We’re moving up in the world - We’ve significantly upgraded our server capacity, booking a machine that should hopefully take us forward for quite awhile. Specifically, we’ve gone from a 256mb slice on a shared virtual host to a dedicated 4GB quad-core machine. MMMhmmm feel that computing muscle. Our new server (which we have yet to name) lives up here in Canada with us, just outside of Montreal.

For the last two days I’ve been wearing my sysadmin hat, securing and configuring the box for our needs. In the meantime, I discovered that the IP address we were given more than likely used to belong an R-rated website - now that we have a web server up on port 80 I can see our request logs being filled with queries for salacious content that most definitely no longer exists. I hope these dead links will be found sooner rather than later to clean up the logs a bit, but it’s pretty amusing in any case. 

This is a big step forward as we will now be able to do our testing on the live network with real lag and real capacity (and the early results are very postive :)). The previous server just didn’t have the guts to run our backend. 

Yey for Toys!

- Paul

We had a huge day at matygo today, we got a one button click to deploy script running. It allows us to selectively deploy our back end Java server, or the Sproutcore front end app, Or both!

And get this, it was all written in ANT.

So what this means is we are one step closer to our grand vision of delivering next generation educational tools, and I would say this was a big step.

In addition to that, I spent the evening whipping up (read: spending a few hours tinkering with css…) a login page for the DarkHorse application. I think it looks pretty sharp, here’s a little screen.

A nice simple login form, which can also become the signup form with one click (and anice animation).

Most surprisingly, it’s only 12:30 and I am off to bed…

Stay tuned for more updates, maybe a video or two!

.joe

tmblg:

Stephen Fry: What I wish I’d known when I was 18

Some really brilliant stuff about technology, work, education, and creativity here. A bit long but worth it. 

- Paul

Yesterday was the 4th birthday of uEnd. To those of you who don’t know, uEnd is non-profit based out of Calgary Alberta that we have partnered with. uEnd’s goal is to empower everyday people to eradicate extreme poverty through gift giving. They place a strong emphasis on transparency and choice, things that we at Matygo are proud to align our selves with.

Above I’ve included Jay Baydala’s TEDx talk, Jay is the founder of uEnd. I’ve known him for 12 years now, and suffice it to say he’s one of the most interesting and inspiring people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. 

Great work Jay, and great work uEnd!

.joe

Here’s a sneak peak of what we’re working on for the fall:  Two screenshots highlighting a few of the features of our upcoming product. 

On the left is the navigation menu. We’ve built a  customizable dashboard and you can see some sticky widgets being used. Centre screen is our HTML5 drag-and-drop file uploader.

This shot has the course navigation pane open. You can see the three different courses saved in the dock on the right. And at the bottom is the course filtering menu. Note: The course titles are all just filler for now.

Last night our team attended in Launch Party Vancouver 9 hosted by Bootup Entrepreneurial Society. It was a great choice of venue, excellent catering, and a fantastic group of people. I have to say that the event delivered way beyond my expectations. There are some great things happening out here on the West Coast and I am very excited to be part of this enthusiastic tech community. All the best to those I chatted with. And to those I didn’t, I look forward to my chance at the next event.

Also, a special shout out to Chris Breikss of 6S Marketing for the shots.

At lunch today I rescued a cat in need of adoption. I’m glad that Matty will have someone to play with now, please welcome kitty, the former Save-On-Meats newly Matygo fortune cat. Yes, Matygo is new, proud, caring owner of the Save-On-Meats fortune cat.

As previously mentioned, we are one block away from the best cheap burgers in Vancouver at Save-On-Meats. It’s a deal too good to be true, and so sadly it soon will no longer be - by the end of June it’ll be all closed up and no doubt gentrified into some expensive hipster joint. 

Wanting to get in my fill before closing, I went there alone today and discovered that they have started liquidating everything they own. And like so many chinese businesses, Save-On-Meats owned a fortune cat - an iconic golden kitty whose sole purpose is to bring good business fortune to its owners.

Now, some people may think that it’s bad luck to buy a fortune cat from a closing business but I think this is a special case. Not only was/is Save-On-Meats a Vancouver landmark, it was open for 53 years! And it’s only being closed because its 78 year old owner has finally decided to retire. I’d say this kitty has a pretty good track record.

At the low price of $3, kitty was a downright steal. I chatted with a bit with the lady making my burgers (and got to practice my chinese for the first time in much too long) to let her know I’d be taking kitty to a good home. And here he is. I feel the fortune flowing already. :)

- Paul

More and more our new office locations proves to be super fun. The latest discovery was an indoor basket ball hoop in the near by Woodward’s building. We went and picked up a basket ball the other day and played a couple of games of 21. We learned two things: 

1. In the general case, geeks cannot shoot hoops.
2. Cam is much better at 21 than either Paul or I.

So if you stop by the office for a visit, we may just challenge you to some hoops!

joegaudet:

Nothing sweeter than seeing a fully passing test suite at 1 in the morning. Tomorrow shall bring new features… and newly failing tests.

Here at Matygo we’ve decided to jump on the NoSQL bandwagon and as such have been building up a small Java + Cassandra client. One of the many features of Cassandra is the Column / SuperColumn naming by time based UUIDs. I won’t bother explaining it, as many other people have done a much better job than I could (WTF is a super column). 

That said one of the sticky bits when using Java is that the UUID class included in the java.util package doesn’t support making time based UUIDs. This is covered on the official Cassandra wiki here. However I find their code a bit cluttered, so I thought I’d post an alternative using the Java NIO package which is quite helpful for type conversions between byte arrays and primitive data types. The class in question is the ByteBuffer. 

I tested both implementations for speed and they both performed the same, very very quickly :P

Here is the code, you’ll also need the UUID library found here.

public class UUIDUtil {
  public static java.util.UUID getTimeUUID() {
      return java.util.UUID.fromString(new com.eaio.uuid.UUID().toString());
 }
  public static java.util.UUID getRandomUUID(){
      return java.util.UUID.randomUUID();
  }
  public static java.util.UUID toUUID( byte[] uuid ) {
      ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(16);
      buffer.put(uuid);
      buffer.rewind();
      com.eaio.uuid.UUID u = new com.eaio.uuid.UUID(buffer.getLong(),buffer.getLong());
      return java.util.UUID.fromString(u.toString());
  }
  public static byte[] asByteArray(java.util.UUID uuid) {
      ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(16);
      buffer.putLong(uuid.getMostSignificantBits());
      buffer.putLong(uuid.getLeastSignificantBits());
      return buffer.array();
  }
}

Cheers,

.joe