The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

In my last post I explained how to setup a table of flat rates for shipping.  Magento calls this table rates, but whatever you call it you will have to create a table of values to use to calculate shipping.  In this post I will talk about how to create that table using country codes so that you can assign shipping rates for international shipping.  You will need to do this because you don’t really want to charge the same shipping for the country where you live, and somewhere much farther away. (more…)

So, the other day I needed to do three things.

First, I needed to have a banner image that changed each day.  This image would reflect a daily deal or promotion for a company.  Second I needed the link associated with the image to change and be specific to the promotion and deal.  And to spice things up, I also needed this to be used by other people with sites that could be anything.  So of course I broke the problem into two pieces; Image Rotation, and Link Rotation.

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So I recently sat in a discussion with a small company that needed to integrate and automate a catalog import. After describing some of the integration tools that would work they asked, “What if you don’t have any of that?”

It made me laugh, because really many times we get caught up in the environment that our favorite tool gives us that we don’t see the simple task that we are really solving.

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Back in the day, I used to use a program called Windows made by a little company called Microsoft.  I liked windows, and for the most part it did what I needed it to do.  But it also had a nasty habit of crashing when I tried to do something complex.  And this was really annoying.

Well as time went on, and I became more adept at using windows, I noticed that it tried to tell me what was wrong.  Windows was writing out a crash report.  And it had a message on the blue screen of death.  (a mostly incomprehensible message, but at least it was trying.)  And I discovered that if you looked for the error codes in Microsoft’s knowledge base, you could find the errors had corresponding articles for many of them.  (some of these articles were also incomprehensible.  ) (more…)

Recently I needed to send our team an email.  Yeah okay, so I email a lot, but this was different.  I needed to send my team an email from a server that was not anywhere near a mail server, and that was pretty paired down.  I did a bunch of Googling for answers and came up with quite a few that didn’t work.

I hate it when that happens.  So as a form of perl tutorial, I am posting my working script here as an example of sending email from a limited server using perl and the MIME::Lite library.

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Running perl integration tools we have two basic needs for time stamps and date time values.

First, it is useful to note the time that something is happening in a log file so that we don’t have to guess.

Second, it is also useful to append the date to a file name to keep our logs in daily files not just one long never ending file.

Here is a function that I use to do both of these things. (more…)