We've come a long 12-15 years since then. Now you can likely get an HTML spec lead at even less than those rates -- never mind a regular consultant -- Java application servers are now 'free' -- with more than one to choose from -- and domain registration has dropped to around $10 a year with companies like GoDaddy.

It seems the world has pretty much adjusted from the craziness of those days. At least I thought so, until I ventured into trying to buy a domain through a re-seller, then it seemed like 1999 all over again, when I received a counter-offer for the paltry sum of $8,000 U.S dollars. Doing the math, that's an 80,000% return on investment at today's current registrarion fees, for a 9 letter .com domain, that currently gets close to 30 hits a month being parked (yes, THREE-ZERO plain, not thousands mind you ).Here's the story and a tech business that still appears to be stuck in 1999!

If you've worked with Python and processed any non-english language characters, there's a high probability you've seen the error: "'ascii' codec can't decode byte", in this post I'll explain why this is a common error and how to solve it.

So many definitions and meanings depending on who you ask. But speaking of software consulting and clients. After over a decade of doing consulting work, here's a set of common characteristics or red flags you should be on the look out for when engaging with a potential client. They may or may not apply to your past experiences, but in my case, with over 100 clients and counting these are red flags you should be weary of.

I can't help but roll my eyes when I hear statements like "Wow, this is a fantastic app and it's FREE". Newsflash: If you're not paying for a product/app online, then you are the product for the product/app stakeholders.

If you've ever downloaded some type of open-source software, you might have noticed there are multiple locations from where to download the software. In most cases you're automatically re-directed to the location nearest to you, so you can download the software faster. This is the principle of CDNs, having multiple copies of the same content in different data centers to increase throughput. The term mirroring is also often used to describe CDNs, given that nodes in a CDN mirror copies of one another's content.

• Performance tuning.- This step would consist of refactoring a web application's source code, analyzing a web application's configuration settings, attempting to further parallelize a web application's logic, implementing caching strategies, detecting hot spots and another series of often invasive -- code wise that is -- procedures throughout a web application's tiers.
• Vertical scaling.- This step would consist of migrating a web application or individual tiers to nodes with greater resources.
• Horizontal scaling.- This step would consist of decoupling a tier from a web application or decoupling a tier in itself to run on multiple nodes. In this scenario, instead of adding more resources which is the case of vertical scaling, a web application or its tiers are decoupled so that demand is spread out among multiple nodes.

When you write character data in a text editor or IDE for a web application, it's encoded using a series of numbers. When a user's browser receives a web application's content, these numbers are decoded and placed on a screen. When data is saved to a web application's permanent storage system (e.g. RDBMS), it's encoded using a series of numbers. When a web application's business logic code reads data from a permanent storage system, it's decoded to execute the appropriate logic. This same encoding and decoding process can take place at several other parts of a web application that require reading and writing character data.

This encoding and decoding process in character data operates on the basis of character encodings, also called character sets, charsets, character maps or charmaps. But with over 50 character encodings to choose from in web applications, which one should you choose ?

This entry addresses why you should select UTF-8 Unicode for every part of your web applications and how you benefit from doing so.

You can read the headlines enticing both sides. 'How to hire and retain the top 1% of developers', 'Be a ninja or rock-start with our team', 'How to crack the interview questions at X','Interview the right way', 'Avoid saying the wrong....'

There are blog posts, articles, even entire books dedicated to the right and wrong way to both conduct interviews and being interviewed.

After more than 10 years doing software, as a contractor, employee, interviewer and interviewee, trust me there is no right or wrong way to do an interview. There are just types of interviews that you can ace or bomb depending on your skills and attitudes.

In case you're also starting to use OSGI or Spring-DM in your Java projects, here are some things to consider when choosing an OSGi distribution.

As a user, I find this feature very helpful because it tells me on what site I will end up when clicking on a link, not to mention a URL can be sufficiently descriptive to give me added context about what I'll read next.

Which is why I find URL shortners disruptive. Up until a few years ago, there were just a few URL shortening services, but now that Google has made its URL shortening service public -- http://goo.gl/ -- it appears the inevitable is upon us.

Are URL shortners really warranted on the web ? Here are some technical and usability facts.

The problem though is that Java is a huge platform, so saying its 'dead' or 'its the greatest technology in the world' is likely to be skewed. What part of Java exactly ? Mobile devices running J2ME ? Server-side web applications using JSP's/Servlets ? Game development ? Desktop applications ?

I wont focus on the negative aspects, since you can easily search the web for these often fruitless discussions. I will focus on what I've personally experienced and read are very productive and successful Java projects.

You might ask 'leap of faith ? , why ?' Well because that 'secret sauce' that makes your provider's services so appealing (e.g. fault-tolerance, automated scalability. etc), is of course: secret. This means you can't just walk away and take your application to another cloud computing provider.

If you're an extremist like Richard Stallman , you might even say cloud computing is trap because it operates like this. The OpenStack initiative is aimed at easing these fears of cloud provider lock-in.

Here is Richard Stallman who has done so much for open source software, coming out and declaring that cloud computing is a trap .

Slowly but surely, the results are starting to materialize. Which include the departure and inclusion of heavyweight IT names, as well as the reassurance and cancellation of certain product lines.

The obvious answer would be to consult the security documentation of the software you installed, DUH!. But I digress, would-be exploiters would know this like the back of their hand. However, there also aren't many broad security standards o guidelines to follow. So here are some tips and resources I've given to clients, many of which don't just pop-up on Google when you search "secure system" or something along those lines.