Posts Filed in "Work"

We have pushed out iBegin Share 2.3 (and wp plugin 1.2 to go along with it). It’s a pretty mild update, that includes one pretty cool new feature: Statistics. We’ve built in some quick stats to let you see how people are using the share plugin, on your blog, or standalone (although the WP integration […]

We released new versions of iBegin Share and the Wordpress plug-in this morning. These are critical updates to solve display inconsistencies across browsers. You can grab them both over at the labs.
If you don’t know what iBegin Share is, it’s a simple tool which allows you to “share” pages of your website. It’s very similar […]

Last week I made the decision to begin the conversion from MySQL to PostgreSQL. Well, more of a benchmark conversion, but none the less. So we begin the installation..
I installed PostgreSQL server, version 8.2, painlessly both locally and on our staging server. I then installed psycopg2 via Python setuptools. Nice, quick and easy, right? Segmentation […]

We’ve launched our first new site over at iBegin, and it’s called Places. It’s an experiment in mapping informal spaces, or outlining landmarks and other types of locations that you wouldn’t normally find on a map. The framework was built in about a week, and is powered by Django, MySQL, the Jinja templating engine, and […]

Today we released iBegin Share v2.10, a complete rewrite to the original, iBox v2.11, and WordPress plug-in’s to go along with each of them (see Share below this post).

One of my first projects at the new company has been updating a script called iBox. Most people are familiar with the concept, that of lightbox, as well as how inefficient most of the scripts are. The goal of iBox is simple: provide a lightweight modal dialog box with additional support for document types to […]

We’ve been working on our central authentication service at Curse lately, so we just began porting it’s libraries to PHP. We plan to deploy it across all sites (specifically the vBulletin forum sites) very soon.
In order to achieve a working library in PHP, we needed some HTTP utilities. We didn’t want to create dependencies with […]

We’ll be releasing a bunch of widgets for Curse/WoWDB, and here’s a sample of one of them.

Throw any feedback you have over here, because we’re glad to hear it

We ran across a fun gotcha today while performance testing some code. The issue was originally discovered when we noticed a 300ms query taking 20 seconds. After about an hour of debugging we found the issue to be with aliases in table locks.
Here’s what our original SQL looked like:

LOCK TABLES files_versiondownloadcount WRITE;
 
UPDATE files_version AS version, […]

One issue I’ve personally had to overcome with Django, and languages which aren’t specifically designed for the web, is that you don’t have access to the environment everywhere. The environment I’m referring to, is the current request, and response objects.
In PHP there is no response object, at least not one as you would see in […]