Our Blog

We are hiring: Ruby on Rails Developer

By Ron Phipps
June 24, 2011

This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.

Job Description:

End Point is looking for a talented software developer who can consult with our clients and develop their Rails web applications. We need someone that focuses on the client and will deliver quality, tested code.

About End Point:

End Point is a 15-year-old web consulting company based in New York City, with 20 full-time employees working remotely from around the United States. Our team is made up of strong e-commerce, database, and system administration talent that leverage a variety of open source technologies.

We service over 200 clients ranging from small mom and pop shops to large corporations. End Point continues to grow this year and we’re looking for intelligent and passionate people that want to join our team and make a difference. We prefer open source technology and do collaborative development with Git, GNU Screen, IRC, and voice.

What is in it for you?

• Work from your home office or our Manhattan based headquarters
• Flexible full-time work hours
• Strong balance of work and home life
• Bonus opportunities
• Health insurance benefits
• Ability to move without being tied to your job location

What you will be doing:

• Consulting with clients to determine their web …

Competing with the big players in e-commerce

By Ron Phipps
June 20, 2011

While attending the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in San Diego last week I had a few moments to speak with Nathan Barling, the CTO for Shoebacca.com. During our conversation he mentioned he would be speaking at the conference in the track titled: “Small Retailers: Winning Strategies in a tougher market”. I attended his talk and was impressed by the things that Shoebacca is doing to appear larger then they are, which helps them compete with the big players in their industry such as Zappos. The tactics that Nathan discussed can be applied to many industries in e-commerce and for all sizes of businesses, even those on limited budgets.

One of the first things Nathan discussed was to make your policies clear and to highlight them on the site so that people are aware of the rules. Nathan recommends this, especially in the case of Shoebacca, where many of their policies encourage people to shop on their site, by reducing risk to the customer. Some of their policies include:

• Free ground shipping
• Free return shipping
• 365 day return policy
• 110% price match for 14 days

Nathan mentioned many 3rd party tools that they leverage at their company, along with open source tools they …

DBD::Pg UTF-8 for PostgreSQL server_encoding

By Greg Sabino Mullane
June 20, 2011

We are preparing to make a major version bump in DBD::Pg, the Perl interface for PostgreSQL, from the 2.x series to 3.x. This is due to a reworking of how we handle UTF-8. The change is not going to be backwards compatible, but will probably not affect many people. If you are using the pg_enable_utf8 flag, however, you definitely need to read on for the details.

The short version is that DBD::Pg is going return all strings from the Postgres server with the Perl utf8 flag on. The sole exception will be databases in which the server_encoding is SQL_ASCII, in which case the flag will never be turned on.

For backwards compatibility and fine-tuning control, there is a new attribute called pg_utf8_strings that can be set at connection time to override the decision above. For example, if you need your connection to return byte-soup, non-utf8-marked strings, despite coming from a UTF-8 Postgres database, you can say:

  my $dsn = 'dbi:Pg:dbname=foobar';
  my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, $dbuser, $dbpass,
    { AutoCommit => 0,
      RaiseError => 0,
      PrintError => 0,
      pg_utf8_strings => 0,
    }
  );

Similarly, you can set pg_utf8_strings to 1 and it will …

Internet Retailer exhibits of note

By Jon Jensen
June 17, 2011

Last night concluded Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2011 in San Diego. We had a lot of good conversations with attendees and other exhibitors at the End Point booth, and our Liquid Galaxy with Google Earth was a great draw for visitors:

The majority of exhibitors at the show were offering software as a service or productized ecommerce services. A couple of our favorite small SaaS companies, both for their knowledgeable and friendly technical staff, and for their challenging some of the less-beloved incumbent giants in the space, were Olark, offering a SaaS live chat service, and SearchSpring, with their SaaS faceted search service. We look forward to trying out their services.

Some of the more dazzling software demonstrations at the show were:

• Total Immersion, an augmented reality solution. Their TryLive Eyewear demo had us looking into their webcam and trying out different eyeglass frames that were overlaid on our video image in real time.

• Styku, a company offering 3-D virtual fitting room software. They had an amazing video demo of mannequins modeling different clothes, and it’s all customizable per visitor who wants to use his/her measurements to be fitted …

End Point at IRCE 2011

By Steph Skardal
June 15, 2011

We are in full force with a booth at at Internet Retailer Conference 2011 in San Diego. The exhibit hall opened yesterday afternoon after the last few stragglers flew in from North Carolina (me) and Idaho (Jon) to join Ben, Rick, Carl, and Ron.

We’ve had a steady flow of booth visitors interested in hearing about our core ecommerce services and Liquid Galaxy. We’ve also heard from a few companies interested in partnering, which is a nice way to learn about the latest popular technologies in ecommerce, such as mobile and tablet opportunities, live chat integration, real-time user interactivity ecommerce features, and shipping integration and analytics.

Stop by if you’re here and interested in hearing more about End Point’s open source consulting and development services!

Here at IRCE 2011!

Ben navigates our Liquid Galaxy display.

Rick navigates through San Diego before a team dinner.

Ben & Carl pose in front our our Liquid Galaxy display.

DBD::Pg moves to Git!

By David Christensen
June 14, 2011

Just a note to everyone that development the official DBD::Pg DBI driver for PostgreSQL source code repository has moved from its old home in Subversion to a Git repository. All development has now moved to this repo.

We have imported the SVN revision history, so it’s just a matter of pointing your Git clients to:

$ git clone git://bucardo.org/dbdpg.git

For those who prefer, there is a GitHub mirror:

$ git clone git://github.com/bucardo/dbdpg.git

Git is available via many package managers or by following the download links at https://git-scm.com/download for your platform.

Enjoy!

MongoDB replication from Postgres using Bucardo

By Greg Sabino Mullane
June 12, 2011

One of the features of the upcoming version of Bucardo (a replication system for the PostgreSQL RDBMS) is the ability to replicate data to things other than PostgreSQL databases. One of those new targets is MongoDB, a non-relational ‘document-based’ database. (to be clear, we can only use MongoDB as a target, not as a source)

To see this in action, let’s setup a quick example, modified from the earlier blog post on running Bucardo 5. We will create a Bucardo instance that replicates from two Postgres master databases to a Postgres database target and a MongoDB instance target. We will start by setting up the prerequisites:

sudo aptitude install postgresql-server \
perl-DBIx-Safe \
perl-DBD-Pg \
postgresql-contrib

Getting Postgres up and running is left as an exercise to the reader. If you have problems, the friendly folks at #postgresql on irc.freenode.net will be able to help you out.

Now for the MongoDB parts. First, we need the server itself. Your distro may have it already available, in which case it’s as simple as:

aptitude install mongodb

For more installation information, follow the links from the MongoDB Quickstart page. For my test box, I ended up installing from source …

June 8, 2011: World IPv6 Day

By Josh Williams
June 7, 2011

I’m a little surprised they didn’t do it today. 06-06, what better day for IPv6? Oh well, at least Hurricane Electric was awesome enough to send a Sage certification shirt just in time!

June 8th, 2011 is the day! In just a couple days time World IPv6 Day begins. Several of the largest and most popular sites on the Internet, and many others, turn on IPv6 addresses for a 24-hour interval. Many of them already have it, but you have to seek it out on a separate address. Odds are if you’re seeking that out specifically you’re configured well enough to not have any problems. But with IPv6 configured on the primary addresses of some of the largest Internet sites, people that don’t specifically know they’re testing something become part of the test. That’s important to track down exactly what composes those 1-problem-in-2,000 configurations, and assess if that’s even an accurate number these days.

Not sure about your own connection? https://test-ipv6.com/ is an excellent location to run a number of tests and see how v6-enabled you are. Odds are you’ll end up at one end of the spectrum or the other. But if there’s a configuration glitch that could help you track it down.

At End Point we …