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:
- Use the final thought of your first draft in the beginning of the final message.
- Write out a lot, and cut down 90% of it.
- 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.
- For important, longer documents, do editing the day after.
- Re-read anything before you send it.
- Reading what you’ve written out loud is great way to catch mistakes.
- Have the wisdom to know when not to reply or send something.
- Don’t be afraid to use the phone if your thoughts aren’t concise enough for an email.
company conference
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.
ecommerce interchange
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.
visionport
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.
clients conference ecommerce interchange
EP Meeting: Clean Editor and Git Workflows
By Matt Vollrath
June 14, 2012
Having good editor configurations and Git habits is a great way to make work easier and less tedious. David Christensen showed us how to reduce cruft and leverage advanced features of Git to take control of the code.
Indentation is a big part of reading and understanding code, too important to be ignored. Tabs can be interpreted differently in different editors, so using spaces makes life easier for you and your coworkers. Most editors have automatic indentation and tab translation settings to standardize the workflow. Remember, code should be optimized for humans.
Commit often! If your commit can not be summarized in one sentence, it is probably not granular enough. Don’t hesitate to make multiple commits per work session as you accomplish separate tasks. In your commit messages, describe the ‘why,’ not the ‘how.’ Don’t mix trivial style or whitespace tweaks with actual code modifications, because it makes it harder to catch important changes in diffs. If you make multiple changes to a single file, you can use -p/–interactive mode to commit hunks of code separately.
git tips tools
Handling Ecommerce Transactions with PayPal
By Greg Davidson
June 14, 2012
Options
PayPal has several options for payment processing and Mark Johnson just shared his experiences working with saved credit cards using PayPal’s Express Checkout.
Order Types
There are a couple of order types of transaction in Express Checkout:
- Standard: everything purchased in a single transaction
- Custom: handles multiple shipments and multiple charges
What’s in a name?
PayPal generates something they call an “order” that is distinct from the order for a given merchant. This is typically confusing to merchants because their concept of an order simply refers to the order a customer has just placed in their ecommerce application. The PayPal “order” is created prior to any other transaction. If the authorization fails, the “order” is not removed (which would be nice) but lingers around for 29 days by default. When merchants ask about this, the response PayPal offers is to void the “order”. For standard on API call (authorization) if that fails you have to do a second API call to void the order.
The “order” has little value except to specify a charge ceiling for a given ecommerce transactions. Although the ceiling is set by the “order”, there is the notion of an “order …
ecommerce payments api
Josh Tolley: About Google Earth Tours
By Josh Ausborne
June 14, 2012
Josh Tolley spoke on the building of tours for viewing within Google Earth and the Liquid Galaxy. It seems that everybody has data and wants a way to view it, such as businesses who want to visually represent where their customers are based, or even documenting where lightning strikes within a certain region. Google Earth is a fantastic tool for the viewing of this data.
Josh talked about what is required to display geographical data in Google Earth. The data needs to go through the process of geocoding, which is the conversion to latitudinal and longitudinal format. As this is a tedious process, it is highly recommended to use a script and loop through the conversion. Google Earth is based upon KML documents, which are XML documents that contain geographical data. He explained some of the different ways to create the KML documents, including the use of Google Earth itself, writing by hand, or using a tool such as kamelopard or PyKML to create the data.
He demonstrated how a KML file can contain data such as placemarks, polygons, time lapses, overlays, and animations, and he showed his own farm with an overlay placed in the wheat field. Now the zombies know where to find wheat. …
google-earth visionport kamelopard kml
OpenSSH Tips and Tricks with Matt Vollrath
By Brian Buchalter
June 14, 2012
Matt Vollrath’s presentation focused on unique solutions Liquid Galaxy administration requires.
Specifically, Liquid Galaxy requires secure access to many public sites, which we don’t have physical access to. OpenSSH helps handle these remote challenges securely and quickly.
Multiplexing for Speed
The LG master node can send commands to all the slave nodes at the same time. This can be helpful to examine all display nodes’ current states without manual work. The multiplexed connection uses options -f (background), -M (control socket), -N (no command), and -T (prevents pseudo-terminal from being allocated), and any further connections to the host do not need to authenticate, for speed.:
ssh -fMNT hostname &
Include the ampersand to be able to track the PID of the background ssh connection. This connection will be maintained until it fails or is killed.
Additionally -O allows us to examine the state of the control connection as well as exit. As of OpenSSH 5.9, you can also use -O with the “stop” command to not accept any more multiplexers.
When combined with a simple bash script to inspect the host connection first, the script can create that multiplexed connection first. This …
visionport ssh tips