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We attend to both larger and small individuals who need custom work. Generally Z505 starts off with low hourly rates, and we allow you to decide to give us a raise when you see that we do an excellent job. At the same time, if you are on a shoe string budget then Z505 can make compromises. Note however that Z505 is very busy with existing clients, and is involved in longer term projects and/or partnerships. If we can not take on your project immediately, Z505 will notify you - or there may even be a delay in replying if we are extremely busy at the moment.

Initial consultation (regarding project goals, general issues, and general planning) is free. Therefore do not hesitate to contact Z505 if you just want to discuss an estimation, project goals, project ideas, etc. Our phone number can be obtained by e-mailing Z505. Z505 also does not charge when we are sending emails or talking on the phone with you. We only charge for programming hours, database administration, intense research, etc.

How many consultants publish their rates and give you the bottom line before a contract is even discussed? Not many. Z505 feels you should have a general idea ahead of time.

Introduction

Z505 offers consulting and service for those running Microsoft Windows, BSD, and *NIX/GNU/Linux operating systems. We are experienced with relational database theory and practice, system administration, networking, Delphi, Freepascal, Powtils, SQL, HTTP, TCP/IP.

We also of course work with PHP, Ruby, shell scripts, C/C++, and other tools and languages - however we have listed mainly our niche tools and skills.

Z505 is a new consulting company (with years of experience developing private software for ourselves) and would like to offer a serious consulting option for your company or self.

We love what we do

Take advantage of our efficiency and expertise. Z505 is Canadian based, native English speaking.

Outsourcing to far off shore non English speaking countries has its problems. Z505 is in Canada, a serious advantage for you or your company.

Currently Z505 specializes in the following areas:

Database and Server Maintenance

• expertise in the relational model, databases, SQL

• Z505 can optimize databases, normalize tables, migrate, tweak indexes, administrate

• Z505 can convert html, Excel files, or similar less structured data into a database, CSV formats or similar

Data mining and extraction

• We build custom parsers to get that data out of X and into Y. From website monitoring, affiliate mining, Amazon integration, Wikipedia, inventory scraping, brokers, price watching tools, stock market spying, Ebay monitoring - we can extract and display data from any website or file. We've built several parsers and extraction tools that are reusable and maintainable.

• Having issues with robot/scraping scripts or using clunky "mashup" or "macro" programs? We write custom tools that have been parsing data for years with small maintenance. We also assist you in using your existing tool-sets, robots, mashup tools, scrapers.
• Whether it's one hundred or three million websites (or files) that you wish to extract data from, we have the expertise and have been there and done that. Drop your extracted data into a local database or deal with it in real time on the fly in a custom program. We can also host your data on your or our servers.

• Z505 can build parser programs for the end user or developer, display data in a GUI, web page, or export to a file.

• For desktop software, servers, web applications, or web services.

• The core of our scraper and data mining code is not a bunch of regular expressions and search and replace hacks. We write high quality, maintainable, and reusable parsers. Know the difference between a parser and a bunch of regex infested scripts.

• Examples of data mining, parsing, scraping:
  • Z505 required a way to extract Stock Market quotations and built this demo stock quote software in only a few hours here.

  • Z505 required a way to extract Auction searches from Ebay and built this demo software that does not require an Ebay API subscription in only a few hours here.

  • Z505 has also worked with Amazon, Ebay, and Google API's. However, we can parse any site without an API and build robots that obey robots.txt if needed.

Web security

• Within 2 minutes and 24 seconds Z505 was able to inject input forms into several of these so called "Hacker Safe" websites and construct fake login/password forms on the sites using only a URL. With this URL, an attacker could have retrieved sensitive email, login, and password information from a corporate website.

  Is your website secure? Would you like to know? Z505 is not a black hat cracker team, but since Z505 has been building web libraries for hundreds of programmers, Z505 has a lot of experience with the flaws in input forms, scripts, SQL injection and web security in general. Whether it is cross site scripting, input form injection, or other insecurities - your site may not be safe at all. Contact Z505 for an analysis of your website, online store, or portal.

Malware, Spyware, Adware, Virus removal

• When the automated ad-aware or spyware removal tools do not do their job, what does one do?

• Manually removing spyware and Adware from Windows operating systems requires expertise and in depth knowledge of how threads and processes are launched.

• Not only the Windows Registry and Windows file system needs to be monitored, but hidden threads and dynamic link libraries too.

• Z505 has successfully removed hundreds of spyware programs from computers which "ad-aware" or "spyware removal tools" could not remove! We have the right tools to monitor and extract the problem in your corporate network, small business network, or home PC. We've successfully removed spyware which is not even visible in the task manager and is running as a piggy back thread or DLL.

Ebay Automation, Auction Automation

• automatically dissect incoming emails and spit the auction information into Excel or a database

• Save time by automatically keeping track of each ebay auction instead of manually entering your sales data into a spreadsheet or database. Our software can forward and organizes all the data into an Excel spreadsheet or database from an "Item Sold" email from Ebay

• shopping cart system that reads live data from ebay without subscribing to the ebay API - our Ebay scraper software saves an ebay seller thousands of dollars per year.

Courses and Learning

• We will have more material, ebooks, binders, research studies, and papers for purchase (and free) soon.

Plug-ins and modularization

• Plug-in systems: robust and powerful plug-in systems for software applications. Looking to implement a plug-in system into your Delphi/C++ or other application? Does your software, text editor, IDE already sell many copies, but lacks straightforward and powerful plug-in system for your users? Does your plug-in system follow a standard that is flexible? Z505 has invented, studied, developed, and become and expert in plugin architecture.

Website Development and Programming

• We can do website development (and basic graphics), or we can work with your graphic designer. Z505 can produce update-able sites that allow the programmer and designer to work together easily, using html templates with content variables embedded in them.

• We also can do beautiful less graphic intense fast loading websites

• Strong security - Z505 founder Lars is the core developer of a secure web framework and he has protected several critical web sites from URL injection, cross site scripting, SQL injection.

Other Niche Areas we Specialize in:

• system administration, SSH/Telnet, Windows programming

• Wikipedia extraction, wikipedia dump files, wikipedia XML dumps, wikipedia xml to sql conversion, utilizing millions of pages of wikipedia content on your website.

• TCP/IP, sockets, thin clients, internet enabled software

• Networking software applications together in the same building or across the world.

• Deploy Linux environments from within Microsoft Windows. Z505 has experience with our own FakeLinux, and experience with Virtual Box (alternative to VMware), colinux. Running an Apache Linux web server or whatever linux software you wish, right from within windows is not a dream. It's just an obvious possibility.

  Does your workplace or desktop require that you be at two operating systems at once? No problem.

• Operating system installations. Is your business ready to install BSD, GNU/Linux or Microsoft Windows on even several hundred computers? Z505 can help

• Web server administration and installations. Apache, Lighttpd, linux web server installations on any operating system. Z505 founder has also written and has experience with light weight web servers for localhost, embedded use, etc.

• Search engine marketing. In addition to e-mail marketing, the majority of your web visitors will come from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. It doesn't matter how many search engines you submit to or how many times of the year you submit your website. Z505 has several years of experience in the search engine game, and several case studies of top ten results for targeted search engine terms.

  The search engines are random and changeable. There is no definite science behind search engine marketing. There are, however, consistent ways of getting top ten search engine results and several streams of traffic from the search engines. See examples in PNG format.

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