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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 …

End Point booth at CSTE 2022 conference

By Shannon Sandall
June 9, 2022

Photo by David Barajas

Converging on Kentucky

We are excited to announce that End Point will be attending the CSTE (Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists) conference in less than two weeks!

We will be running a booth during the 3-day conference in Louisville, Kentucky from Monday, June 20 through Wednesday, June 22, 2022. Our crew is scheduled to include Steve Yoman, Linda King, Ben Goldstein, and me.

Please come visit us in booth #35 to learn more about the EpiTrax Disease Surveillance System and EMSA (Electronic Message Staging Area). Now is the time for public health entities to turn to modern systems to perform disease surveillance, automate the ingestion of electronic laboratory records (ELRs) and electronic case reports (eCRs), report to the CDC through NMI reporting methods, track outbreaks, perform contact management, and do it all with a highly configurable system.

Our booth will feature a VisionPort Mini to showcase EpiTrax and EMSA! VisionPort is our product combining hardware and software to give organizations the ability to create dynamic, shared immersive multimedia experiences. We are delighted when we have opportunities like this to use VisionPort to …

Understanding Linear Regression

By Kürşat Kutlu Aydemir
June 1, 2022

Photo by Scott Webb

Linear regression is a regression model which outputs a numeric value. It is used to predict an outcome based on a linear set of input.

The simplest hypothesis function of linear regression model is a univariate function as shown in the equation below:

$$ h_θ = θ_0 + θ_1x_1 $$

As you can guess this function represents a linear line in the coordinate system. The hypothesis function (h₀) approximates the output given input.

θ₀ is the intercept, also called bias term. θ₁ is the gradient or slope.

A linear regression model can either represent a univariate or a multivariate problem. So we can generalize the equation of the hypothesis as summation:

$$ h_θ = \sum{θ_ix_i} $$

where x₀ is always 1.

We can also represent the hypothesis equation with vector notation:

$$ h_θ = \begin{bmatrix} θ_0 & θ_1 & θ_2 \dots θ_n \end{bmatrix} x \begin{bmatrix} x_0 \\ x_1 \\ x_2 \\ \vdots \\ x_n \end{bmatrix} $$

Linear Regression Model

I am going to introduce a linear regression model using a gradient descent algorithm. Each iteration of a gradient descent algorithm calculates the following steps:

• Hypothesis h
• The loss
• Gradient descent update

The gradient descent …

Backing up your SaaS data with Google Takeout

By Seth Jensen
May 31, 2022

Keeping backups is extremely important.

Losing important files can feel like a far-off problem, but the chance of misplacing a drive, theft, drive failure, accidental deletion, house fire, flood, etc., is much greater than we may think. The benefits outweigh the cost of backups, for files that matter at all. So everyone should make regular backups of data that they care about and that can’t be replaced.

Even among people who regularly make backups, there is one area many of us neglect: all of that data on various online services, also called software as a service or SaaS: Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, etc.

It’s true, the most volatile files are the ones sitting in a single location on your laptop or thumb drive, not those on Google, WordPress, or iCloud servers. The danger of losing files is not nearly as present with SaaS. You can’t drop Google on the floor and lose a couple terabytes of data, like you can a hard drive, but you can be locked out of your account, accidentally delete files, and lose data by missing a notice about a service shutting down. Not to mention the possibility that your SaaS provider is hacked and loses …

Aligning monospace font text columns with an old Unix tool

By Jon Jensen
May 30, 2022

Photo by Garrett Skinner

A blast from 1990: column

A while back I learned of a nice old Unix command-line tool called column. It first appeared in 4.3BSD-Reno, released in July 1990. (This is not to be confused with the different, even older Unix tool col.)

column formats plain text into nice columns based on the width of the input separated by tabs or groups of spaces.

For example, take this mess found in a server’s /etc/fstab file defining filesystem mount points. It is a real example lightly redacted to remove business details. You may need to scroll right to see the end of the fairly long lines:

/data3/customer_uploads   /home/interch/htdocs/shared/customer_uploads none    rw,bind 0   0
/data3/customer_images    /home/interch/htdocs/shared/customer_images  none    rw,bind 0   0
/data3/images/items       home/interch/htdocs/images/items     none    rw,bind 0       0
/data3/images/thumb       home/interch/htdocs/images/thumb     none    rw,bind 0       0
/data3/upload_images       /home/interch/upload_images     none    rw,bind 0       0
/data3/design    /home/interch/htdocs/shared/design  none    rw,bind 0   0
/data3/design_temp   /home/interch/htdocs/shared/design_temp …

Middleware: Is that still a thing?

By Richard Templet
May 26, 2022

The simple answer to the question in the title is simply, yes! Despite the term being many decades old and well past its hype peak, middleware is still very much a thing and has become a key part of the technical landscape that is critical in day-to-day functioning of systems.

So there are still some questions to be answered: What is middleware? What does it do? And maybe most importantly: Why do we care?

What is it?

In its simplest meaning, middleware is an application that sits between other applications and shuffles data between them. There is normally one system requesting the information and the middleware figures out where to get that requested data and makes the request to another system.

An easy example of this is buying something at a retail store using your credit or debit card. When you swipe your card, the business makes a request to a service (some middleware) to ask if there’s enough room on the card for that purchase. Then that system makes a request to the appropriate bank or card holding company to ask the same question. The bank or card holding company replies with either a yes or no and that answer is then relayed back to the terminal where you swiped …