1. More on our partnership with Engineyard

    Posted by rick on Monday May 05 / 0 comments

    I completely missed the actual publishing of Engineyard’s latest press release announcing Lighthouse and Github on a new private cluster. I just wanted to take this chance to thank Engineyard for all the support for 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 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.

  2. Free Open Source Projects Now In Lighthouse!

    Posted by justin on Tuesday April 29 / 10 comments

    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.

    Open Source Support in Lighthouse

    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!

  3. Migrate from JIRA or Trac to Lighthouse

    Posted by justin on Thursday April 24 / 2 comments

    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.

  4. Lighthouse Timeout troubles

    Posted by rick on Tuesday April 22 / 1 comment

    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.

  5. ENTP gets ENTerPrise: working with Oracle

    Posted by courtenay on Thursday April 17 / 0 comments

    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)!

  6. What's new in Lighthouse: Custom States

    Posted by justin on Wednesday April 16 / 1 comment

    One of our most requested features was the ability to add custom states. It's now possible to do this! Just go to the edit screen for the project you want to add custom states to and fill in your preferences.

    Custom states

    Not only can you add custom states, you can specify a color for this state that will be used in event timelines and tickets. How sweet is that?

    Custom states

  7. What's new in Lighthouse: Bin Enhancements

    Posted by justin on Tuesday April 15 / 124 comments

    Ticket bins have received major upgrades. It's really easy to share and sort them now. Let's assume you want everyone to be aware of critical issues; Just search for tickets tagged:critical state:open and when you go to save your search, select "Share this ticket bin with others".

    Sharing ticket bins

    And considering critical issues are, well, critical, you'll probably want this bin displayed prominently at the top of everybody's ticket bin list.

    Ticket bin sorting

  8. What's new in Lighthouse: OpenID

    Posted by courtenay on Tuesday April 15 / 9 comments

    We’ve listened to all four of you who wanted it: Lighthouse finally joins the ranks of OpenID-enabled sites. For the noobs of you, OpenID is (most simply) a centralized way of identifying yourself. You enter your OpenID url instead of username/password. There are plenty of resources and OpenID providers out there, and you can even run your own, or set up your blog as a delegate . If you already have OpenID, this will be a welcome addition.

    Adding OpenID to your account.

    Click on the “My Profile” link in the upper right, then, fill in the details in the “Reset OpenID” sidebar box.

  9. Deploying Lighthouse 2.0!

    Posted by justin on Monday April 14 / 20 comments

    We're back!

    We're in the process of pushing the new Lighthouse 2.0. We're currently rsynching some data such as your uploads and avatars and also moving the database over. We expect to be back up before 6p.m. PST. Thanks for your patience. We'll keep you posted.

    Update 5:02 PST: Database moved over. Data is still synching. It's possible we'll be back up in the next 30 minutes.

    Update 5:30 PST: We're back! The DNS has changed, so until your ISP updates you can use YOURACCOUNT.v2.lighthouseapp.com to access your account.

  10. GitHub and Lighthouse Sitting in a Tree

    Posted by justin on Friday April 11 / 2 comments

    We'd like to congratulate our friends over at GitHub for launching an inventive masterpiece! GitHub is a fine piece of work and has changed my attitude about starting and maintaining open source projects. It's like XBOX Live (the good parts) for programmers. Fork someone's repository, helping them tackle a bug, and send them a pull request, or just sit back and watch your friends activity in true stalker fashion.

    One of the new features of GitHub is Lighthouse integration. Just provide your API key and a couple more details and you're ready to start tricking out your commit messages with meaningful information that Lighthouse can parse.

    Just incase you're unfamiliar with Lighthouse's powerful commit message parsing, check out a few examples: All examples follow this format: [ticket# keyword:value]

    # Close ticket #12 as resolved
"Fixed some broken JavaScript [#12 state:resolved]"

    # Reassign ticket #15 to rick and tag it with @high
"Finished up the design, needs to be programmed [#15 responsible:rick tagged:@high]"

    # Move ticket #121 to the milestone 1.5 Release
"Fixed most of this, but needs a lot of work [#121 milestone:'1.5 Release']"

    # Close ticket #31, tag it with 'specs', assign it to justin and set it's milestone to 1.8
"Fixed some broken specs [#31 state:resolved tagged:specs responsible:justin milestone:'1.8']"

    While you're browsing around GitHub, check out some awesome code from us here at ENTP:

  11. Come see Jeremy at the MySQL Conference

    Posted by jeremy on Friday April 04 / 139 comments

    I'll be speaking at the MySQL Conference and Expo happening in Santa Clara, CA on April 14-16, 2008.

    If you're interested, I'll be giving two talks. The first on the 15th at 4:25p.m. in Ballroom A is quite obviously titled Talk = Ruby + MySql.new(bie): An Introduction to Using MySQL with Ruby. I'll walk through the various avenues of using MySQL with Ruby, from the barest of metals to the sweetest of syntactic sugars. The second, on the 16th at 5:15p.m. in Ballroom A again, is titled ActiveRecord Under the Microscope. I'll be walking over ActiveRecord, touring features, point out gotcha's, and offering advice for those in the audience who want to jump into using ActiveRecord in big projects.

    If you're in town and want to come by, then please grab me and let me know. I'll have free copies of my book to give away.

  12. A new way to track time

    Posted by courtenay on Friday March 07 / 2 comments

    As our team rapidly expanded from one to seven, we hit some issues in tracking time. As a project manager, I needed to be able to quickly see what everyone was working on. At the same time, the existing time-tracking web-apps and programs didn’t make it very easy for developers to enter their time. As with most of our crazy ideas, this one started with “What if..”. “What if it were as simple as twittering?”

    We decided to make a time-tracker that worked just like twitter: you record your statuses just like tweets (over IM, or over the web), and you can directly address a project with @project.

    We’ll be launching this incredibly useful and simple application soon. Stay tuned for more updates.