Zero Pricing in Interchange using CommonAdjust
By Mark Johnson
June 26, 2017
Product pricing can be quite complex. A typical Interchange catalog will have at least one table in the ProductFiles directive (often products plus either options or variants) and those tables will often have one or more pricing fields (usually price and sales_price). But usually a single, static price isn’t sufficient for more complex needs, such as accessory adjustments, quantity pricing, product grouping–not to mention promotions, sales, or other conditional features that may change a product’s price for a given situation, dependent on the user’s account or session.
Typically to handle these variety of pricing possibilities, a catalog developer will implement a CommonAdjust algorithm. CommonAdjust can accommodate all the above pricing adjustments and more, and is a powerful tool (yet can become quite arcane when reaching deeper complexity). CommonAdjust is enabled by setting the PriceField directive to a non-existent field value in the tables specified in ProductFiles.
To give an adequate introduction and treatise on CommonAdjust would be at a minimum its own post, and likely a series. There are many elements that make up a CommonAdjust string, and subtle operator nuances …
ecommerce interchange
Liquid Galaxy at The Ocean Conference
By Ben Witten
June 19, 2017
End Point had the privilege of participating in The Ocean Conference at the United Nations, hosted by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), these past two weeks. The health of the oceans is critical, and The Ocean Conference, the first United Nations conference on this issue, presents a unique and invaluable opportunity for the world to reverse the precipitous decline of the health of the oceans and seas with concrete solutions.
A Liquid Galaxy was set up in a prominent area on the main floor of the United Nations. End Point created custom content for the Ocean Conference, using the Liquid Galaxy’s Content Management System. Visiting diplomats and government officials were able to experience this content—Liquid Galaxy’s interactive panoramic setup allows visitors to feel immersed in the different locations, with video and information spanning their periphery.
Liquid Galaxy content created for The Ocean Conference included:
- A study of the Catlin Seaview Survey and how the world’s coral reefs are changing
- 360 panoramic underwater videos
- All Mission Blue Ocean Hope Spots
- A guided tour of the Monaco Explorations 3 Year Expedition
- National Marine Sanctuaries …
conference event visionport
Successful First GEOINT Symposium for End Point Liquid Galaxy
By Ben Witten
June 16, 2017
This past week, End Point attended GEOINT Symposium to showcase Liquid Galaxy as an immersive panoramic GIS solution to GEOINT attendees and exhibitors alike.
At the show, we showcased Cesium integrating with ArcGIS and WMS, Google Earth, Street View, Sketchfab, Unity, and panoramic video. Using our Content Management System, we created content around these various features so visitors to our booth could take in the full spectrum of capabilities that the Liquid Galaxy provides.
Additionally, we were able to take data feeds for multiple other booths and display their content during the show! Our work served to show everyone at the conference that the Liquid Galaxy is a data-agnostic immersive platform that can handle any sort of data stream and offer data in a brilliant display. This can be used to show your large complex data sets in briefing rooms, conference rooms, or command centers.
Given the incredible draw of the Liquid Galaxy, the GEOINT team took special interest in our system and formally interviewed Ben Goldstein in front of the system to learn more! You can view the video of the interview here:
We look forward to developing the relationships we created at GEOINT, and …
cesium conference event visionport unity
Amazon AWS upgrades to Postgres with Bucardo
By Greg Sabino Mullane
June 6, 2017
Many of our clients at End Point are using the incredible Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which allows for quick setup and use of a database system. Despite minimizing many database administration tasks, some issues still exist, one of which is upgrading. Getting to a new version of Postgres is simple enough with RDS, but we’ve had clients use Bucardo to do the upgrade, rather than Amazon’s built-in upgrade process. Some of you may be exclaiming “A trigger-based replication system just to upgrade?!” While using it may seem unintuitive, there are some very good reasons to use Bucardo for your RDS upgrade:
Minimize application downtime
Many businesses are very sensitive to any database downtime, and upgrading your database to a new version always incurs that cost. Although RDS uses the ultra-fast pg_upgrade –links method, the whole upgrade process can take quite a while—or at least too long for the business to accept. Bucardo can reduce the application downtime from around seven minutes to ten seconds or less.
Upgrade more than one version at once
As of this writing (June 2017), RDS only allows upgrading of one major Postgres …
aws database postgres
Series Digital joins End Point!
By Jon Jensen
June 1, 2017
End Point has the pleasure to announce some very big news!
After an amicable wooing period, End Point has purchased the software consulting company Series Digital, a NYC-based firm that designs and builds custom software solutions. Over the past decade, Series Digital has automated business processes, brought new ideas to market, and built large-scale dynamic infrastructure.
Series Digital launched in 2006 in New York City. From the start, Series Digital managed large database installations for financial services clients such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup. They also worked with startups including Drop.io, Byte, Mode Analytics, Domino, and Brewster.
These growth-focused, data-intensive businesses benefited from Series Digital’s expertise in scalable infrastructure, project management, and information security. Today, Series Digital supports clients across many major industry sectors and has focused its development efforts on the Microsoft .NET ecosystem. They have strong design and user experience expertise. Their client list is global.
The Series Digital team began working at End Point on April 3rd, 2017.
The CEO of Series Digital is Jonathan Blessing. He joins …
dotnet company design windows
Recognizing handwritten digits: a quick peek into the basics of machine learning
By Kamil Ciemniewski
May 30, 2017
Previous in series:
- Learning from data basics: the Naive Bayes model
- Learning from data basics II: simple Bayesian Networks
In the previous two posts on machine learning, I presented a very basic introduction of an approach called “probabilistic graphical models”. In this post I’d like to take a tour of some different techniques while creating code that will recognize handwritten digits.
The handwritten digits recognition is an interesting topic that has been explored for many years. It is now considered one of the best ways to start the journey into the world of machine learning.
Taking the Kaggle challenge
We’ll take the “digits recognition” challenge as presented in Kaggle. It is an online platform with challenges for data scientists. Most of the challenges have their prizes expressed in real money to win. Some of them are there to help us out in our journey on learning data science techniques—so is the “digits recognition” contest.
The challenge
As explained on Kaggle:
MNIST (“Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology”) is the de facto “hello world” dataset of computer vision.
The “digits recognition” challenge is one of the best ways to get acquainted with …
julia machine-learning python
infoShare 2017 - JavaScript, JavaScript everywhere
By Piotr Hankiewicz
May 27, 2017
The last week was really interesting for me. I attended the infoShare 2017, the biggest tech conference in central-eastern Europe. The agenda was impressive, but that’s not everything. There was a startup competition going on and really, I’m totally impressed.
infoShare in numbers:
- 5500 attendees
- 133 speakers
- 250 startups
- 122 hours of speeches
- 12 side events
Let’s go through each speech I was attending.
Day 1
Why Fast Matters by Harry Roberts from csswizardry.com
Harry tried to convince us that performance is important.
Great speech, showing that it’s an interesting problem not only from a financial point of view. You must see it, link to his presentation here
Dirty Little Tricks From The Dark Corners of Front-End by Vitaly Friedman from smashingmagazine.com
It was magic! I work a lot with CSS, but this speech showed me some new ideas and reminded me that the simplest solution is maybe not the best solution usually and that we should reuse CSS between components as much as possible.
Keep it DRY!
One of these tricks is a quantity query CSS selector. It’s a pretty complex selector that can apply your styles to elements based on the number of siblings. (http://quantityqueries.com/ …
browsers conference java javascript
Drupal — rapid development
By Piotr Hankiewicz
May 26, 2017
Here at End Point, we had the pleasure to be a part of multiple Drupal 6, 7 and 8 projects. Most of our clients wanted to use the latest Drupal version, to have a long term support, stable platform.
A few years ago, I already had big experience with PHP itself and other, various PHP frameworks like WordPress, Joomla! or TYPO3. I was happy to use all of them, but then one of our clients asked us for a simple Drupal 6 task. That’s how I started my Drupal journey which continues until now.
To be honest, I had a difficult start, it was different, new and pretty inscrutable for me. After a few days of reading documentation and playing with the system I was ready to do some simple work. Here, I wanted to share my thoughts about Drupal and tell you why I LOVE! it.
Low learning curve
It took, of course, a few months until I was ready to build something more complex, but it really takes a few days only to be ready for simple development. It’s not only about Drupal, but also PHP, it’s much cheaper to maintain and extend a project. Maybe it’s not so important with smaller projects, but definitely important for massive code bases. Programmers can jump in and start being productive really …
cms drupal php programming