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Analyzer Reports with Geo Map Option in Pentaho 5 BI Server

By Selvakumar Arumugam
September 12, 2014

The “Geo Map” option in Analyzer Reports provides a feature to visualize data with geographic locations. We will learn how to design a Mondrian schema and configure Pentaho to make use of the “Geo Map” feature in the Analyzer Reports. This article will show us how to set this feature up step by step.

Enable Geo Map feature on Geographic fields in Mondrian Schema

The Mondrian schema has two main categories called Dimensions and Measures. The Dimensions are defined as levels in the Mondrian schema. The Geographic fields should have two additional annotations to use Geo Map. The two annotations are:

1. Data.Role — defines the type of level generally; for this type of node, this must be set to ‘Geography’.

2. Geo.Role — defines the geographical classification in a hierarchy. These can be either predefined roles (‘country’, ‘state’, ‘city’, ‘postalcode’) or custom roles.

Sample Level with Annotation:

<Level name="Country Name" visible="true" column="country" type="String" uniqueMembers="false" levelType="Regular" hideMemberIf="Never">
  <Annotations>
    <Annotation name="Data.Role"> …

Today’s Internet Slowdown

By Jon Jensen
September 10, 2014

Today End Point is participating in an Internet-wide campaign to raise awareness about net neutrality, the FCC’s role in overseeing the Internet in the United States, and the possible effects of lobbying by large consumer Internet providers.

Many companies and individuals are in favor of specific “net neutrality” regulation by the FCC, and make good arguments for it, such as these by Battle for the Net, Etsy and ThoughtWorks and Reddit.

There are also plenty speaking out against certain specific regulatory proposals out there: TechFreedom, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Todd Wasserman, and with a jaunty propagandistic style, NCTA, the cable company’s lobby.

I think we are all sympathetic to free-market arguments and support non-governmental solutions that allow companies and individuals to create things without getting permission, and to arrange services and peering as they see fit. It seems that most people and companies understand the need to pay for more bandwidth, and more data transfer. (Marketers are the ones promising unlimited everything, then hiding limits in the fine print!) Many of us are worried about further entrenching government in private networks, whether …

Adventures in Downgrading my Linode Plan

By Steph Skardal
September 9, 2014

I recently went through the process of downgrading and downsizing my Linode plan and I wanted to share a few of the [small] hoops that I had to jump through to get there, with the help of the Linode Support team.

Background

I’ve had a small personal WordPress site running for more than a few years now. I also use this server for personal Ruby on Rails development. When I began work on that site, I tried out a few shared hosting providers such as Bluehost and GoDaddy because of the low cost (Bluehost was ~$6/mo) at the time. However, I quickly encountered common limitations of shared server hosting:

• Shared hosting providers typically make it very difficult to run Ruby on Rails, especially edge versions of Ruby on Rails. It’s possible this has improved over the last few years, but when you are a developer and want to experiment (not locally), shared hosting providers are not going to give you the freedom to do so.
• Shared hosting providers do not give you control of specific performance settings (e.g. use of mod_gzip, expires headers), so I was suffering from lack of control for my little WordPress site as well as my Rails sites. While this is another limitation that may have …

Enhancing the labelsontime.com Spree application

By Bianca Rodrigues
September 9, 2014

Labels on Time is an online retailer that delivers top-quality thermal roll and direct thermal labels—​and all on time, of course. They came to us last year to upgrade their Spree site, resolve bugs, and develop cutting-edge features, utilizing our expertise with the ecommerce platform. Spree Commerce is an open-source ecommerce solution built on Ruby on Rails, and manages all aspects of the fulfillment process, from checkout to shipping to discounts, and much more.

UPGRADING THE SPREE PLATFORM

There were quite a few challenges associated with the upgrade, since Labels on Time was still running on Spree’s version 2.0, which was not yet stable. To keep some stability, we initially worked off a fork of Spree, and selectively brought in changes from 2.0 when we were sure they were stable and reliable enough.

USING SPREE GEMS

To date, some of the Spree gems we have used on the site include:

Active Shipping: This is a Spree plugin that can interface with USPS, UPS and FedEx. Label on Time’s active_shipping gem interacts with the UPS API, which is a big task to tackle since it requires a lot of configuration, especially every time Spree is updated.

Another important gem we use for Labels …

Rsyslog property based filtering features

By Emanuele “Lele” Calò
September 4, 2014

Do you need something more powerful than the usual, clunky selectors based Rsyslog filtering rules but still you don’t see the benefit of going full throttle and use RainerScript?

Perhaps you weren’t aware, but there is an additional filtering rule you may not have used, which is a great alternative to the classic selector-based one, called property-based filtering.

This kind of filtering lets you create rules like:

:msg, contains, "firewall: IN=" -/var/log/firewall

There’s a few more properties that you can use like hostname,fromhost,fromip and the number (and variety) is growing over time.

Instead of just verifying that a specific string is contained in the highlighted property, you could also be interested in operators like isempty, isequal or the powerful regex and ereregex which could be used to compare the string content against regexes, that we all love so much.

:fromhost, regex, ".*app-fe\d{2}" -/data/myapp/frontend_servers.log
:fromhost, regex, ".*app-db\d{2}" -/data/myapp/DB_servers.log

Also remember that you can always use the ! to negate the condition and the discard operator to block Rsyslog from further rules parsing for that specific …

Looking at development environments with DevCamps and Vagrant

By Spencer Christensen
August 25, 2014

For most web developers, you have practices and tools that you are used to using to do your work. And for most web developers this means setting up your workstation with all the things you need to do your editing, compiling, testing, and pushing code to some place for sharing or deployment. This is a very common practice even though it is fraught with problems- like getting a database setup properly, configuring a web server, any other services (memcached, redis, mongodb, etc), and many more issues.

Hopefully at some point you realize the pain that is involved in doing everything on your workstation directly and start looking for a better way to do web development. In this post I will be looking at some ways to do this better: using a virtual machine (VM), Vagrant, and DevCamps.

Using a VM for development

One way to improve things is to use a local virtual machine for your development (for example, using VirtualBox, or VMware Fusion). You can edit your code normally on your workstation, but then execute and test it in the VM. This also makes your workstation “clean”, moving all those dependencies (like a database, web server, etc.) off your workstation and into the VM. It also gets …

Liquid Galaxy for the Daniel Island School

By Dave Jenkins
August 22, 2014

This past week, End Point had the distinct pleasure of sending a Liquid Galaxy Express (the highly portable version of the platform) to the Daniel Island School in Charleston, South Carolina. Once it arrived, we provided remote support to their staff setting up the system. Through the generous donations of Mason Holland, Benefitfocus, and other donors, this PK-8 grade school is now the first school in the country below the university level with a Liquid Galaxy on campus.

From Claire Silanowicz, who coordinated the installation:

Mason Holland was introduced to the Liquid Galaxy system while visiting the Google Headquarters in San Francisco several months ago. After deciding to donate it to the Daniel Island School here in Charleston, SC, he brought me on to help with the project. I didn’t know much about the Liquid Galaxy at first, but quickly realized how cool of a project this was going to be. With some help, I assembled a team of about 8 Benefitfocus employees to help with installation and long-term implementation. Benefitfocus is full of employees who are so passionate about innovative technology, and Mason’s involvement with Benefitfocus was a perfect way to connect the …

Spree Commerce, Take Care When Offering Free Shipping Promotion

By Matt Galvin
August 20, 2014

Hello again all. I was working on another Spree Commerce Site, a Ruby on Rails based e-commerce platform. As many of you know, Spree Commerce comes with Promotions. According to Spree Commerce documentation, Spree Commerce Promotions are:

“… used to provide discounts to orders, as well as to add potential additional items at no extra cost. Promotions are one of the most complex areas within Spree, as there are a large number of moving parts to consider.”

The promotions feature can be used to offer discounts like free shipping, buy one get one free etc.. The client on this particular project had asked for the ability to provide a coupon for free shipping. Presumably this would be a quick and easy addition since these types of promotions are included in Spree.

The site in question makes use of Spree’s Active Shipping Gem, and plugs in the UPS Shipping API to return accurate and timely shipping prices with the UPS carrier.

The client offers a variety of shipping methods including Flat Rate Ground, Second Day Air, 3 Day Select, and Next Day Air. Often, Next Day Air shipping costs several times more than Ground. E.g.: If something costs $20 to ship Ground, it could easily cost …