What’s so great about family-owned companies? We don’t do business deals. We create business relationships that go beyond software and websites. Our clients aren’t Conglomo, Inc, or Customer Number 1337-D. They’re Tammy, Susan, Josh, Justin, & Steve.

We answer all our phone calls ourselves, we don’t have “Press 1 for Sales; Press 2 for Billing; Press 3 to have an awful experience.” If you want to know about a new project, you’ll talk with our CEO, Michael, and he can give you a price estimate over the phone. Theresa handles the billing. When you’re working on a project, you’ll be able to speak directly with the engineers who are working for you. You can know the names of the people working for you — and that’s something you’ll never get buying software from a Microsoft or an Apple.

I wanted to get a quick post in regarding one of our clients, Susan Goldstein, who’s recently launched a site for her organization: Floridians for the Future of the Developmentally Disabled.

Susan used to be a State Representative for Florida. Now, she spends her time working for her organization, and lobbying her former coworkers in Tallahassee for things that are important to those with developmental disabilities, and their families. She’s gotten a mention on the Sun Sentinel’s blog, and I felt like this should be shared. We wish her the best of luck as an advocate for the things she believes in.

Tim here, writing in about a new site we’ve got launched for Scantron. It’s ScantronEvents.com, and we built it at Scantron’s request to help them manage user registrations for the events they host around the country.

This isn’t the first event registration system we’ve built, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Some of the events companies host are huge, and the frequency at which the events occur is enough to have people on the payroll just to keep on top of things.

For example, there’s another event management system I worked on a while back, for Harland Financial Solutions (Scantron is actually a division of Harland). They’re a great company who we’ve done a lot of work for over the years, and they are constantly hosting meetings and other events.

We’ve just launched a new website for Florida Partners in Crisis.

Florida Partners in Crisis offers treatment and support services for people with mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders. Their new website will allow them to bring vital information to the public in a timely manner and with the skywriter content management system and our custom web tools running the site they can update most of the content on their own.

We’ve just become a sponsor for BarCampOrlando. See you there.

BarCampOrlando is a bi-yearly event to bring together people from different technical backgrounds to share and learn from each other. Several of us have just registered for the event and we’re very excited about attending.

I’m working on a side project, naturally in PHP (v4.4.1 to be specific). There’s a lot of string parsing, and regex just wasn’t able to handle it. When it worked, it would take 30+ seconds; often it timed out. I went and wrote some tail-recursive functions that would do the parsing, but much faster (it works about 90% of the time and load times take 2-3 seconds).

Unfortunately, PHP doesn’t work well with recursion. For one, there’s no real good way to release memory, so it’s easy to use up all the available memory quickly. Oh well, so be it. That’s how the language is built.

Recently I’ve found myself thinking about something really cool going on at work or out in the tech world and then I’ll have the following thought, “that really deserves an official corporate blog post.” Then I let the moment slip by and I quickly find myself wrapped up in the all of the other happenings around the office.

With this post I declare that these moments of inspiration shall slip by no more!

I’m hoping to use this blog to let everyone know about the various things going on here at cloudspace. Notices about new projects, server/system upgrades, and general techy things will hopefully fill this space and provide an informative and interesting read. So welcome to the first of many blog postings by myself and the staff here at cloudspace!