Adroit Computing

Requestio.com – Online Survey & Poll Software

adminNew — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:58:59 +0000

About the project

Requestio is a easy to use market research tool that enables you to create online surveys and opinion polls. Flexible yet powerful, this web based survey software allows you to collect responses and data from your survey target audience. You can then run this data through our reporting modules to interpret the results of your online market research campaigns. With Requestio you can create, customize, deploy and promote your online market research campaigns in a few minutes. It’s not just an online survey software- it’s a full featured market research platform for each step of your online survey campaigns or opinion polls.

Service used:

Web Design
Web Development Application
SEO, SEM
LAMP
Custom Solution

Shortcuts are not always shorter

adminNew — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:25:08 +0000

We always have a tendency to cut corners. It so happened today that I was installing Magento on one of our servers since I wanted to work on a custom module. Installation is a trivial process with Magento. Usually before installing software I do a check on requirements and dependancies to make sure that the process will go smooth but not this time.

So off I went to Magento’s website and grabbed the download URL. Using SSH on my server I downloaded the scripts and went through the installation process. After going through the quick fire list of commands that are involved when you install Magento by shell I reached the step that lets users complete the installation via a browser. WOW, I was told that I had PHP 5.1 and needed 5.2

I knew this earlier but in my haste I did not run a check on requirements specification on this server. As I kept on finding a workaround I came across a hack that lets us run Magento even when we have less than 5.2. The reason for this was that I was in a haste and also this particular server has components that are PHP version sensitive.

I had to get a PHP5-CGI and change permissions but then I ran into further problems. Time to think! I wasn’t very happy with the hack either. So I said ‘No shortcuts now’. Then I tried another shortcut — updating PHP using yum

On a CentOS x 64 box using default repositories I was not able to find a version higher than 5.1. Google search led to the atomic repo which helped me update PHP version using yum. The results of haste again: it broke a few of PHP extensions. Digging further into yum repositories available to me, led to conclusion that I did not have the proper versions to work with 5.2 now. What a day!

Now I was in trouble as I had a broken PHP and work still to be done on the custom Magento module. Then began a process of uninstalling extensions using PECL and reinstalling them after pear channel update and in between going to http://mirror.centos.org or http://dev.centos.org to get any RPM’s that were required. At the end of the process I was able to get back the PHP version in place, sort out the extension related issues and also install Magento. By then I was tired and logged out of the shell.

Ohh and by the way, I am still to start working on the custom module that I originally intended to. What a shortcut!

Using memcached as a session store

adminNew — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:18:53 +0000

Using memcached as layer that handles user defined caching using key-value pair is fairly common these days. Memcached can help reduce the load on MySQL servers [or any backend data store] for read intensive systems. More often people are using 2 or more front end servers that handle distributed load.
Having such a system in place exposes the applications to adapt to scenario where session is setup on a particular server that needs to be uniformly available across cluster. Memcached works really well as a sessions data store where any server sets a session and using inherent distribution and pooling capacity of Memcached the same is available to all machines in the cluster.
Making session handling based on Memcached is easy:

session.save_handler = memcached

session.save_path = "tcp://127.0.0.1:11211"

Where 127.0.0.1 and 11211 should be replaced if you are not using defaults. It’s now done but beware that Memcached is a in memory non persistent data store and hence if it fails for any reason all your users will loose their sessions There are ways to tackle it but more on it later.

PCI DSS: should you care?

adminNew — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:17:12 +0000

Many e-commerce websites that handle payment using a third party payment gateway end up paying a significant percentage of their gross transaction amount to the payment gateways. While there is a wide range of payment gateways available the fees still range from 0.1% to 5% of the sales amount. Some gateways charge low per transaction fee percentage while requiring a monthly fee or monthly minimum amount in monthly transactions. Others that do not charge such a fee, simply offer their services at a higher % of fee. This is a huge amount of money for high sales volume sites.

Another aspect that worries the e-commerce sites is that users are many a times redirected to the payment gateway sites to fulfill the payment. Many of the users who checkout and are redirected to the gateway do not complete the transaction nor return to the merchant site.

The solution to these situations is to accept payments on your own site and not using a third party payment gateway. While this option is to many the most lucrative to operate its certainly the most difficult one. Usually with a third party payment gateway, you only need to sign up, verify your account and follow a few simple steps to start accepting payments online. However when not using a third party gateway you have to comply with something they call as “Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard” or in short and more commonly PCI DSS. You can find more information about PCI DSS standard, compliance measures, frequently asked questions on the PCI DSS website.

So it’s easy right? Well not so easy as it seems. According to Gartner, PCI compliance will cost up to an average of $2.7 million among Level 1 merchants and $267,000 among Level 2 merchants. This alone is the biggest hinderance in accepting payments on site. There are also solutions such as Aria that help reduce these costs. Aria even goes ahead and assures to have their solutions deployed in a month or less for $30,000. So I guess the field is now open to a large number of players even if they are not Level 1 or Level 2 merchants.

The deciding factor and rightly so, now is the balancing of volume vs revenue vs upfront costs as earlier alright but there at a significantly smaller scale of economics.