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https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/08/us/school-shootings-us-2019-trnd/index.html

It was disturbing, saddening, and ironic, that I was asked/told "are you going to be okay down there" and "be safe" before going to Colombia, and then 2 shootings occur in the US while I'm gone.The concern for my safety while traveling to another country was not lost, of course.But the amount of danger and fear for safety within our own country is a LOT worse than so many other places.The things I find most disturbing is that the bulk of the danger affects our youth, LITERALLY THE FUTURE of America, being slaughtered because of so many heinous reasons. From reasons as nefarious to dark money and lobbying from arms manufacturers and the NRA, to the most simple human selfishness, the "I don't want to give up my gun because I think it will give me a fighting chance when our government tries to herd us into corrals", as if an AR-15 will do anything to a tank running people over.Or worse when a person thinks that somehow their 2nd amendment right is somehow justified by the murder of their fellow Americans. I try to limit my political posts, because words != action, especially on this platform. But it is so painful to try and grasp the insurmountable sadness, fear, shock, and trauma that courses through the hearts & minds of anyone who experiences these shootings. I know it's a generalization, but man are we really fucking this up.

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Sharing Vespa (Open Source Big Data Serving Engine) at the SF Big Analytics Meetup

By Jon Bratseth, Distinguished Architect, Oath

I had the wonderful opportunity to present Vespa at the SF Big Analytics Meetup on September 26th, hosted by Amplitude. Several members of the Vespa team (Kim, Frode and Kristian) also attended. We all enjoyed meeting with members of the Big Analytics community to discuss how Vespa could be helpful for their companies. Thank you to Chester Chen, T.J. Bay, and Jin Hao Wan for planning the meetup, and here’s our presentation, in case you missed it (slides are also available here):

Largely developed by Yahoo engineers, Vespa is our big data processing and serving engine, available as open source on GitHub. It’s in use by many products, such as Yahoo News, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Oath Ads Platforms. 

Vespa use is growing even more rapidly; since it is open source under a permissive Apache license, Vespa can power other external third-party apps as well. 

A great example is Zedge, which uses Vespa for search and recommender systems to support content discovery for personalization of mobile phones (Android, iOS, and Web). Zedge uses Vespa in production to serve millions of monthly active users.

Visit https://vespa.ai/ to learn more and download the code. We encourage code contributions and welcome opportunities to collaborate.

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My manager, Ryan, and I had the opportunity to present on mobile first website development and what we’ve discovered along the way while building Shinola Detroit’s new mobile first e-commerce website.

Check it out and let me know what you think! :)

-T

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Varien_Crypt_Mcrypt OpenSSL override for Magento

I recently tried running Magento v1 on PHP7.1 and ran into the following error:

Function mcyrpt_module_open() is deprecated

I did some Googling to see if this has happened to other people, and sure enough, it has. Cadence Labs has a post that provides an easy workaround.

However, I take issue with the fact that this doesn't actually get past the usage of mcrypt. MCrypt is abandoned entirely in later versions of PHP and I need to make sure my clients and I are running long term solutions.

The better way to resolve this is to copy the Varien_Crypt_Mcrypt class to the local code folder at /app/code/local/Varien/Crypt/Mcrypt.php. Then refactor the class to use OpenSSL encrypt/decrypt functions instead. If you want, you can just download the code I wrote for this and drop it in your install.

Click here to download the file.

Warning: I have not tested this for backwards compatibility and I have only used this successfully with the AES-256-ECB cipher.

There are some methods in the code that attempt to translate old Mcrypt constants (ciphers and modes) to their OpenSSL alternatives, but you should do as much testing as possible before putting this in production.

- T