balancer” sound all but foreign to you, you are not alone. I used to consider myself fairly well versed in technical jargon. It wasn’t until I started working in the Marketing Department at Lextech that I realized how much I didn’t know. There were times I felt like I was working in a distant land, where everyone dealt in a currency to which I didn’t have access.

I thought we had a good thing going; I thought we could trust each other. I wouldn’t play with her heart, and she wouldn’t let me down. We seemed to be in a stable, long-term relationship. Then she just stopped trying and completely locked me out. I couldn’t figure out why her behavior just changed overnight, and I didn’t know what else to do. So I had someone follow her, to find out what was really going on.

While I would never hire some sneaky character to follow a person, I have no such qualms about having something stalk a misbehaving application.

Fiona from College@Home pointed us to an article they have up covering innovative ways to use the iPhone in a research or library setting. It presents some great ideas that can be applied in most businesses too.

“Whether you love or loathe technology the reality is that it’s going to play a big role in the future of libraries and educational facilities all over the world. Mobile technology has been at the center of a lot of discussion lately in research and library facilities, with schools like ACU choosing to distribute iPhones to new students for educational purposes. … Here are a few ideas and tips to get you started on using the iPhone for more than just calls.”

The following profile was compiled from an interview with Lisa Reisman, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Aptium Global Inc. Read on to learn how she is using technology to generate revenue.

Get some valuable advice and the recipe to this business’ Secret Sauce!

Previous step — Getting started in part 1

Install day. Pull the car in from the 20 degree November day to the garage with the big space heater going. Numb hands and warming surfaces with a heat gun to make them pliable or to get adhesives to actually stick definitely slows things a bit.

With the impending launch of the 2.0 OS for the iPhone allowing third parties to build iPhone applications, now is the ideal time to be rolling out an extension of your existing web system for iPhone users. I’m not talking about a different web version but a truly native app that links to your web system.

Having developed several CakePHP projects in Eclipse, I’ve always been on the lookout for things to make my life easier. Not too long ago I stumbled across an addition to Eclipse’s PHP Development Tools (PDT), which integrates the Zend/Xdebug debuggers into the Eclipse environment. The ZendDebugger binaries are available for OS X, Linux and Windows platforms at Zend’s website http://www.zend.com/en/community/pdt.

So here is a problem we’ve run up against several times: displaying live, streaming video in real-time. Doesn’t sound that hard, but you’d be amazed. We are generally dealing with RTSP streams, which both QuickTime and RealPlayer handle just fine - for pre-recorded content. But I’ll tell you what, no matter how many preferences you enable with names like “Instant-On”, “PlayNow”, and “TrueLive”, these players will continue to suck for real-time video.

Our data center move checklist had 3 major parts - what to do before the move, what to do a short time before and at the time of the move, and how to validate that everything was up and running correctly. The advance portion of it included things like notifying customers of the planned downtime, figuring out who’s DNS was where so it could be properly modified at the time of the move, and quite a few others.

The following profile was compiled from an interview with Ara Surenian, founder and President of Cadent Resources, Inc. Read on to learn how he is using technology to generate revenue.

Get some valuable advice and the recipe to this business’ Secret Sauce!

One of the things that constantly comes up when you start taking the security of your computer systems seriously is the simple fact that your users are the weakest part of any security policy. You can spend all day working out intrusion detection systems, firewalls, nearly impossible to crack passwords, and doors with five levels of authentication, but when your security guard holds the door open for the pizza guy, you have a problem.

Security researchers have uncovered a massive database of web site FTP logins and passwords to web sites around the world, including many well known sites. The scary twist is that the crooks behind the database have put in place a trading and payment interface to allow less talented thieves to purchase access to these compromised sites and even automatically upload tools to help them attack site visitors.