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What is serialization?

By Zed Jensen
May 6, 2021

Photo by Brian Patrick Tagalog on Unsplash

Serialization is a process used constantly by most applications today. However, there are some common misconceptions and misunderstandings about what it is and how it works; I hope to clear up a few of these in this post. I’ll be talking specifically about serialization and not marshalling, a related process.

What is serialization?

Most developers know that complex objects need to be transformed into another format before they can be sent to a server, but many might not be aware that every time they print an object in the Python or JavaScript console, the same type of thing is happening. Variables and objects as they’re stored in memory—either in a headless program or one with developer tools attached—are not really usable to us humans.

Data serialization is the process of taking an object in memory and translating it to another format. This may entail encoding the information as a chunk of binary to store in a database, creating a string representation that a human can understand, or saving a config file from the options a user selected in an application. The reverse—deserialization—takes an object in one of these formats and converts it …

3 Immediate Benefits of Google Analytics for Business Owners

By Ben Witten
April 30, 2021

Image from Google’s marketing platform blog

Where is your traffic coming from? What drew the traffic to your website? Which parts of your website are most visited? How do visits change over time? And how can the answers to these questions help you?

Answering such questions and doing something about it is called search engine optimization (SEO).

To help you with this is Google Analytics, a web analytics service that lets you track and understand your website traffic. It is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes that are looking to grow.

Here are three ways Google Analytics can benefit your business:

Determining Site Improvements to Strengthen Website Flow

This is a great way to generate more “conversions” — visitors to your website taking a desired action. Are visitors behaving the way you expected them to? Can you observe any bottlenecks in audience flow?

Bottlenecks include traffic getting stuck on one page, when you want them to be going to a different one, like a contact page. Understanding how traffic gets stuck might point you toward the need to refresh certain web pages, which could in turn lead to more conversions.

For example, we observed that our “Deployment …

Enumerated Types in Rails and PostgreSQL

By Patrick Lewis
April 29, 2021

Photo by Jared Tarbell, used under CC BY 2.0, cropped from original.

Enumerated types are a useful programming tool when dealing with variables that have a predefined, limited set of potential values. An example of an enumerated type from Wikipedia is “the four suits in a deck of playing cards may be four enumerators named Club, Diamond, Heart, and Spade, belonging to an enumerated type named suit”.

I use enumerated types in my Rails applications most often for model attributes like “status” or “category”. Rails’ implementation of enumerated types in ActiveRecord::Enum provides a way to define sets of enumerated types and automatically makes some convenient methods available on models for working with enumerated attributes. The simple syntax does belie some potential pitfalls when it comes to longer-term maintenance of applications, however, and as I’ll describe later in this post, I would caution against using this basic 1-line syntax in most cases:

enum status: [:active, :archived]

The Rails implementation of enumerated types maps values to integers in database rows by default. This can be surprising the first time it is encountered, as a Rails developer looking to store status …

Automating Windows Service Installation

By Daniel Gomm
April 23, 2021

Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

For me, setting up a service started as a clean one-liner that used InstallUtil.exe, but as time went on, I accumulated additional steps. Adding external files & folders, setting a custom Service Logon Account, and even an SSL cert had to be configured first before the service could be used. An entire checklist was needed just to make sure the service would start successfully. That’s when I realized a proper installation method was needed here. This article will go over how to make a dedicated .msi installer for a Windows Service that can do all these things and more.

Creating an installer can be tricky, because not all the available features are easy to find. In fact, the setup project itself is not included by default in Visual Studio; you need to install an extension in order to create one. But once the installer is created, we can use it to do things like:

• Configure the installer to copy the build output of a project to the C:\Program Files (x86) folder, as well as add custom files & folders to the installation
• Add custom CLI flags to the installer to specify the Service Logon Account at install time
• Add an installer class to the …

GStreamer Nvenc for Ubuntu 20.04

By Neil Elliott
April 22, 2021

Image by Martin Adams on Unsplash

GStreamer is a library for creating media-handling components. Using GStreamer you can screencast your desktop, transcode a live stream, or write a media player application for your kiosk.

Video encoding is expensive, even with AMD’s current lineup making it more palatable. Recent Nvidia Quadro and GeForce video cards include dedicated H.264 encoding and decoding hardware as a set of discrete components alongside the GPU. The hardware is used in the popular Shadowplay toolkit on Windows and available to developers through the Nvidia Video SDK on Linux.

GStreamer includes elements as part of the “GStreamer Bad” plugin set that leverages the SDK without having to get your hands too dirty. The plugins are not included with gst-plugins-bad in apt, and must be compiled with supporting libraries from Nvidia. Previously this required registering with Nvidia and downloading the Nvidia Video SDK, but Ubuntu recently added apt packages providing them, a big help for automation.

Environment

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• Video card from GPU support matrix
• GStreamer

CUDA

The nvenc and nvdec plugins depend on CUDA 11. The apt version is too old. I’ve found the runfile to …

CZML-KML Editor Geometry Editing

By Dmitry Kiselev
April 13, 2021

We are happy to introduce a new feature for the Cesium CZML-KML Editor: polygons and polylines geometry editing. You can now edit geometries for existing entities and move entered points during the creation process. Here is a video with a short summary of the editing process:

See our previous blog post introducing the Cesium CZML-KML Editor for further reference.

Spatial queries with MySQL

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
March 24, 2021

Photo by Francois Powell, CC BY 2.0, cropped

MySQL is one of the most widely used relational databases. Most PHP websites rely on MySQL for persisting their information, which makes it one of the DB-Engines top four most popular databases along with Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL.

One of its capabilities that is not very well known is that the engine supports working with spatial data, allowing you to save different shapes (points, lines, polygons) and querying information based on intersections, distances, or overlaps. This capability was included in MySQL a long time ago, but it became easier to use starting in version 5.6, when the distance and point intersection functions were added.

Spatial data can be useful for many needs, including:

• Searching for places based on latitude/​longitude coordinates
• Displaying information and areas as layers on maps
• Architecture or home design applications

My first experience with spatial queries was for a weather website I developed that displays local alerts/​warnings on a map using MySQL spatial functions to return active weather alerts for a given location, or to inform if lightning has been observed near the user’s current …

Database Design: Using Natural Keys

By Emre Hasegeli
March 15, 2021

Whether to use natural or surrogate keys is a long-debated subject of database design. I am a fan of using natural keys. I think there are even more compelling reasons to use natural keys in databases as the systems grow more complex and interdependent.

Natural or Surrogate

Let’s start by what we mean by natural. It’s not trivial to define this. In today’s world of APIs, someone’s surrogate key is another’s natural key. Wikipedia defines natural keys as “a type of unique key in a database formed of attributes that exist and are used in the external world outside the database”. This makes it clear that the keys we get from APIs are our natural keys. But how about the ones generated by us to be used in the external world?

When applications expose the keys on the URLs and APIs, others start relying on them. This is where our choices become important. When all those different applications generate their own keys instead of using the keys they got from other places, life becomes difficult for no reason.

Let’s elaborate with an example corporate database where employees are identified by their usernames and the departments with their domains. So our data would look like this:

| …