Our Blog

VisionPort at University of Tokyo, New York office: An Exhibition for Peace on August 6th and 7th

By Samuel Stern
July 26, 2022

Ground Zero, Hiroshima, Japan – August 6th, 1945. Visualized by the lab of Professor Hidenori Watanave.

Technology and education go hand in hand, and the VisionPort platform is being used every day to make that connection.

We are extremely honored to be able to contribute to the first exhibition at the University of Tokyo’s New York office, “Convergence of Peace Activities: Connecting and Integrating by Technologies”.

It is said that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it, and in that vein, the exhibition, drawing from the work of Professor Hidenori Watanave, will be using the VisionPort platform to educate viewers on the realities of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the date of the 77th anniversary of the first nuclear weapon used in war.

The team has been collecting and colorizing photographic material from the aftermath of the bombings for over 10 years. The exhibition will combine that work with interviews and writings from survivors on a GIS canvas to allow attendees to see what it looked like and to hear from those who were there.

The lab will also be presenting the work they have been doing covering the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Day by …

Windows SSH key agent forwarding confirmation

By Ron Phipps
July 26, 2022

At End Point we use SSH keys extensively, primarily for authentication with servers for remote shell access as well as with Git services including GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Most of the time the servers we are attempting to reach are blocked from direct access and require that we go through an intermediate “jump server”.

Because of this need to jump from server to server we utilize SSH key forwarding that allows us to use the private key stored on our local system to authenticate with each of the servers in the chain. When we reach our destination server we can use the same private key to authenticate with the Git hosting service and perform git commands without having to enter a password.

One of the best practices when using SSH key forwarding is to use an option called key confirmation. When key confirmation is turned on, each time a request is made to use the private key that is loaded in the SSH agent a prompt will appear on your local machine to approve the use of the key. This reduces the ability for an attacker to use your private key without approval.

For the longest time SSH key confirmation was not available on Windows. One of the most popular SSH clients on Windows …

CSTE Conference EpiTrax retrospective

By Steve Yoman
June 29, 2022

Last week we were in Louisville, Kentucky for the CSTE Conference. End Point staffed a conference booth to represent the EpiTrax public health surveillance system to a wonderful group of public health experts.

You can read some background about the conference and CSTE in our earlier blog post announcing our plans.

We really enjoyed meeting new friends in person after two years of canceled events due to the pandemic. We spoke with staff from health departments and disease surveillance teams from several state and local jurisdictions, as well as with experts from the CDC and other software and service vendors.

One of the highlights was going around to meet other people staffing booths at the conference. It charged us up to see and hear about all of the interesting and innovative things going on in the public health space at a time when there is so much that needs to be done. We were particularly struck by the efforts being made in onboarding and distributing ELRs and eCRs, areas where the Electronic Message Staging Area (EMSA, which we deploy and support) can complement and enrich those activities.

The open-source disease surveillance and reporting software EMSA and EpiTrax both …

How to deploy a Django App with Aurora Serverless and AWS Copilot

By Jeffry Johar
June 26, 2022

Photo by Виктор Куликов

AWS Copilot has the capability to provision an external database for its containerized work load. The database options are DynamoDB (NoSQL), Aurora Serverless (SQL), and S3 Buckets. For this blog we are going to provision and use Aurora Serverless with a containerized Django app. Aurora Serverless comes with 2 options for its engine: MySQL or PostgreSQL.

Watch Amazon’s 2-minute introduction video to get the basic idea of Aurora Serverless.

We are going to work with the same Django application from my last article on AWS Copilot.

In my last article, the Django application was deployed with SQLite as the database. The application’s data is stored in SQLite which resides internally inside the container. The problem with this setup is the data is not persistent. Whenever we redeploy the application, the container will get a new filesystem. Thus all old data will be removed automatically.

Now we are moving away the application’s data externally so that the life of the data does not depend on the container. We are going to put the data on the Aurora Serverless with PostgreSQL as the engine.

Django with SQLite as the internal database

Django …

How to deploy a containerized Django app with AWS Copilot

By Jeffry Johar
June 21, 2022

Generally there are 2 major options at AWS when it comes to deployment of containerized applications. You can either go for EKS or ECS.

EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) is the managed Kubernetes service by AWS. ECS (Elastic Container Service), on the other hand, is AWS’s own way to manage your containerized application. You can learn more about EKS and ECS on the AWS website.

For this post we will use ECS.

The chosen one and the sidekick

With ECS chosen, now you have to find a preferably easy way to deploy your containerized application on it.

There are quite a number of resources from AWS that are needed for your application to live on ECS, such as VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), Security Group (firewall), EC2 (virtual machine), Load Balancer, and others. Creating these resources manually is cumbersome so AWS has came out with a tool that can automate the creation of all of them. The tool is known as AWS Copilot and we are going to learn how to use it.

Install Docker

Docker or Docker Desktop is required for building the Docker image later. Please refer to my previous article on how to install Docker Desktop on macOS, or follow Docker’s instructions for Linux and …

Getting started with Docker and Kubernetes on macOS

By Jeffry Johar
June 20, 2022

What is the best way to master American English? One school of thought says that the best way to learn a language is to live in the country of the origin. For American English that would be the USA. Why is that so? Because we as the learners get to talk to native speakers daily. By doing this, we get to know how the natives use the language and its grammar in the real world.

The same goes for learning Docker and Kubernetes. The best way to learn Docker and Kubernetes is to get them in our MacBooks, laptops, and PCs. This way we can learn and try locally what works and what doesn’t work in our local host at any time, any day.

Lucky for us earthlings who enjoy GUIs, Docker now has Docker Desktop. As its name suggests, it is nicely built for the desktop. It comes with GUI and CLI to manage our Docker and Kubernetes needs. Please take note of the Docker Desktop license. It is free for personal use, education, and open source projects, and has a fee for enterprise usage. With that out of the way, let’s get things started.

Docker Desktop Installation

The official Docker Desktop for can be found on Docker’s website. It covers installation for …

Implementing Authentication in ASP.NET Core Web APIs

By Kevin Campusano
June 17, 2022

Authentication is a complex space. There are many problem scenarios and many more solutions. When it comes to Web APIs written with ASP.NET Core, there are various fully featured options like Duende IdentityServer or Azure Active Directory. These promise to be “everything but the kitchen sink” solutions which are robust and allow you to deal with many complex requirements.

But what if our requirements dictate that we need something simpler? Do we have to roll out our own from scratch? Or does ASP.NET Core offer smaller, customizable, somewhat independent puzzle pieces that we can put together without having to write all the code ourselves and still have a good amount of control?

Spoiler alert: The answer to that last question is yes. And we’re going to talk about it in this very article.

There is a Table of contents at the end of this post.

Two approaches to authentication: JWT and API Keys

In this article, we’ll take an existing ASP.NET Core Web API and add authentication capabilities to it. Specifically, we’ll support two authentication schemes commonly used for Web APIs: JWT and API Keys. Also, we will use our own database for storage of user …

3 useful built-in objects and functions in JavaScript

By Phineas Jensen
June 15, 2022

I love learning (and learning about) programming languages. Right now I’m teaching myself Rust and trying to learn about 3D rendering. Every time I find a list of programming languages I have to look up every one that I haven’t heard of, and when I see posts about Zig or Haskell or any other cool project on Hacker News, I can’t help reading through the comments and seeing people discuss the unique features, quirks, and drawbacks of each language.

One thing I enjoy about learning about these languages (sometimes in an all-too-shallow way) is seeing all the different methods and syntaxes that exist for solving problems, and while it’s always tempting to think the grass is greener on the other side, it’s also important to do the same kind of exploration within the languages I’m using right now. Not only is it important, it actually makes using those languages a lot more enjoyable as I find new, more efficient ways to do things I’ve probably done dozens of times before.

With that spirit, here’s a little list of cool objects and functions in JavaScript that have given me that feeling of excitement and made the language more fun and …