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ENTP brings on Rabble, ass-kicking ensues

2008-07-07T16:15:00Z

The excellent Evan Henshaw-Plath, a longtime friend and cabooser, has joined ENTP as our latest Ruby and Rails coder. Evan worked at famed early rails adopters Odeo, and most recently was instrumental in the Yahoo BrickHouse’s Fire Eagle geo platform.

I know can speak for the team when I say we’re all wetting our pants to work with yet another smart implementer. He’s already been hacking XMPP into some of our internal apps.

Where did those custom selectors in Lighthouse go?

2008-06-25T23:42:00Z

As some of you may have noticed, the fancy user selector in Lighthouse has recently gone missing! You know the one. It looked a little something like this:

No, the Hamburglar did not hop out of your televisions and run off with it. We've just decided to make take a different direction for the time being. So for now, you'll see something a little more on the simple side of life.

You can quit rubbing your eyes and pinching yourself. It's not a dream. In truth, we've run into a few brick walls with the usability of the assigned user selector. While we work on developing a user selector widget that can rock some socks off, we feel that the usability of the system controls are more important than some fancy UI fluff.

So what was so wrong with the previous selector? For starters, the script wasn't going to allow us to order the list in a way which made sense for accounts and projects with a large number of users. It was forcing us to settle for horizontal ordering, which isn't cool at all.

Most importantly though, it crippled the use of hotkeys. By taking out that beloved visual selector, you can now use your keyboard the way it was intended. As accounts and projects grow, those lists are getting long, and now you can use that keyboard to sort through the list or jump straight to a user.

Lighthouse member/invites system gets some love

2008-06-24T18:57:00Z

Last Wednesday, we took Lighthouse offline to deploy some bug fixes and give it some serious feature love. Our original intention was to blog about the new features the next morning so that users would wake up to something pretty cool, but we got a little sidetracked tweaking some last minute details. Now we owe our users a blog post, so without further ado...

What's new?

Member management ++

When you log into your Lighthouse account, you'll notice something different at the top. Rather than the old People tab, you now have an Access & Permissions tab:

We're especially excited about this. The member management and invite areas within your Lighthouse account has been revamped from the ground up.

Lighthouse has received a great deal of feedback from our users over the last year. Thanks to your voice, we came up with an entirely new way to handle Access & Permissions for member management and invites. This update will make managing the people who surround your projects a lot easier.

When you click Set Permissions, the available settings for that member will drop down.

As you can see, I'm currently set to the account administrator. This actually disables the project selectors at the bottom half of the selector options. If the administrator check is removed, then those fields are opened up and you can easily select which projects that person is a member of.

We've had a few users ask how deleting or removing members from their accounts works. This is a side of the user interface that isn't quite finished just yet. We decided to release the improvements we'd already built (ship early!).

The access and permissions list organizes your users in order of their permissions. Members who have account access are at the top, while those who have individual project access will be below the account level members.

So what about deleting a user from your account/project? For technical reasons, rather than deleting the user from the account, you remove all their permissions. This will remove the user from your member count, and they will be pushed down to the very bottom of your members list.

Meet the totally revamped invite system

Lighthouse invites have always been pretty straight forward. Actually, they've been so straight forward that they sometimes were fumbled in the process. We took that into account when restructuring the invite system so there wasn't any confusion between the inviter, the invitee, and the Lighthouse account or project(s) in question.

Now when you click the Invite someone by email tab, you'll see a lot more than just the email address field that the old system had.

The new invite system allows for you to not only invite the user, but set their permissions to your account and/or projects right there. But wait...there's more.

So you've just sent the invite email out and you're soon to be project member gets the email a few moments later. When they click that link in their email, they will see a little something like this:

Notice the two options on the left side? Lighthouse invites now allow you to create a new profile right there on the spot or log into a current profile for which you wish to accept the invitation offer. Also, if you're already logged into Lighthouse when you receive an invite, you'll see a third option.

The third option is to use the invitation for the profile in which you are currently logged into. Pretty cool, huh?

Overall, we really think the new member management and invite system is going to improve the users experience of Lighthouse right from the start.

Lighthouse downtime scheduled for Saturday, 8 p.m. PDT

2008-06-20T23:43:00Z

We’ll have a small window of downtime for about one hour on Saturday night in order to push some bug fixes and perform server maintenance to Lighthouse. Downtime will start on Saturday at 8 p.m. PST (2000 -7 GMT) while our host, Engine Yard, performs a Cluster Switch Upgrade. During that time we’ll be updating Lighthouse.

We’re hoping that Saturday night/Sunday morning is good time when most sane people will be out doing things that don’t involve ticket tracking, but we would like to apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause. The details for the updates are as follows:

Cluster Switch Upgrade

Engine Yard is upgrading the switches that provide connectivity for our slices starting at 8 p.m. PDT (2000 -7 GMT)

Database Maintenance

Deployments usually only take a few minutes, but we’ll be taking this opportunity to tweak some of the core database indexes. The site will already be offline while the new switches are being setup.

DNS Changes

Much our surprise, our DNS nameservers were still at our old Engine Yard cluster. EY00 happened to be taken down for some server maintenance while we were pushing out the new Access & Permissions updates this week. This is the last bit of our service that relies on the old slices. We’re all set up on the new nameservers, but we’ll be making the change live tomorrow night.

edit

June 20, 2008 at 9:28 p.m. – this post was just updated to reflect that the downtime will begin at 8 p.m., not at the originally stated 9 p.m.

Git Put

2008-06-20T20:20:00Z

I had zero experience using version control before I began working for ENTP, so starting fresh with Git was a breeze. The only problem I found was when I when it came time to git push, I always seemed to push branches I didn't mean to push. Luckily, my pal Trevor showed me how to create an alias for a new command - git put. This neat trick (using newer versions of git) ensures only the 'current' branch is pushed.

Paste this into your $HOME/.gitconfig file and never worry about accidentally pushing that p0rn branch again.


[alias] 
  put = push origin HEAD

Rough seas around the lighthouse this morning

2008-06-19T03:52:00Z

4:47 p.m. PDT

Account invite emails are now being processed. We're still under the hood at the moment, but those which we're cued up should have reached their destination inbox by now.

3:52 a.m. PDT

We hit a bit of a snag after we brought Lighthouse back online last night. At the moment, invitations for Lighthouse accounts and projects are not making it out of the system.

On a positive note, the entire email system is not effected. Emails sent to Lighthouse are being processed, and email notifications of ticket replies are going through the system as normal.

We'll keep you updated as we know more.

Scheduled Lighthouse downtime tonight at 10 p.m.

2008-06-18T18:30:00Z

We're taking Lighthouse offline for approximately 15-30 minutes at 10 p.m. PST (that would be 2200 -7GMT) today in order to perform some updates to the system.

There are several updates in store which we will blog about as we bring Lighthouse back online, but there seems to be an odd sense of excitement in the office about one of the minor improvements. It has to do with some wording changes to the inline Lighthouse ticket notifications.

Currently, when you set a milestone of a ticket to be empty, it reads:

→ Milestone set to “" "”

That's now going to have a more clear statement, which will read something like:

→ Milestone cleared

Now call me crazy, but I've never seen Rick so excited about a single change in Lighthouse. Maybe he needs his privileges from the Viso stocked office fridge taken away? I've heard him use the term "snarky" 22 times today, so that has to be grounds for some kind of punishment.

Minor refinements to Lighthouse such as this improve the users experience and mixed with additional notification improvements to tickets that we have in store for the near future, it just makes Lighthouse better. Of course, there is a little more in store than just some wording changes that we are REALLY excited about! *CoughNewMembersAndInvitesSystemCough*

We'll keep you posted on tonight's update after this short break. Stay tuned!

Open Source Loves Lighthouse

2008-06-17T20:33:00Z

Since we've rolled out our free Open Source projects we've had a number of amazing projects come on board. Check out the projects for yourself:

SproutCore: Fresh off the press! Created by Sproutit with major contributions from Apple, SproutCore is a Cocoa-inspired, MVC-based JavaScript framework.

mootools: A compact, modular, object-oriented JavaScript framework. We used mootools' FX package on Warehouse, it's a fantastic framework and we're glad to have them on board.

Prototype: Our JavaScript framework of choice. We use Prototype almost universally on our projects, including Lighthouse.

RubyOnRails: The immensely popular web framework that Lighthouse is built on along with a host of other very popular applications including Twitter, Penny Arcade and BaseCamp.

Merb: An up and coming web framework built on Ruby, created and supported by our awesome hosting provider EngineYard.

Chyrp: A clean and simple PHP blogging engine with a pimpin' theme and module engine.

Rubinius: A virtual machine for running Ruby programs and a Ruby core library. Rubinius is also supported by Engineyard.

RSpec: A Behaviour Driven Development framework for Ruby

Thanks to all those projects who've joined us here at Lighthouse, especially the Rubinius, Merb and Rspec guys. They were on Lighthouse long before our official open source support, and have given us a lot of good feedback and criticism. We're looking forward to expanding on our Open Source functionality and doing what we can to support free and open projects!

Lighthouse Spam Issues

2008-06-04T21:50:00Z

9:01 AM PST (the next day)

I deployed some code late last night that should make the spam handling more tolerant (hello, http timeouts!). I also changed the default behavior for failed API calls to leave the ticket in the current state, rather than marking it spam. Please let us know if there's something we can do to resolve any spam fires, or if you're still seeing issues.

We've gotten some requests over the last month to allow projects to disable spam tracking. We'll cautiously provide this, but I'm thinking some of you don't remember the dark spam-filled early days of Lighthouse. We have a ridiculous tar pit system that I hope is keeping a lot of the riff raff out.

6:57 PM PST

I recently heard from Defensio. They are in the process of restoring their service, in the mean time we'll be working on a fix on our end to ensure we'll be able to handle this scenario in the future.

2:58 PST

It looks as if an Amazon EC2 is the cause of the problem. Defensio is twittering their status that you can follow here.

2:52 PM PST

Just a quick post to let everyone know we started experiencing high levels of false positives for spam. It appears our filter Defensio is down at the moment. We're getting in touch with them and I'll update this post as soon as I know something further.

Exciting developments in Lighthouse

2008-05-21T02:51:00Z

From our Campfire room. Read into this what you will. :)

More on our partnership with Engineyard

2008-05-05T23:09:00Z

I completely missed the actual publishing of Engine Yard’s latest press release announcing Lighthouse and Github on a new private cluster. I just wanted to take this chance to thank Engine Yard for all the support they have given us over the past year. With just the two man team in ActiveReload bootstrapping the application from their own pockets, there’s no way we would have had the time to do our client work, write Lighthouse, and set up a scalable clustered infrastructure too. Their knowledgeable staff has helped keep the database tuned and speedy, migrated us to the faster Thin web server, and gave us a much larger caching server to keep everything snappy.

I also noticed that New Relic finally emerged from stealth mode. We’ve been using their monitoring system for several months now and have been very pleased. I’ll be posting more on that later.

Disclaimer: Naturally, our opinions may be tainted a bit by the donated hosting provided by Engineyard.

Free Open Source Projects Now In Lighthouse!

2008-04-29T23:44:00Z

We've just rolled out the beginning of exciting things to come in Lighthouse: Open Source Project support. To create an OSS Project, just select "Open Source Project" from the Project Type area and choose a license when creating or editing a project.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on our support for OSS projects. Our next goal in this area is to roll out an area where anyone can browse and search OSS projects across Lighthouse. Enjoy!

Migrate from JIRA or Trac to Lighthouse

2008-04-24T21:37:00Z

Looking to move from old tickets from JIRA or Trac to Lighthouse? You're not alone. Some of our members have gotten creative with the Lighthouse API and implemented some unofficial importers.

Lighthouse Timeout troubles

2008-04-22T04:41:00Z

If you’re following our twitter stream or been trying to use Lighthouse this afternoon, you will have noticed the slowness. It’s been tracked down to a firewall issue on the slices and elevated to an EY support issue. Basically, the slices can’t access the outside world. This is fine for most functions, but breaks down on a few of them. The major one is OpenID. I was astonished to find that it has no concept of timeouts, so requests to openid servers were timing out after several minutes. Yikes. I’ve fixed the code and posted a patch for the ruby-openid folks.

Keep an eye on this post or Twitter for when the firewall issue is solved. And until then, please refrain from using OpenID to log in. Thanks.

Update: And we’re back. The firewalls are syncing up properly now.

ENTP gets ENTerPrise: working with Oracle

2008-04-17T03:40:00Z

The fine folks at Oracle have been building a Rails-based social platform called Mix for their customers and employees to network and collaborate. For customers of Oracle, this is an invaluable site to see into the internals of Oracle and ask questions of the relevant teams in a public forum (“Where’s the 10G adapters for OSX Intel?”).

It was initially built on a JRuby + Oracle App server + Oracle DB stack, and has been growing since its launch around OpenWorld last year. Oracle has their excellent internal Apps Lab team hacking on the site, but due to timing constraints needed a fresh team to come in and kick some ass.

We’ve been busy adding some cool features like direct messaging, while learning the ins and outs of Oracle 10G and building WARs. Meanwhile, Justin and Kyle been super-busy on some of the coolest javascript I’ve ever seen, for some secret new features yet to be unveiled. There’s more to be released over the coming months in the lead-up to OpenWorld. (Honestly, I don’t know where Justin gets the time to work on Gitnub , Lighthouse and client work)!