PostgreSQL 9.0 Admin Cookbook
By Josh Tolley
November 29, 2010
I’ve been reading through the recently published book PostgreSQL 9.0 Admin Cookbook of late, and found that it satisfies an itch for me, at least for now. Every time I get involved in a new project, or work with a new group of people, there’s a period of adjustment where I get introduced to new tools and new procedures. I enjoy seeing new (and not uncommonly, better) ways of doing the things I do regularly. At conferences I’ll often spend time playing “What’s on your desktop” with people I meet, to get an idea of how they do their work, and what methods they use. Questions about various peoples’ favorite window manager, email reader, browser plugin, or IRC client are not uncommon. Sometimes I’m surprised by a utility or a technique I’d never known before, and sometimes it’s nice just to see minor differences in the ways people do things, to expand my toolbox somewhat. This book did that for me.
As the title suggests, authors Simon Riggs and Hannu Krosing have organized their book similarly to a cookbook, made up of simple “recipes” organized in subject groups. Each recipe covers a simple topic, such as “Connecting using SSL”, “Adding/Removing tablespaces”, and “Managing Hot …
postgres
Mongol Rally charity fundraiser
By Jon Jensen
November 26, 2010
This summer, End Point was pleased to be one of several sponsors of team One Steppe Beyond in the 2010 Mongol Rally. Team member Christopher Letters is the son of the owners of Crotchet Classical, a longtime End Point ecommerce client. Chris reports that they had a great time on the rally driving 10,849 miles to their destination in Mongolia!
You can read their dispatches from the road on their Mongol Rally team page.
Each team raises money for a charity, a minimum of £1000 per team. Team One Steppe Beyond chose the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation which has a project in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.
Congratulations to team members Christopher, Dominic, and Thomas for finishing the race! It was obviously quite an adventure and for a good cause.
company travel
Ruby on Rails versus CakePHP: A Syntax Comparison Guide
By Steph Skardal
November 26, 2010
My time is typically split between Interchange and Spree development, but in a recent project for JackThreads, I jumped back into CakePHP code. CakePHP is one of the more popular PHP MVC frameworks and is inspired by Rails. I decided to put together a quick syntax comparison guide between CakePHP and Rails since I occasionally have to look up how to do some Rails-y thing in CakePHP.
Basic | Ruby on Rails | CakePHP |
|---|---|---|
| MVC Code Inclusion | Rails is typically installed as a gem and source code lives in the user’s gem library. In theory, a modified version of the Rails source code can be “frozen” to your application, but I would guess this is pretty rare. | CakePHP is typically installed in the application directory in a “cake/” directory. The “app/” directory contains application specific code. From my experience, this organization has allowed me to easily debug CakePHP objects, but didn’t do much more for me. |
| Application Directory Structure | app/ controllers/ models/ views/ helpers/ lib/ config/ public javascripts/ images/ stylesheets/ vendors/ plugins/ extensions/ | controllers/ models/ views/ layouts/ elements/ ... config/ webroot/ tmp/ plugins/ vendors/ … |
php ecommerce ruby rails
Liquid Galaxy Sysadmin+ Wanted
By Benjamin Goldstein
November 18, 2010
This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.
End Point Corporation is hiring for a motivated and creative GNU/Linux systems administrator. The work will primarily involve installing, supporting, maintaining and developing infrastructure improvements for Google Liquid Galaxy systems. Liquid Galaxy is an impressive panoramic system for Google Earth and other applications. Check it out!
Responsibilities:
- Set up and upgrade Liquid Galaxy Systems at client locations. (Some travel is required, including internationally.)
- Do on site and remote troubleshooting and support.
- Participate in ongoing work to improve the system with automation, monitoring, and customizing configurations to clients’ needs.
- Provide first-class customer service.
Requirements:
- BS degree or equivalent experience
- At least 3 years of experience with Linux systems administration
- Strong scripting skills in shell, and also Python, Ruby, Perl or PHP
- Proven technical troubleshooting and performance tuning experience
- Excellent analytical abilities along with a strong sense of ownership and urgency, plus the drive and ability to rise to new challenges and master new skills
- Awareness and knowledge about security issues
- Good communication skills
- The basic physical …
jobs-closed linux visionport sysadmin
Utah Open Source Conference 2010 part 1
By Jon Jensen
November 12, 2010
It’s been about a little over a month since the 2010 Utah Open Source Conference, and I decided to take a few minutes to review talks I enjoyed and link to my own talk slides.
Magento: Mac Newbold of Code Greene spoke on the Magento ecommerce framework for PHP. I’ve somewhat familiar with Magento, but a few things stood out:
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He finds the Magento Enterprise edition kind of problematic because Varien won’t support you if you have any unsupported extensions. Some of his customers had problems with Varien support and went back to the community edition.
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Magento is now up to around 30 MB of PHP files!
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As I’ve heard elsewhere, serious customization has a steep learning curve.
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The Magento data model is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model. To get 50 columns of output requires 50+ joins between 8 tables (one EAV table for each value datatype).
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There are 120 tables total in default install—many core features don’t use the EAV tables for performance reasons.
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Another observation I’ve heard in pretty much every conversation about Magento: It is very resource intensive. Shared hosting is not recommended. Virtual servers should have a minimum of 1/2 to 1 GB RAM. Fast disk & …
conference database ecommerce javascript open-source perl python ruby security magento
(Image|Graphics)Magick trick for monitoring or visualizations
By Kiel Christofferson
November 3, 2010
It’s a good time for all when we start poking fun at the visual assault of stereotypical PowerPoint presentations. On the other hand, when data is presented in an effective visual format, human brains are able to quickly grasp the ideas involved and pick out important pieces of information, such as “outliers”.
Without getting into a long trumpeting session about the usefulness of data visualization (there are plenty of books on the subject), I’d like to jump directly into a Magick trick or two for creating simple visualizations.
Let’s imagine we’ve got a group of machines serving a particular purpose. Now let’s say I want quick insight into not only the internal activity of all 8 machines, but also what the systems believe they are sending to their displays.
With a little magick (of the ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick variety), we can save ourselves from running “ps” and “free” and from having to be in the same room (or the same country) as the system we’re checking up on.
First, let’s organize some simple output from the system:
$ echo -en "$(hostname) GPID: $( pgrep googleearth-bin ). APPID: $( pgrep -u root -f sbin/apache2 ).\nCRASH: $( ls -1 ${HOME}/.googleearth/crashlogs/ | …graphics linux visionport monitoring
Speeding up the Spree demo site
By Jon Jensen
November 2, 2010
There’s a lot that can be done to speed up Spree, and Rails apps in general. Here I’m not going to deal with most of that. Instead I want to show how easy it is to speed up page delivery using standard HTTP server tuning techniques, demonstrated on demo.spreecommerce.com.
First, let’s get a baseline performance measure from the excellent webpagetest.org service using their remote Internet Explorer 7 tests:
- First page load time: 2.1 seconds
- Repeat page load time: 1.5 seconds
The repeat load is faster because the browser has images, JavaScript, and CSS cached, but it still has to check back with the server to make sure they haven’t changed. Full details are in this initial report.
The demo.spreecommerce.com site is run on a Xen VPS with 512 MB RAM, CentOS 5 i386, Apache 2.2, and Passenger 2.2. There were several things to tune in the Apache httpd.conf configuration:
- mod_deflate was already enabled. Good. That’s a big help.
- Enable HTTP keepalive: KeepAlive On and KeepAliveTimeout 3
- Limit Apache children to keep RAM available for Rails: StartServers 5, MinSpareServers 2, MaxSpareServers 5
- Limit Passenger pool size to 2 child processes (down from the default 6), to queue extra …
ecommerce hosting optimization performance rails spree
Keep the Aisles Clean at Checkout
By Mark Johnson
October 26, 2010
It’s no mystery in ecommerce that checkout processing must flow smoothly for an effective store. Providing products or services in high demand doesn’t mean much if they cannot be purchased, or the purchase process is so burdensome that would-be customers give up in frustration.
Unfortunately, checkout also tends to include the most volatile elements of a web store. It virtually always involves database writes, which can be hindered by locking. It often involves real-time network access to 3rd-party providers, with payment transactions being at the top of the list. It can involve complex inventory assessments, where high concurrency can make what’s normally routine highly unpredictable. Meanwhile, your customers wait, while the app sifts through complexity and waits on responses from various services. If they wait too long, you might lose sales; even worse, you might lose customers.
Even armed with the above knowledge, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of expediency. A particular action is so logically suited to be included as part of the checkout routine, and a superficial evaluation makes it seem like such a low-risk operation. That action can be tucked in there just after …
ecommerce interchange performance tips