Our Blog

Nifty In-Button Confirmation

By Evan Tann
December 19, 2011

I’ve been working on a personal email client after work, called Warm Sunrise, that forces myself to keep a manageable inbox. One of the goals of the project was to get to a zero-inbox everyday, so I needed a ‘Delete All’ button that was easy-to-use without running the risk of accidentally deleting emails. I took a look at JavaScript’s confirm, which is jarring, and jQuery’s dblClick, which doesn’t provide any feedback to the user after the first click, leaving the user to wonder why their emails weren’t deleted.

Given these options, I built my own button using Rails 3.1, jQuery, and CoffeeScript, that better fit the goals I set out with. It requires a double click, but gives the user a confirmation in the button itself, without any sort of timeout.

Starting with app/views/letters/index.html.erb, I generated the buttons using Rails helpers and Twitter’s Bootstrap classes:

<%= link_to 'Write letter', new_letter_path, :class => "btn primary pull-right far-right" %>
<%= link_to 'Delete all', '#', :class => "btn pull-right no_danger", :id => "delete_all" %>
<%= link_to 'Are you sure?', …

Sanitizing supposed UTF-8 data

By Jon Jensen
December 17, 2011

As time passes, it’s clear that Unicode has won the character set encoding wars, and UTF-8 is by far the most popular encoding, and the expected default. In a few more years we’ll probably find discussion of different character set encodings to be arcane, relegated to “data historians” and people working with legacy systems.

But we’re not there yet! There’s still lots of migration to do before we can forget about everything that’s not UTF-8.

Last week I again found myself converting data. This time I was taking data from a PostgreSQL database with no specified encoding (so-called “SQL_ASCII”, really just raw bytes), and sending it via JSON to a remote web service. JSON uses UTF-8 by default, and that’s what I needed here. Most of the source data was in either UTF-8, ISO Latin-1, or Windows-1252, but some was in non-Unicode Chinese or Japanese encodings, and some was just plain mangled.

At this point I need to remind you about one of the most unusual aspects of UTF-8: It has limited valid forms. Legacy encodings typically used all or most of the 255 code points in their 8-byte space (leaving point 0 for traditional ASCII NUL). While UTF-8 is compatible with 7-bit ASCII, it does not …

Hurray for tracking configuration files in source control

By Josh Williams
December 15, 2011

In a number of places we’ve started tracking configuration files locally in Git. It’s great for Postgres configs, Apache or nginx, DNS zone files, Nagios, all kinds of things. A few clients have private offsite repos we push to, like at GitHub, but for the most part they’re independent repos. It’s still great for keeping track of what was changed when, and by whom.

In one case we have a centralized Nagios instance that does little more than receive passive checks from a number of remote systems. I’d set the checks on the remote systems but not loaded that configuration in yet. However while getting the central system set up, muscle memory kicked in and I suddenly had a half-red console as it’s loading in stale data.

We don’t need a flood of false alerts over email, but I don’t want to completely revert the config and lose all those services…

[root nagios]# git stash; service nagios restart; git stash apply
Saved working directory and index state WIP on master: 0e9113b Made up commit for blog
HEAD is now at 0e9113b Made up commit for blog
Running configuration check...done.
Stopping nagios: .done.
Starting nagios: done.
# On branch master
# (etc)

Green! A small victory, for …

Preventing Global Variables in JavaScript

By Evan Tann
December 15, 2011

JavaScript’s biggest problem is its dependence on global variables ―Douglas Crockford, JavaScript: The Good Parts

Recently I built out support for affiliate management into LocateExpress.com’s Sinatra app using JavaScript and YUI.

I used a working page from the admin, Service Providers, as a starting point to get something up and running for affiliates quickly. By the time I finished, the Affiliates page worked great, but forms on the Service Provider page no longer populated with data.

Identifying a misbehaving global variable

There were no errors in the console, and the forms on the Service Providers page remained broken even after restoring an old copy of service_providers.js. As it turns out, a global variable, edit_map, was defined within service_providers.js, and again in the copied affiliates.js. Credit for spotting the problem goes to Brian Miller.

The fix was as simple as moving edit_map’s declaration into the file’s YUI sandbox, so that version of edit_map wouldn’t be visible to any other pages in the admin.

Preventing global variables

As projects grow and complexity increases, it becomes easier and easier to overlook global variables and thus run into this …

Using Gmail at Work

By Brian Buchalter
December 15, 2011

The Short Story

For those who don’t care about why, just how…

1. Create a new Gmail account
2. Setup Mail Fetcher
3. Setup send email from another account;and make it your default
4. Verify you send and receive as your corporate address by default using the web client
5. Setup your mobile
6. From your mobile go to m.google.com/sync and Enable “Send Mail As” for this device (tested only on iOS)
7. Verify you send and receive as your corporate address by default using your mobile client
8. Setup Google Authorship with your domain’s email address

The Long Story

Here at End Point there are a lot of opinions about email clients. Our hardcore folks like Alpine while for most people Evolution, Thunderbird, or Outlook will do. As a Gmail user since September 2004, I found I needed to figure out how get our corporate email system to work with my preferred client.

My first reaction was to have Gmail act as an IMAP client. I found (as many others had) that Gmail does not support IMAP integration with other accounts. However, Gmail does have a POP email client known as Mail Fetcher. I found that Gmail does support encrypted connections via POP, so use them if your email server supports them. When combined …

Liquid Galaxy at Le Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris

By Benjamin Goldstein
December 12, 2011

Today there was an exciting opening of a new 48-screen Liquid Galaxy display at Le Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. The configuration and use of this display is distinct from other Liquid Galaxies in that it consists of six columns and eight rows of 55” bezel-less displays set out on the floor to show just the city of Paris. This Liquid Galaxy replaced a physical model of Paris that was previously set up in the same space. It has four podiums with touch screens that visitors can use to navigate about Paris. The museum produced an impressive video showing the setup of this project:

End Point had the pleasure of working for and with Google on this project. Pierre Lebeau of Google spearheaded the project—at least from our point of view. Pierre’s quick and clever thinking from a high-level perspective and his leadership were crucial for getting the project done on schedule. He’s posted a nice blog article about the project. In addition to the Googlers on site our engineers also had the opportunity to see the talented museum staff at work and to work with JCDecaux who set up and are supporting the Planar Clarity displays. Kiel Christofferson and Adam Vollrath spent a couple of weeks …

Sunspot, Solr, Rails: Working with Results

By Steph Skardal
December 12, 2011

Having worked with Sunspot and Solr in several large Rails projects now, I’ve gained some knowledge about working with result sets optimally. Here’s a brief explanation on working with results or hits from a search object.

MVC Setup

When working with Sunspot, searchable fields are defined in the model:

class Thing < ActiveRecord::Base
  searchable do
    text :field1, :stored => true
    text :field2
    string :field3, :stored => true
    integer :field4, :multiple => true
  end
end

The code block above will include field1, field2, field3, and field4 in the search index of things . A keyword or text search on things will search field1 and field2 for matches. field3 and field4 may be used for scoping, or limiting the search result set based to specific values of field3 or field4.

In your controller, a new search object is created with the appropriate scoping and keyword values, shown below. Pagination is also added inside the search block.

class ThingsController < ApplicationController
  def index
    @search = Sunspot.search(Thing) do
      #fulltext search
      fulltext params[:keyword]

      #scoping
      if params.has_key?(:field3)
        with :field3, …

Christmas Tree Commerce in 2011

By Brian J. Miller
December 9, 2011

Took a bit of a break today to get one of those perennial activities out of the way, the great Christmas tree shop. Much hasn’t changed about this time honored tradition, don the hats and gloves (well, at least until global warming takes over), pile the family in the car, and hit the ATM to get a bundle of cash to pass “under the table.” Not so fast, this is 2011 and Christmas tree lots aren’t what they used to be.

Rest assured much of the experience hasn’t changed, you still get to wade up and down aisles of freshly cut firs. Trying to select just the right balance of fat vs. thin, tall vs. short, density vs. ornament hanging potential, and there is still some haggling over price (if you are lucky) and the inevitable chainsawing, bundling, and twining to the top of the old station wagon (well, SUV). But today did have a big difference, and one that our e-commerce clients and more so our bricks and mortar clients should be particularly mindful, the “cash box” with the flip up lid and stacks of tens and twenties had been replaced by an iPad with a card reader. This Christmas tree lot has gone high tech, all the way. The iPad totaled the order, and with card reader attached, took my …