For our Shopify Product Search we needed a good way to Screenshot web pages. There are some services on the web for this but we ended up building it but none of them fit our needs. They were either way to expensive, they didn’t produce nearly the quality we needed or they didn’t offer an API at all. Our solution was to install a headless X server in our server farm which runs firefox 2.0. We used a python GTK ...

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I need more followers on twitter :-)

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Today I got my Canadian citizenship. Both Germany and Canada allow multiple citizenships so I’m allowed to carry both. Geographical redundancy accomplished. Next step is to apply for my Canadian passport so that I can instant failover :-)

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Todd Hoff in his love letter to Amazon’s SimpleDB SimpleDB shifts work out of the database and onto programmers which is why the SimpleDB programming model sucks: it requires a lot more programming to do simple things. I’ll argue however that this is the kind of suckiness programmers like. Programmers like problems they can solve with more programming. We don’t even care how twisted and inelegant the code is because we can make it work. And as long as we ...

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James released his development version of Active Shipping to github Active Shipping does what Active Merchant did for payment gateways: Provide one unified API to talk to all the Parcel Services on the web. Given a weight, a to and a from address you can calculate the Shipping costs of every supported Shipping Service. All the complexity of the task is handled by the library. Active Shipping has been in production use with Shopify since the beginning of the year. ...

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Git support in the latest capistrano works very well but there are two gotcha’s I ran into, i’ll document them here so that Google can pick it up. The first problem was the bizarre error message I got when I forgot to push my changes to the deployment repository: ** [err] Needed a single revision ** [err] Needed a single revision [...] Needed a single revision, well then. Git seems to use the rare other meaning of “single” which means ...

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Are you in Ottawa, Canada or willing to relocate? Want to work in the coolest office in town? Would you like to work on a high profile rails application with millions of users? Do you want to work with some of the best rails programmers out there? Please email me at tobi@jadedpixel.com. Please include a piece of code you are especially proud of or point me to some of your open source work. If you include a CV please attach ...

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if false var = nil end p var.nil? #= true ???

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ActiveSupport has this really nice returning tool. It allows you to rewrite the common pattern of initialization and returning a object from am method like this: returning something = Thing.new do something.this something.that end We were wondering if there may be a performance issue with the tool so a quick benchmark showed the following: user system total real def n; i = 0; return i; end 0.510000 0.000000 0.510000 ( 0.520417) def n; i = 0; i ; end 0.340000 ...

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The quality of Shopify stores being launched every day really boggles my mind. Just look at those 3 most recent examples: ClothMoth ZipRC Destinative If you like pretty stores, i recommend subscribing to the Shop of the moment feature or head over to our http://www.shopify.info/screenshots/ page. Speaking of which, our screenshot page is actually powered from the RSS feed of the Shop of the moment category on our blog. Shopify.info is powered by radiant and we use the RSS Reader ...

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Paul Grignon’s 47-minute animated presentation of “Money as Debt” tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it is being created. via google video : embed src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-9050474362583451279#38;hl=en-CA" /embed

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I just checked in a new version of the delayed_job plugin which handles background processing of long running tasks in Shopify. DJ is now fully parallelizable and does not require any global locking anymore. This means that you can run as many worker processes as you want across your server farm if you need to speed up the queue processing. This became necessary when we kicked off a full search server reindex recently and realized that a single worker process ...

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Small plugin for using the global lock service of mysql in your rails app: Locking plugin Great if you have long running cron tasks or require exclusive access to some resources. Example: Invoice.aquire_lock("Shopify billing") do # Can only run once across your server farm Invoice.find_all_due.each { |invoice| invoice.collect_payment! } end

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So we went from Darcs - SVN - Mercurial - Git in just over 3 years and without losing a single commit in the process. 4th one is a real winner though. If you don’t use git yet you should really check it out. If you are unfamiliar with GIT, I recommend watching Peepcode’s introduction. We have a site-license for peepcode at jadedPixel and often run the latest screencasts on the big LCD in the office during lunch break. Its ...

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I finally got a github invitation and used the opportunity to release another Shopify extractions. Delayed::Job or DJ is a asynchronous priority queue which only relies on a simple database table. It doesn’t require you to run a dedicated server like many other systems do. We use for a lot of longer running tasks in Shopify such as sending newsletters, uploading files to s3, downloading images from urls, indexing products to Solr and so on. There are two ways to ...

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If you are working on a ruby application that requires dealing with credit cards, you are probably using ActiveMerchant. If not, you probably didn’t know about ActiveMerchant. ActiveMerchant is an extraction from Shopify. It’s a simple to use library which translates one common interface into the wire language of 30-40 different payment processors around the globe with more added at rapid pace. As long as your application can talk to active merchant you can switch payment providers with a single ...

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Daniel, our designer, has just posted the redesign of the Shopify brochure page. The new version features a video overview of some of Shopify’s features, as well as profiles and interviews with some of Shopify’s clients such as Tesla Motors. A Shop in minutes, a business for life; If you’re in the market for an e-commerce store or if you’re into eye candy then you’ll definitely want to go and check it out.

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After successfully installing thrift there are still a string of dependencies needed before you can install ThruDB. Thanks in no small part to Jake Luciani for helping me with finding the dependencies. MacPorts First we need several packages from the macports. You may want to run sudo port selfupdate to get the latest versions of those packages. sudo port install boost clucene libevent memcached ossp-uuid I hit a weird compile error on boost. I fixed it by running sudo port ...

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Compiling thrift on OSX can be a bit of a hassle because of some POSIX discrepancies. sudo port install boost tar xfz thrift-* cd thirft-* curl http://blog.leetsoft.com/files/patches/thrift.patch | patch -p1 ./configure --with-boost=/opt/local make sudo make install

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Igvita shares the details on ThruDB, another take on the document storage paradigm. Article: ThruDB, faster and cheaper than SimpleDB The architecture sound incredible. Amongst others there is the rank and file of the high scalability open source software such as memcached, spread, CLucene and facebook’s newcomer thrift for wire protocols. ThruDB is able to use Amazon S3 as a permanent data store which makes it an ideal fit for EC2 installations. For quick document access its able to utilize ...

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