Summersault Blog

Earlier this year, I made some notable contributions to various open-source projects, including:

• Tim Bunce, the author of Perl’s DBI asked me to be a committer on the DBIx::HA project, a high-availability/load-balancing Perl module.
• I uploaded a new release of CGI::Session, version 4.30. As the official maintainer of the module, I worked closely with Ron Savage who did most of the release work. Summersault will likely take advantage of these improvements in the future.
• Multiple people gave me praise for my help with the Darcs 2 release. One person wrote, “Mark Stosberg was an unsung hero of the darcs-2 project for diligently triaging and following-up on hundreds of bug tracker tickets. His quality-assurance work (including setting up automated buildbot tests) is an important reason that darcs-2 is much less buggy.” By patch count, I’ve committed the third most patches to the project due to numerous documentation and test suite improvements.

These are just some of the ways that Summersault staff participate in the online community and in the open-source software movement.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that just because we want to try to be all things to our clients doesn’t mean that we can be. Of course, for any given project, the conversation about what’s possible, and on what timeline, and at what cost is never a simple one. The bigger the project, the more complex that conversation becomes. It can be easy to over-promise and under-deliver if you’re not extremely careful.

Several years ago, we began using parts of the “Extreme Programming (XP)” software engineering paradigm in our development process, with the goal of improving our time estimates, better understanding what we were able to deliver to our clients and when. I’ve not found any part of XP to be more useful than the way it describes the interactions between these four variables:
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I recently discovered some new source code control workflows that are possible with darcs.

Just after I record a patch in my local repository, I often feel compelled to review it one more time before pushing into the central repo. “Did I record changes in just the files I meant to? And even within specific files, did I include just the changes I meant to?” With darcs, this check is easily done
after recording with darcs changes --interactive --last 1 or just darcs changes -i --last 1, for short. They key part here is --interactive which launches darcs in interactive mode.

I press “x” to view the list of files affected, or “p” if I want to review a kind of “diff” in a pager, and of course “?” if I need help to remember what the options are. Very handy!

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A friend recently noted that 4 of the 5 web-based applications he uses on a regular basis to manage his life are officially still in “beta” status. While I think this has become a fairly standard practice for many web application providers, I hope it’s one that we still treat with some healthy skepticism and concern.

At Summersault, when we develop software applications, beta is certainly one of the stages that the software goes through, but it’s not a stage we would ever turn the public loose on. Generally speaking, here are the stages of our software life-cycle:
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I recently found a neat little application that has been useful both at work and in my at-home computing. It is called Prism, and what it does is allow you to run your favorite web applications (Remember the Milk, Facebook, Google Calendar, etc.) as if they were desktop applications. Because it was built on the Firefox engine, it will run any web applications you can run in your Firefox browser.
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As we’ve built Summersault’s web hosting infrastructure over the years, I’ve had a great time learning all about the security and privacy issues that come with managing a complex network of computer servers connected to the Internet. Of course, it didn’t begin there - part of being a good geek has always meant showing curiosity in how things work and what’s going on behind the scenes, and I can’t remember a time I haven’t enjoyed testing the boundaries of how secure various systems are. Perhaps that’s why I very much enjoyed Bruce Schneier’s book Secrets & Lies, a formalized (but accessible) look at of a lot of the security concepts and practices I’ve encountered over the years.
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The IMail Server from Ipswitch software is a business-oriented e-mail management system that runs on the Windows operating system. A few years ago, we were hired by a local Internet Service Provider, Parallax Systems, to help migrate their IMail Server system to a new mail server using qmail and vpopmail on a Unix-based operating system, one of the most popular mail management system setups on the Internet.

As a part of that process, we created a Perl script to assist with the migration of all the virtual domain data, individual user mailboxes and preferences, forwards, aliases, address book files, etc. It uses the Windows registry key maintained by the IMail software and creates equivalent configuration settings under the qmail/vpopmail setup.
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Today’s local paper has a story about a software glitch at the Meijer big-box grocery stores that caused them to ring up all store purchases at half price. From the article:
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As a software engineer, one of the genres of programs that you’re always on the lookout for is the “killer app,” the tool or utility that immediately becomes the “best in class” for a given problem space and technology. One problem space where I’ve been hoping for just such a tool to come along is answering that age old question, “how can we quickly schedule a meeting between a bunch of people with separately maintained and very busy calendars?” In the past, it meant lots of back and forth conversations, disjointed calendar checking, and that sense that you were spending time on “administrivia” when you could be out enjoying the world.

Enter the free web tool Doodle.ch.
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Mark hasn’t had time to create a weblog entry about this yet, so I thought I would note that he recently had an article published on Perl.com entitled Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application, which is all about the popular and mature Perl CGI::Application framework for web applications. It’s definitely for geeky web developers like us, but shows how we’re keeping track of the latest trends and tools for efficiently creating robust web applications for our clients (and designing the logo for some of those tools too). Nice job, Mark!