Articles by Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Introducing Presto

Note: If you’re looking for information on Houdini or Toggle, you’re in the right spot. After changing the project name from Toggle to Houdini (for SEO reasons), we’ve switched again (there was another Houdini already). If you know of another language called “Presto” please let us know, we’ve got more names. At Carbon Five we

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Bash-pocalypse 2014!

Hopefully by now everyone has heard about the Bash remote execution vulnerability, and is sufficiently terrified. We here at Carbon Five all use Macs, and so we are all by default vulnerable. Here are the steps we took to secure our computers. Maybe they can help you too.

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Agile for Startups

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation entitled Agile for Startups to the companies in Startup UCLA, a startup accelerator program run by UCLA. I actually gave this talk a week after my colleague Lane Halley presented her talk to the same group. Agile for Startups from Michael Wynholds The talk went well,

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Automating Node.js deployment to EC2 with Chef

This post is a follow up to my colleague Ben’s excellent post from three weeks ago describing how he got node.js up and running on Amazon EC2. He asked me if I could automate his deploy in order to help him provision his production environment. I decided it was a good opportunity to learn Chef.

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Raking and Testing with EventMachine

I have been getting more and more interested in high-performance Ruby apps, and in EventMachine in particular. First of all, super props to Aman Gupta for EM, and to some other Ruby devs out there who have been writing libraries and drivers on top if it, such as Ilya Grigorik, and Carbon Five’s own Mike

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Database migrations for Cassandra with ActiveColumn

We at Carbon Five are pleased to announce the release of ActiveColumn – an object mapping framework for Apache Cassandra. Currently at version 0.1.1, this gem is young but functional with its first major feature of data migration support. Prior to Cassandra 0.7, keyspaces and column families had to be maintained by hand in a

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Cassandra and Rails talk at LA NoSQL meetup

Last week, Mike Wynholds presented at the inaugural Los Angeles No SQL meetup. The movement to these non-traditional data storage systems has exploded in the last year, and we had a chance to use Cassandra in one of our client’s projects. Cassandra is a column based datastore developed within Facebook, and open-sourced as a top-level

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Evernote for the Palm Pre

The Pre, an innovative next generation smartphone from Palm Inc., recently launched with much fanfare. Access to the WebOS SDK was limited to a few select partners including Evernote, maker of a web, mobile and desktop applications for capturing and finding our memories, notes and inspirations. The Pre and the app are getting a good amount press from tech heavyweights like lifehacker and ZDnet. We

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

Dojo drag and drop gotcha in IE

I have been working on a web app for one of our clients that includes a pretty interactive AJAX / Web 2.0 component within it. This component is essentially a simplified drag-and-drop book publishing tool, which allows users to upload images and then to arrange them on predefined templates in order to create a book.

Michael Wynholds

Michael Wynholds

DBUnit, HSQL and the BOOLEAN data type

We have been using HSQL in-memory along with DBUnit for unit testing lately, and I found an issue using the most recent version of each. Basically, HSQL has added a new data type, BOOLEAN, which replaces BIT. But DBUnit is not updated to support this, and an error is throw when you attempt to insert