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Integrating UPS Worldship - Pick and Pack

By Terry Grant
May 29, 2012

Using UPS WorldShip to automate a pick and pack scenario

There are many options when selecting an application to handle your shipping needs. Typically you will be bound to one of the popular shipping services; UPS, FedEx, or USPS or a combination thereof. In my experience UPS Worldship offers a very robust shipping application that is dynamic enough to accommodate integration with just about any custom or out of the box ecommerce system.

UPS Worldship offers many automating features by allowing you to integrate in many different ways. The two main automated features consist of batch label printing and individual label printing. I would like to cover my favorite way of using UPS Worldship that allows you to import and export data seamlessly.

You should choose the solution that works best for you and your shipping procedure. In this blog post I would like to discuss a common warehouse scenario refereed to as Pick And Pack. The basic idea of this scenario is an order is selected for a warehouse personnel to fulfill, it is then picked, packed, and shipped. UPS Worldship allows you to do this in a very automated way with a bit of customization. This is a great solution for a small to …

Simple Pagination with AJAX

By Jeff Boes
May 24, 2012

Here’s a common problem: you have a set of results you want to display (search results, or products in a category) and you want to paginate them in a way that doesn’t submit and re-display your results page every time. AJAX is a clear winner in this; I’ll outline a very simple, introductory approach for carrying this off.

(I’m assuming that the reader has some modest familiarity with JavaScript and jQuery, but no great expertise. My solutions below will tend toward the “Cargo Cult” programming model, so that you can cut and paste, tweak, and go, but with enough “how and why” sprinkled in so you will come away knowing enough to extend the solution as needed.)

Firstly, you have to have the server-side processing in place to serve up paginated results in a way you can use. We’ll assume that you can write or adapt your current results source to produce this for a given URL and parameters:

/search?param1=123&param2=ABC&sort=colA,colB&offset=0&size=24

That URL offers a state-less way to retrieve a slice of results: in this case, it corresponds to a query something like:

SELECT … FROM … WHERE param1='123' AND param2='ABC'
ORDER BY colA,colB OFFSET 0 LIMIT …

Liquid Galaxy at Doodle 4 Google

By Alejandro Ramon
May 21, 2012

Last week I went to Google’s New York Office on 8th Ave with Ben, intern Ben, and hired hand Linton. For those who have not experienced this wonderful place, Google’s building takes up an entire city block, is very colorful, and is probably one of the coolest places I have ever been to in the Big Apple.

Walking through the huge building is an experience in itself, with people riding Razor Scooters by you as you pass by street signs marking different areas in the office. It was explained to me that each floor is themed after a different place in the city. For example, the 10th floor, the main floor we were working on, is based on Queens. And of course they have the best break rooms. Free food everywhere! Also they have ball pits. You know you are awesome when you have ball pits.

Anyway, the reason we were at Google in the first place was to move the Liquid Galaxy on the 10th floor down to the 5th floor. It was great to see how many people came up to us and told how much they enjoyed using the system, and they all wanted to know when and if it would ever be back.

Moving the Liquid Galaxy went smoothly, and setting it back up on the 5th floor (at the “Water Tower”) went even smoother. …

Website Performance Boot Camp at UTOSC 2012

By Jon Jensen
May 21, 2012

I’ll keep brief my last post about this year’s Utah Open Source Conference.

I was asked to give on both day one and day two a talk called “Website Performance Boot Camp” which carried this brief description:

What’s the difference between a snappy website and a sloth that you turn away from in frustration? A lot of little things, usually. It’s rarely worth doing 100% of the optimization you could do, but getting 75% of the way isn’t hard if you know where to look.

We’ll look at HTTP caching, compression, proxying, CDNs, CSS sprites, minification, and more, how to troubleshoot, and what’s best to leave alone when you have limited time or tolerance for risk.

Here is the video recording of the first time I presented the talk. (The technician noted its audio was “a little hot”.)

Use this Website Performance Boot Camp direct YouTube video link if the embedded video doesn’t work for you.

The slides for this Website Performance Boot Camp presentation are available.

Thanks again to the conference organizers and the other speakers and sponsors, and the nice venue Utah Valley University, for making it a great conference!

UTOSC 2012 talks of interest

By Jon Jensen
May 18, 2012

It’s been two weeks now since the Utah Open Source Conference for 2012. My fellow End Pointers wrote previously about it: Josh Ausborne about the mini Liquid Galaxy we set up there for everyone to play with, and Josh Tolley with a write-up of his talks on database constraints and KML for geographic mapping markup.

There were a lot of interesting talks planned, and I could only attend some of them. I really enjoyed these:

• Rob Taylor on AngularJS

• Brandon Johnson on Red Hat’s virtualization with oVirt, Spacewalk, Katello, and Aeolus

• Clint Savage about RPM packaging with Mock & Koji

• Daniel Evans on testing web applications with Capybara, embedded WebKit, and Selenium (which End Pointer Mike Farmer wrote about here back in December)

• Aaron Toponce on breaking full-disk encryption (I missed this talk, but learned about it from Aaron in the hallway track and his slides afterwards)

• Matt Harrison’s tutorial Hands-on intermediate Python, covering doctest, function parameters and introspection, closures, function and class decorators, and more.

I gave a talk on GNU Screen vs. tmux, which was fun (and ends with a live demo that predictably fell apart, and audience questions …

Keeping Your Apps Neat & Tidy With RequireJS

By Greg Davidson
May 17, 2012

RequireJS is a very handy tool for loading files and modules in JavaScript. A short time ago I used it to add a feature to Whiskey Militia that promoted a new section of the site. By developing the feature as a RequireJS module, I was able to keep all of its JavaScript, HTML and CSS files neatly organized. Another benefit to this approach was the ability to turn the new feature “on” or “off” on the site by editing a single line of code. In this post I’ll run through a similar example to demonstrate how you could use RequireJS to improve your next project.

File Structure

The following is the file structure I used for this project:

├── index.html
└── scripts
    ├── main.js
    ├── my
    │   ├── module.js
    │   ├── styles.css
    │   └── template.html
    ├── require-jquery.js
    ├── requirejs.mustache.js
    └── text.js

The dependencies included RequireJS bundled together with jQuery, mustache.js for templates and the RequireJS text plugin to include my HTML template file.

Configuration

RequireJS is included in the page with a script tag and the data-main attribute is used to specify additional files to load. In this case “scripts/main” tells RequireJS to load the main.js file …

Vim — working with encryption

By Terry Grant
May 16, 2012

On occasion I have to work with encrypted files for work or personal use. I am partial to a Linux environment and I prefer Vim as my text editor, even when I am only reading a file. Vim supports quite a few different ways of interfacing with external encryption packages. I only use two of those variations as described below.

Vim comes packaged with a default encryption mechanism referred to as VimCrypt in the documentation. I typically use this functionality as a temporary solution in a situation where my GPG is not immediately available, like a remote system that is not mine.

Using Vim’s default VimCrypt feature

Creating a new encrypted file or open a plain text file you wish to encrypt:

vim -x <filename></filename>

This will create a new file if it does not exist or open an existing file and then prompt you for a password. This password is then used as the key to encrypt and decrypt the specified file. Upon saving and exiting this file, it will be saved in this encrypted format using your crypt key.

You can also save and encrypt an open file you are currently working on like so. Please note this is a capital X:

:X 

This will also ask you for a password to encrypt the …

Points of Interest

By Brian Buchalter
May 15, 2012

It’s been a fairly straight forward week at work, but I have stumbled a few interesting finds along the way this week.

Vim Adventures

Finally! A game based approach to learning Vim keyboard commands. I was hoping someone would do this. It’s just getting started (only two levels) and sadly, it looks like it’ll be charging money to unlock higher levels. However, some things are worth paying for. I’ve found just playing the first two levels a few times have helped retrain my brain to not take my fingers off the home row. It’s still quite buggy and seems to only work in Chrome. I found several times I needed to close all my Chrome windows after playing. Also, incognito mode seems to help with the bugs, as it disables all extensions you may have installed.

MySQL query comments in Rails

Ever wanted to know where that slow query was being called from? Well, if you’re using MySQL with your Rails 2.3.x or 3.x.x app, you can get debug information about what controller’s action made the call. Check out 37Signals new marginalia gem.

How to use EC2 as a web proxy

Kevin Burke provides a very detailed HOWTO article for working around restrictions you may experience in the course of an Internet …