Load Big Data to the Cloud with Amazon’s Import/Export Service

Our offices are headquartered in New Orleans. We love the city’s culture, music, and food, but it also means we have to be prepared for an occasional hurricane and the potential electricity or network service outage that can accompany a storm. We’ve always kept our customers’ production web servers out of the city; currently we have servers with Rackspace, Linode, Amazon, Engine Yard, and Peer1. However, we still run an in-office file server and a staging web/application server.

I Must Have a CMS!

Many inquiries we get from potential customers are focused on the development of their company’s website.  Often, part of that conversation focuses on the future control of their site and invariably turns to the demand for a content management system, or CMS, which is a web-based application that allows businesses to update website content from the website itself.

When a customer emphatically demands a CMS—I immediately answer, “of course—but why?”

Design Patterns

The Mudbug Media programming team regularly meets for “study hall” sessions in which we review important programming techniques and practices. Recently, we discussed the classic Design Patterns approach to software engineering. Design patterns are flexible templates for solving common problems in software design.

Many patterns are easily implemented thanks to standard code libraries, such as the JavaScript library jQuery, which we use frequently. The lazy initialization pattern, for example, is standard via jQuery’s $(document).ready() function—it delays the process of running the enclosed code until necessary. The observer pattern is made trivial thanks to .bind(), allowing objects to be notified automatically of changes in state. And the .each() method implements the iterator pattern, accessing every element of an aggregate object in turn.

Using The qmail-klepto Patch

Stop your development email from leaking to the world with the qmail-klepto patch!

Why

Almost all web applications, from a simple contact form to a massively complex CRM, send email notifications to their users. However, it is absolutely crucial that emails generated on your development, staging, and testing servers do not make it out to your production users in the real world. At best, your user will be mildly inconvenienced or confused by an irrelevant email they received, and at worst you could cause the user to panic and react to the message, potentially costing your user time and money.

The Quicksand Advantage

A few weeks ago, I was assigned to evaluate a jQuery plugin called Quicksand that allows you to shuffle data around in a unique way.

The plan was to add Quicksand to the team page of our website, which is a great place for this type of application.