AIAIO: Our Blog

Last week, The NY Enterprise Report released their list of the 10 Great Entrepreneurial Places to Work. Qualifications for the list are based on compensation policies, benefits and time off policies, as well as entrepreneurial spirit, culture, work/life balance and company philanthropy.

With that in mind, we’re pleased to announce that Ai ranks among the top ten Great Entrepreneurial Places to Work in New York. With lots of cool companies, serious start-ups and creative agencies around each corner, this is huge news, and just goes to confirm all the things Ai believes in: creating an environment that encourages teamwork, creativity and a sense of ownership. We strive to offer that to our employees, and we are humbled to be recognized for it.

Last year, we introduced our Ai Tenets (called “the Morgan Freemans”) to perpetuate the Ai culture by defining what makes an awesome Ai-er (who better in his roles embodies all that’s great in this world other than Morgan Freeman?). The “Morgan Freemans” include being merry craftsmen, taking initiative, seeking ownership and working towards continual growth on project and personal levels. And of course, looking out for your fellow Ai-ers: teaching, learning, giving high-fives and questioning ideas to make them better.

From the mouths of Ai-ers:

“It is kind of the chicken or the egg—not sure if the people here create the culture or our culture attracts the right people, but the quality of work and willingness to help is like nothing I have experienced in past jobs.”

“Ai is a fantastic creative hub, and what makes it special is a character trait that everyone here owns … must be the Morgan Freeman stuff – smart, hardworking, unique and quirky in all the awesome ways.”

“I’ve been lucky to work with a lot of smart, open-hearted, creative colleagues  in my life–but I’ve found more awesome people per square foot here at Ai than any other place I can remember. And an almost eerie shortage of ego and neurosis.”

Thanks to our awesome employees and to NY Enterprise Report for showcasing us among such good company. We may not take ourselves seriously, but we take culture seriously, and we are ecstatic others recognize that. Yay entrepreneurial spirit!

While doing routine sanity checks, one of our QA Engineers, Sammy Shaar, was alerted about an important Magento security update. The vulnerability potentially allows an attacker to read any file on the web server where the Zend XMLRPC functionality is enabled. This might include password files, configuration files, and possibly even databases if they are stored on the same machine as the Magento web server.

To see if you site has been affected, please see this page.

Luckily, Magento has released patches for all supported versions:

• Magento Enterprise Edition and Professional Edition merchants:
  You may access the Zend Security Upgrade patch from Patches & Support for your product in the Downloads section of your Magento account. Account log-in is required.
  Download

• Magento Community Edition merchants:
  Community Edition 1.4.0.0 through 1.4.1.1
  Community Edition 1.4.2.0
  Community Edition 1.5.0.0 through 1.7.0.1

To install the patch, place the patch file in the root of your Magento site and run the following command:

patch -p0 < zendxml_fix.patch

If you don’t have ssh access or patch installed on your machine, please see this stack overflow post for alternative methods.

Please Note: All current Ai and Canopy sites have been patched

Last Wednesday 10 Ai-ers took the morning to volunteer with Citymeals-On-Wheels delivering hot and cold meals to New York City’s homebound elderly. This was the second Meals-On-Wheels event for Ai, although it was my first experience.  The first Ai event was on the Upper East Side, and this event brought us to the west side in Hell’s Kitchen.

For many of the seniors, the Meals-On-Wheels volunteer is the only person they may interact with in an average day.  All those that receive meals are 60 years or older, physically and/or mentally incapacitated and in need of some assistance. These seniors are unable to prepare nutritious meals for themselves and generally have no family or friends nearby to help. Ai stepped in to lend a hand.

The 10 of us, split among 4 separate routes, trekked along a 15 block radius delivering meals. While some folks simply asked for the meals (one woman asking us to slip it through the window of her ground floor apartment), others enjoyed spending a few minutes chatting.  Regardless of how much interaction occurred, the recipients were always happy to see us and appreciative of the help. In fact, one recipient asked my group to help take out his trash – we were happy to oblige knowing this household task would be very difficult for him.

Last year, City-Meals-On-Wheels delivered over 2 million healthy meals and companionship to 16,232 seniors throughout NYC. Ai is proud to be part of this year’s numbers. It was a rewarding experience and we will be back. Downtown- here we come.