Our Blog

Interchange Caching Implementation Under Fire

By Adam Vollrath
June 15, 2012

Richard and David presented a recent case study on an e-commerce hosting client.

Several Interchange catalogs drive their individually branded storefronts, on top of a standard single-server LAMP stack boosted by an SSD drive.

Last year the sites came under an intense Distributed Denial of Service attack which lasted nearly two weeks. End Point responded immediately and soon engaged third-party DDoS mitigation firms. This experience later prompted an Interchange caching implementation.

Cache population and expiration is difficult for any dynamic web application using sessions, and doubly so for e-commerce sites. Every shopping cart needs a session, but delaying session creation until the first POST submission enables efficient caching for most of the sitemap. Other Interchange caching improvements made it back into the upstream code.

IPv6 Basics by Josh Williams

By Brian Gadoury
June 15, 2012

Josh Williams reviewed World IPv6 Launch that occurred on 2012-06-06. Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook are some of the larger companies that launched on that date. While not exactly on the same scale, endpoint.com did a little over a year earlier.

As many of you may already know, the pool of (32-bit) IPv4 IP addresses that we’re all familiar with, has officially run out. IPv6, defined in 1998, has 128-bit addresses that are constructed by 8 hexadecimal segments.

What are some of the advantages of having the huge pool of addresses? Well, there’s really no longer any need for NAT—​everything becomes directly routable. IPv6 also gives us stateless auto-configuration that uses your MAC address to create your IPv6 address, so this means you’re that much more likely to be able to successfully get the same network address. IPsec is optionally built in to IPv6. (Optional because not everything truly needs IPsec.)

Not sure if your computer or mobile device is using IPv6 yet? Hit http://testipv6.com and it’ll tell you. Welcome to the future, finally.

Locate Express presentation

By Terry Grant
June 15, 2012

Jon Jensen gave a presentation about our client Locate Express, which is a locator service website that allows the user to instantaneously locate a professional in a specific area. The site was launched in 2011 and has been picking up in popularity ever since.

You can “Find a Pro”, as they put it, in three easy steps:

• Step 1, you select the service you are looking for. You can select anything from lawn care to plumbing.
• Step 2, you enter the address location you would like to locate the closest “pros” for the specified service.
• Step 3 shows you a list of pros for the selected service on a map. You can then select the pro of your choosing.

This is a very useful and easy to use service. I think Locate Express has great potential to catch on as it continues to gain traction, especially for service providers carrying “smart” mobile devices. In particular I think this will become more popular in utility emergencies on the weekends and after-hours, when it might be more difficult to find someone to fix your broken water pipe.

Popular Mobile Apps from Brian and Adam

By Steph Skardal
June 15, 2012

In our last lightning talk of the conference, Brian Dillon and Adam Vollrath shared some of their favorite mobile apps. Brian queried the room to see the phone type divide in the room. Here was our split: 33%—​iPhones, 33%—​Androids, 33%—​unsmart phones.

Brian likes pure simplicity for iPhone apps:

• Dropkick, categorization, syncing, require account creation
• Simplenote: same thing, but for notes

Adam has an Android “because Google owns him”:

• Google Goggles: Rumored Google technology is integrated into this. Google tries to ad-hoc identify logos, book covers, automatic translation of images, images, QR codes.
• K9 Mail: email client
• Andchat: IRC client
• WiFi Analyzer: provides site survey on network traffic
• SpeedTest

When not writing in Bash, Perl, Python, and Ruby we write in English: Writing Tips

By Brian Dillon
June 15, 2012

It is as important for our team to improve our skills writing for humans as it is writing code for computers, says our CTO Jon Jensen. He’s right. Thankfully he had a good list of tips for us to make our human writing as effective as our code.

Here are a few great gems:

• Don’t be afraid of bullet-points. ;-)
• Keep it short.
• Understand your audience.

Jon’s recommendations led to some End Pointers to share writing tips of their own:

1. Use the final thought of your first draft in the beginning of the final message.
2. Write out a lot, and cut down 90% of it.
3. When it comes to emails, lay out clear actionable steps you want a person to take in the beginning or in the last sentence of an email, not buried in a thick paragraph.
4. For important, longer documents, do editing the day after.
5. Re-read anything before you send it.
6. Reading what you’ve written out loud is great way to catch mistakes.
7. Have the wisdom to know when not to reply or send something.
8. Don’t be afraid to use the phone if your thoughts aren’t concise enough for an email.

World of Powersports Client Report

By Mike Farmer
June 15, 2012

World of Powersports is a family of websites that runs on Interchange. Carl Bailey describes how a few years after working on their initial website, World of Powersports came to End Point to develop a new website called Dealer Orders which has been very successful. This has allowed End Point the opportunity to work on several other related websites for the client.

Since then, we have worked on several other sites that have since been merged into one, Motorcycle Dealer.

All of the websites pull from a single database that is fed by various APIs from parts vendors such as Honda, Suzuki, and Polaris. This updates the inventory counts and other related information for all of the sites. It also interacts with online sites such as eBay, Google Base, and Amazon for checking part availability and pricing.

Implementing the interactions between these different entities has provided End Point with much of the challenge of these sites but continues to provide the client and customers with great value.

Adam Vollrath shows Liquid Galaxy Tours at the End Point Company Meeting

By Gerard Drazba
June 14, 2012

No one has presented more Liquid Galaxy Tours than Adam Vollrath.

Silver Spring Networks has made extensive use of Liquid Galaxy tours to demonstrate the capabilities of their smart grid technology. Adam most recently presented some of this work at the EMC 2012 in Las Vegas. The tours visualize data on such things as peak power usage time and place, outages and repair times, even lightning strikes.

This data can bore down to individual meters per residence or business. Graphic representation of this data is overlaid on Google Earth. This creates stunning visualizations of Silver Spring Networks’ capabilities.

There are applications for high-end real estate as well. After a trip to the property with a panoramic camera, a property can be toured virtually. End Point is actively developing this capability. Early demonstrations have taken us to Grand Central Station, an Occupy rally, and Highline Park in Manhattan.

Not featured in this talk is a large library of tours created for Google Ocean. These tours have been seen at conferences around the world.

College District presentation

By Greg Sabino Mullane
June 14, 2012

Our company meeting at End Point opened today with a presentation about one of our clients, College District by Terry Grant and Ron Phipps, explaining how the site works from a mostly technical angle. College District is a “community where fans and designers create, grade, and promote collegiate products you can’t find anywhere else.” Each team has its own site: for example, the University of Florida Gators can be found at GatorDistrict.com.

Ron and Terry explained the history of how College District moved from a brick and mortar store to their current wide array of sites. They also explained all the technical underpinnings of how things work behind the scene. The sites are powered by Interchange, Postgres 9.1, Git, and other cool technologies. They also explored some of the exciting upcoming ideas for the site, including …no, that would be telling.