Authorize.Net Transaction IDs to increase in size
By Dan Collis-Puro
September 2, 2008
A sign of their success, Authorize.net is going to break through Transaction ID numbers greater than 2,147,483,647 (or 2^31), which happens to exceed the maximum size of a signed MySQL int() column and the default Postgres “integer”.
It probably makes sense to ensure that your transaction ID columns are large enough proactively—this would not be a fun bug to run into ex-post-facto.
database postgres payments ecommerce
Major rumblings in the browser world
By Jon Jensen
September 1, 2008
Wow. There’s a lot going on in the browser world again all of a sudden.
I recently came across a new open source browser, Midori, still in alpha status. It’s based on Apple’s WebKit (used in Safari) and is very fast. Surprisingly fast. Of course, it’s not done, and it shows. It crashes, many features aren’t yet implemented, etc. But it’s promising and worth keeping an eye on. It’s nice to have another KHTML/WebKit-based browser on free operating systems, too.
Now today news has come out about Google’s foray into the browser area, with a browser also based on WebKit called Chrome. It’ll be open source, include a new fast JavaScript engine, and feature compartmentalized JavaScript for each page, so memory and processor usage will be easy to monitor per application, and individual pages can be killed without bringing the whole browser down. Code’s supposed to become available tomorrow.
A new generation of JavaScript engine for Mozilla is now in testing, called TraceMonkey. It has a just-in-time (JIT) compiler, and looks like it makes many complex JavaScript sites very fast. It sounds like this will appear formally in Firefox 3.1. Information on how to test it now is at John Resig’s …
browsers
Camps presentation at UTOSC 2008
By Jon Jensen
August 31, 2008
Friday evening I did a presentation on and demonstration of our “development camps” at the 2008 Utah Open Source Conference in Salt Lake City. Attendees seemed to get what camps are all about, asked some good questions, and we had some good conversations afterwards. You can read my presentation abstract and my slides and notes, and more will be coming soon at the camps website.
I’ll post more later on some talks I attended and enjoyed at the conference.
conference camps
nginx and lighttpd deployments growing
By Jon Jensen
August 30, 2008
Apache httpd is great. But it’s good to see Netcraft report that nginx and lighttpd continue to grow in popularity as well. Having active competition in the free software web server space is really beneficial to everyone, and these very lightweight and fast servers fill an important niche for dedicated static file serving, homegrown CDNs, etc. Thanks to all the developers involved!
nginx hosting
Moose roles
By Ethan Rowe
August 28, 2008
Perl programmers,
Moose roles give a really nice way of maximizing code reuse within an object system, while favoring composition over inheritance. This makes for shallower inheritance trees, reduced method dispatch spaghettification, and a more comprehensible, maintainable, extensible codebase overall. Revel in the glory.
That is all.
perl
Acts As Xapian — It Just Works
By Sean Schofield
August 26, 2008
I just recently started listening to the podcast done by the guys at RailsEnvy. It’s an excellent resource for keeping up on what’s new in the Rails world and it’s how I found out about the new acts_as_xapian search plugin for Rails. The podcast mentioned this blog post which contains a very thorough rundown of all the different full-text search options currently available for rails. The timing of this article couldn’t have been better since I was in the market for a new solution.
I was approaching a deadline on a client project here at End Point and I was having lots of trouble with my existing search solution which was acts_as_ferret. Setting up ferret was relatively easy and I was very impressed with the Lucene syntax that it supported. It seemed like a perfect a solution at first but then came “the troubles.”
Ferret is extremely fragile. The slightest problem and your server will just crash. What was causing the crash? Unfortunately the server logs won’t give you much help there. You will receive some cryptic message coming from the C++ library if you’re lucky. Note that I skipped the suggested Drb server setup since this was a development box.
After a while I would notice …
rails search
Review of The Book of IMAP
By Jon Jensen
August 26, 2008
Former End Point employee Ryan Masters had his book review of the No Starch Press published over at OSNews.com. Sounds like it was a decent book!
books email
On excellence
By Ethan Rowe
August 21, 2008
The interwebular collective cup runneth over with blog articles addressing the subject of what makes good software engineers good. It is a topic about which many opinions are expressed. What is less commonly addressed, however, is the possibility that the very qualities that make for good software engineers may also make for good technical leaders, good managers, and just good coworkers, period.
At End Point, we toss the term “ownership” around quite a lot, in a variety of contexts. When a particular task or responsibility goes from one person to another, we mention “ownership” when we need to communicate the significance and scope of the responsibility in question. The term may apply to a software engineering task, in which “owning” the problem means taking responsibility for all aspects of the engineering work, across the software stack, from prototyping to full development to deployment. It may also apply to a managerial or leadership role, for which “ownership” implies responsibility for all parties involved on a given project, task, or team, with the “soft” issues of human beings mattering at least as much—and probably more—as the “hard” issues of machines, software, etc. …
culture