Garbage collection in your head, or how to vacation
By Jeff Boes
June 28, 2016
Recently I returned from the longest (8 workdays) vacation I have ever taken from this job (almost 11 years). I made an interesting discovery which I’m happy to share with you:
Life goes on without you.
I spent most of the time aboard a small cruise ship touring Alaska’s Inside Passage and Glacier Bay. During almost all of that, I was out of cell phone range (and, unlike a lot of my colleagues, I don’t carry a smart phone but just a dumb $5 flip phone). With no wifi on the ship, I was completely cut off from the Internet for the longest stretch in at least the last 15 years—maybe the longest since I first got Internet at my house back in the mid–90s.
Life (on the Internet) goes on without you.
Facebook posts get posted, liked, commented on. Tweets happen, get re-tweeted. Emails are sent (for those that still use it, anyway). And life goes on.
I can’t say I came back from vacation recharged in some stupendous way, but I think I’m better off than if I’d taken a shorter vacation in an Internet-connected location, checking up on the virtual world before breakfast and bedtime every day.
So take vacations, and take meaningful ones—disconnect from work. Don’t worry about what’s piling …
travel
Free Encryption for All, In Our Time
By
Lee Azzarello
June 27, 2016
The commodification of encryption algorithms happened in the 1990s. The conversation prior to this event was rife with controversy. Here are some paraphrased FAQs from the era:
- “If encryption is free how will national security continue to be assured?”
- “If these ideas become a commodity, bad people will use them to become worse!”
or one of my favorites,
- “These ideas are dangerous because I do not understand them.”
Fortunately, history was on the side of the algorithm authors and now we have commodified encryption and can securely buy stuff from Amazon. Mission accomplished. Pats own back.
Unfortunately, everything didn’t go as planned. SSL certificate vendors built small empires on asymmetric knowledge about a complicated process. In the USA, the National Security Agency influenced vendors to inject secret backdoors into their security products. Web browsers were installed with poorly implemented SSL certificate management. Academics wrote papers about experiments to break various kinds of security, then published them.
So where does the casual web developer stand in this world? There’s too much chaos for any rational thought—besides, all I want is a secure webpage that just …
security
Postgres migration speedup with table change analysis
By Greg Sabino Mullane
June 13, 2016
One of our clients recently reached out to us for help in upgrading their Postgres database. The use of the pg_upgrade program was not an option, primarily because the client was also taking the opportunity to change from their SQL_ASCII encoding to UTF-8. (If any of your databases, gentle reader, are still SQL_ASCII, please do the same!). Naturally, we also took advantage of the lack of pg_upgrade to enable the use of data checksums, another action we highly recommend. Although there were plenty of wrinkles, and stories to be told about this migration/upgrade, I wanted to focus on one particular problem we had: how to detect if a table has changed.
We needed to know if any applications were modifying certain tables because the speed of the migration was very important. If we could assert that no changes were made, there were some shortcuts available that would greatly speed things up. Initial testing showed that the migration was taking over eight hours, a time unacceptable to the client (no worries, we eventually reduced the time to under an hour!).
Looking closer, we found that over half …
postgres
End Point CEO and NYSE Bell Ringing
By Rick Peltzman
June 10, 2016
Wall Street. Back where it all started for me some 35 years ago. Only instead of being an employee of Oppenheimer and Company, I had the experience and honor of representing End Point as one of 7 companies chosen to “ring the bell” at the New York Stock Exchange, chiming in Small Business Week for JPMorgan Chase. (They work with 4,000,000 small companies.)
The morning started early by going through security checks rivaling the airport, except I didn’t have to take my shoes off. After getting my nifty credential, we went back to the street where the president of the NYSE gave a welcoming speech, pointing out the buildings that are still standing from when Hamilton, Monroe, and Aaron Burr all started their own banks. As well as where George Washington was sworn in.
All this while also getting free coffee from the main small business honoree, Gregory’s Coffee, and picture taking from the business paparazzi!
We then went inside the storied NYSE building and made our way to the trading floor. The surroundings were immensely impressive, as the stock exchange still inhabits a huge floor with gorgeous 40 foot mid-18th century ceilings high above, holding up all sorts of 21st century …
company
Liquid Galaxy for Hyundai Card Travel Library
By Dave Jenkins
June 10, 2016
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| image courtesy of retaildesignblog |
End Point and AZero, a South Korean system integrator, have partnered to deploy a 10-screen Liquid Galaxy to the newly-opened Hyundai Card Travel Library in Seoul, South Korea. This project presented a number of unique challenges for our teams, but we have launched successfully, to the great satisfaction of AZero’s client.
The Hyundai Card Travel Library is an incredible space: wall-to-wall maple bookshelves hold travel brochures, photo books, and other travel-related material. The Liquid Galaxy displays itself sits in a small alcove off the main library space. Being fully enclosed, viewers can control the lighting and get a full immersion experience through the two rows of five 47" screens arrayed in an wall-mounted semi-circle arc. The viewer can control the screens via the podium-mounted touchscreen and SpaceNav mouse controller.
We solved several technical challenges for this deployment: the extremely tight space made cabling and display configuration tricky. Also, this isn’t a “standard” 7-screen single row deployment, but rather two rows of 5 screens each. Working with AZero, End Point reconfigured the Liquid Galaxy display …
visionport travel
Talking UI/UX with Trey McKay
By Liz Flyntz
June 7, 2016
Trey McKay was kind enough to let me ask him a bunch of questions. Trey’s an Interaction Designer at Shapeways, which is a global 3D printing service and marketplace.
Trey focuses on designing and building experiences for turning 3D designs into 3D printed products. He’s worked on everything from site-wide navigation redesigns to a suite of 3D tools, which help product designers identify and fix potential issues in their designs before they go into manufacturing. If you want to stalk him on the Internet, check out his personal site or holler at him on the Twitter @trey_mckay.
Liz Flyntz: What is the thing that is most misunderstood about user interface and user experience design, in your opinion?
Trey McKay: In general, I’ve noticed that a lot of folks think that the role of a designer is to “make something pretty”. From coworkers to general public, I think there is a common misconception about what design is, how important it is, and what we as UX/UI designers do on the day-to-day.
Design is how something works. Good design is transparent, as the saying goes, because when something is properly designed, it’s not getting in the user’s way. Well-designed products and services help …
art ecommerce testing community
Adding Bash Completion To a Python Script
By Szymon Lipiński
June 3, 2016
Bash has quite a nice feature, you can write a command in a console, and then press
I will show how to integrate this mechanism into a custom python script with two types of arguments. What’s more, I want this to be totally generic. I don’t want to change it when I will change the options, or change config files.
This script accepts two types of arguments. One type contains mainly flags beginning with ‘–’, the other type is a host name taken from a bunch of chef scripts.
Let’s name this script show.py—it will show some information about the host. This way I can use it with:
show.py szymonThe szymon part is the name of my special host, and it is taken from one of our chef node definition files.
This script also takes huge number of arguments like:
show.py --cpu --memory --format=jsonSo we have two kinds of arguments: one is a simple string, one begins with –.
To implement the bash completion on double
#!/usr/bin/env python
from sys import argv
import os
import json
if __name__ == …shell python
The merchant login ID or password is invalid or the account is inactive, and to how to fix it in Spree
By Matt Galvin
June 2, 2016
Authorize.net has disabled the RC4 cipher suite on their test server. Their production server update will follow soon. So, in order to ensure your, or your client’s, site(s) do not experience any interruption in payment processing it is wise to place a test order in the Authorize.net test environment.
The projects I was testing were all Spree Gem (2.1.x). The Spree Gem uses the ActiveMerchantGem (in Spree 2.1.x it’s ActiveMerchant version 1.34.x). Spree allows you to sign into the admin and select which server your Authorize.net payment method will hit- production or test. There is another option for selecting a “Test Mode” transaction. The difference between a test server transaction and a test mode transaction is explained quite succinctly on the Authorize.net documentation. To summarize it, test server transactions are never sent to financial institutions for processing but are stored in Authorize.net (so you can see their details). Transactions in test mode however are not stored and return a transaction ID of zero.
I wanted to use my Authorize.net test account to ensure my clients were ready for the RC4 cipher suite disablement. I ran across a few strange things. First, for …
payments spree ecommerce