Company Update August 2012
By Zed Jensen
August 24, 2012
Everyone here at End Point has been busy lately, so we haven’t had as much time as we’d like to blog. Here are some of the projects we’ve been knee deep in:
- The Liquid Galaxy Team (Ben, Adam, Kiel, Gerard, Josh, Matt) has been working on several Liquid Galaxy installations, including one at the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Exploration Center in Santa Cruz, and one for the Illicit Networks conference in Los Angeles. Adam has also been preparing Ladybug panoramic camera kits for clients to take their own panoramic photos and videos. The Liquid Galaxy team welcomed new employees Aaron Samuel in July, and Bryan Berry just this week.
- Brian B. has been improving a PowerCLI script to manage automated cloning of VMware vSphere virtual machines.
- Greg Sabino Mullane has been working on various strange PostgreSQL database issues, and gave a riveting presentation on password encryption methods.
- Josh Tolley has been improving panoramic photo support for Liquid Galaxy and expanding a public health data warehouse.
- David has been at work on a web-scalability project to support customized content for a Groupon promotion, while continuing to benefit from nginx caching. He has also been …
company
Paginating API call with Radian6
By Marina Lohova
August 24, 2012
I wrote about Radian6 in my earlier blog post. Today I will review one more aspect of Radian6 API - call pagination.
Most Radian6 requests return paginated data. This introduces extra complexity of making request several times in the loop in order to get all results. Here is one simple way to retrieve the paginated data from Radian6 using the powerful Ruby blocks.
I will use the following URL to fetch data:
/data/comparisondata/1338958800000/1341550800000/2777/8/9/6/
Let’s decypher this.
-
1338958800000 is start_date, 1341550800000 is end_date for document search. It’s June, 06, 2012 - July, 06, 2012 formatted with date.to_time.to_i * 1000.
-
2777 is topic_id, a Radian6 term, denoting a set of search data for every customer.
-
8 stands for Twitter media type. There are various media types in Radian6. They reflect where the data came from. media_types parameter can include a list of values for different media types separated by commas.
-
9 and 6 are page and page_size respectively.
First comes the method to fetch a single page.
In the Radian6 wrapper class:
def page(index, &block)
data = block.call(index)
articles, count = data['article'], data[ …rails api
Merging Two Google Accounts: My Experience
By Steph Skardal
August 21, 2012
Before I got married, I used a Gmail account associated with my maiden name (let’s call this account A). And after I got married, I switched to a new gmail address (let’s call this account B). This caused daily annoyances as my use of various Google services was split between the two accounts.
Luckily, there are some services in Google that allow you to easily toggle between two accounts, but there is no easy way to define which account to use as the default for which service, so I found myself toggling back and forth frequently. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t provide functionality to merge multiple Google accounts. You would think they might, especially given my particular situation, but I can see how it’s a bit tricky in logically determining how to merge data. So, instead, I set off on migrating all data to account B, described in this email.
Consider Your Google Services
First things first, I took at look at the Google Services I used. Here’s how things broke down for me:
- Gmail: Account A forwards to account B. I always use account B.
- Google+: Use through account A.
- Google Analytics: Various accounts divided between account A and account B. …
tools
Using Different PostgreSQL Versions at The Same Time.
By Szymon Lipiński
August 20, 2012
When I work for multiple clients on multiple different projects, I usually need a bunch of different stuff on my machine. One of the things I need is having multiple PostgreSQL versions installed.
I use Ubuntu 12.04. Installing PostgreSQL there is quite easy. Currently there are available two versions out of the box: 8.4 and 9.1. To install them I used the following command:
~$ sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1 postgresql-8.4 postgresql-client-common
Now I have the above two versions installed.
Starting the database is also very easy:
~$ sudo service postgresql restart
* Restarting PostgreSQL 8.4 database server [ OK ]
* Restarting PostgreSQL 9.1 database server [ OK ]
The problem I had for a very long time was using the proper psql version. Both database installed their own programs like pg_dump and psql. Normally you can use pg_dump from the higher version PostgreSQL, however using different psql versions can be dangerous because psql uses a lot of queries which dig deep into the PostgreSQL internal tables for getting information about the database. Those internals sometimes change from one database version to another, so the best solution is to use the psql from the …
postgres ubuntu
Hidden inefficiencies in Interchange searching
By Jeff Boes
August 13, 2012
A very common, somewhat primitive approach to Interchange searching uses an approach like this:
The search profile contains something along the lines of
mv_search_type=db
mv_search_file=products
mv_column_op=rm
mv_numeric=0
mv_search_field=category
[search-region]
[item-list]
[item-field description]
[/item-list]
[/search-region]
In other words, we search the products table for rows whose column “category” matches an expression (with a single query), and we list all the matches (description only). However, this can be inefficient depending on your database implementation: the item-field tag issues a query every time it’s encountered, which you can see if you “tail” your database log. If your item-list contains many different columns from the search result, you’ll end up issuing many such queries:
[item-list]
[item-field description], [item-field weight], [item-field color],
[item-field size], [item field ...]
...
resulting in:
SELECT description FROM products WHERE sku='ABC123'
SELECT weight FROM products WHERE sku='ABC123'
SELECT color FROM products WHERE sku='ABC123'
SELECT size FROM products WHERE sku='ABC123'
... …interchange
Rails 3 ActiveRecord caching bug ahoy!
By Brian Gadoury
August 2, 2012
Sometimes bugs in other people’s code makes me think I might be crazy. I’m not talking Walter Sobchak gun-in-the-air-and-a-Pomeranian-in-a-cat-carrier crazy, but “I must be doing something incredibly wrong here” crazy. I recently ran into a Rails 3 ActiveRecord caching bug that made me feel this kind of crazy. Check out this pretty simple caching setup and the bug I encountered and tell me; Am I wrong?
I have two models with a simple parent/child relationship defined with has_many and belongs_to ActiveRecord associations, respectively. Here are the pertinent bits of each:
class MimeTypeCategory < ActiveRecord::Base
# parent class
has_many :mime_types
def self.all
Rails.cache.fetch("mime_type_categories") do
MimeTypeCategory.find(:all, :include => :mime_types)
end
end
class MimeType < ActiveRecord::Base
# child class
belongs_to :mime_type_category
end
Notice how in MimeTypeCategory.all, we are eager loading each MimeTypeCategory’s children MimeTypes because our app tends to use those MimeTypes any time we need a MimeTypeCategory. Then, we cache that entire data structure because it’s a good candidate for caching and we like our app to be fast. …
ruby rails tips
Postgres Open 2012
By David Christensen
July 31, 2012
I’m excited to be speaking at the 2012 Postgres Open Conference; Chicago, September 17-19. (Conference details at http://www.postgresopen.org/.)
My talk will be “Choosing a Logical Replication System: Slony vs Bucardo”.
I look forward to seeing many of you there!
conference postgres
Ruby on Rails software developer needed
By Jon Jensen
July 31, 2012
This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.
We’re looking for another talented Ruby on Rails developer to consult with our clients and develop their Ruby on Rails web applications. If you like to focus on solving business problems and can take responsibility for getting a job done well without intensive oversight, please read on!
End Point is a 17-year-old web consulting company based in New York city, with 28 full-time employees working mostly remotely from home offices. Our team is made up of strong ecommerce, database, and system administration talent, working together using ssh, Screen and tmux, IRC, Google+ Hangouts, Skype, and good old phones.
We serve over 200 clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations, using a variety of open source technologies including Ruby, Python, Perl, Git, PostgreSQL, MySQL, RHEL/CentOS, Debian, and Ubuntu.
What is in it for you?
- Work from your home office
- Flexible full-time work hours
- Annual bonus opportunity
- Health insurance benefit
- 401(k) retirement savings plan
- Ability to move without being tied to your job location
What you will be doing:
- Consult with clients to determine their web application needs
- Build, test, release, and maintain web applications for our …
jobs-closed rails