Our Blog

VisionPort Hardware Overview

By Alejandro Ramon
January 24, 2022

End Point’s VisionPort has gone through a number of hardware iterations before becoming the system our clients are familiar with today. In this post, we will break down the history of the changes we have made over the years, and how we ended up where we are today.

The latest server specification used for all current VisionPort installations is known internally as the “LGOne” (Liquid Galaxy One): a node that can support up to eight discrete displays as a single desktop. LGOne is now considered the default specification and will guide the direction and future of VisionPort platform development.

A few definitions before we continue

• Node: a single computer/​server.
• Display node: A computer that acts as a source for the displays, and runs applications.
• Head node: A computer that acts as the “brain” of the system.

Some history

The original server specification for the Liquid Galaxy (now known as VisionPort), was developed around 2011 and is now known as “LGClassic”. The LGClassic specification supported one display per node. For the typical seven-screen installation, this meant that eight individual LGClassic display nodes and one head node were required to run our seamless video wall …

Creating Telegram bots with Google Apps Script

By Muhammad Najmi bin Ahmad Zabidi
January 17, 2022

In a previous post on this blog, Afif wrote about how to use Google Apps Script with Google Forms. Coincidentally, last year I learned a bit about how to use Google Apps Script with Telegram Bot as a personal ledger tool, as outlined in this post by Mars Escobin.

The Telegram Bot I created from Mars’s code looks like this:

In this post I will share a bit on how to adapt Mars’s code and use Telegram Bot to get the input from the user and let Google Apps Script call Google’s cloud-based services (translation and finance) to later return the outputs to the user.

The initial process of creating a Telegram bot is outlined on Telegram’s website. After receiving Telegram’s API key we can use it inside our Google Apps Script editor.

Translation Bot

One way to use the Telegram Bot and Google Cloud Services which came to mind was to create a translation bot. Although there are undoubtedly tons of mobile apps out there which do the same thing, I wanted to learn about it by using Telegram. So I found a class that I could use in Apps Script to realize that.

Google Apps Script can be used to manipulate the Google Translate capability by calling the Language.App class. The translation …

Comparison of Lightweight CSS Frameworks

By Seth Jensen
January 13, 2022

Several months ago I was building a new website and needed a CSS framework. There are many new CSS frameworks around now, so I decided to do several small trial runs and compare them to find the most fitting for our site.

Initially I tried using Foundation, which this site is built on, but I ran into a problem: Foundation and other popular frameworks are powerful, but they have more features than I needed, and they take up too much disk space for a modest website. Foundation is about 6000 lines long and 200kB unminified. It can be shrunk by removing components you don’t need, but the time it takes to slim a large CSS framework down to your needs can be more than it’s worth, especially if you want to change any styling.

Instead of adapting a larger framework to my needs, I looked into lightweight CSS frameworks. These aim to provide boilerplate components, better styling for buttons, forms, tables, and the like, all at the cost of very little disk space.

I like to modify the source CSS as needed, so all of the sizes I list will be unzipped and unminified. They are also from my brief real-world testing on one machine, so your mileage may vary.

Bulma

Bulma looked very …

Database integration testing with .NET

By Kevin Campusano
January 12, 2022

Ruby on Rails is great. We use it at End Point for many projects with great success. One of Rails’ cool features is how easy it is to write database integration tests. Out of the box, Rails projects come with all the configuration necessary to set up a database that’s exclusive for the automated test suite. This database includes all the tables and other objects that exist within the regular database that the app uses during its normal execution. So, it is very easy to write automated tests that cover the application components that interact with the database.

ASP.NET Core is also great! However, it doesn’t have this feature out of the box. Let’s see if we can’t do it ourselves.

The sample project

As a sample project we will use a REST API that I wrote for another article. Check it out if you want to learn more about the ins and outs of developing REST APIs with .NET. You can find the source code on GitHub.

The API is very straightforward. It provides a few endpoints for CRUDing some database tables. It also provides an endpoint which, when given some vehicle information, will calculate a monetary value for that vehicle. That’s a feature that would …

On the Importance of Explicitly Converting Strings to Numbers

By Jeff Laughlin
January 11, 2022

Recently a valued colleague approached me with a JavaScript problem. This individual is new to programming and is working on a self-taught course.

The assignment was fairly simple: Take a list of space-delimited integers and find the maximum and minimum values. If you are an experienced developer you can probably already guess where this is going. His code:

function highAndLow(numbers) {
  const myArr = numbers.split(" ");
  let lowNum = myArr[0];
  let highNum = myArr[0];
  for (let i = 0; i < myArr.length; i++) {
    if (myArr[i] > highNum) {
      highNum = myArr[i];
    } else if (myArr[i] < lowNum) {
      lowNum = myArr[i];
    }
  }
  return highNum + ' ' + lowNum;
}

console.log(highAndLow("8 3 -5 42 -1 0 0 -9 4 7 4 -4"));

This produced the output:

"8 -1"

These are clearly not the maximum or minimum values.

After looking at it for a few moments I recognized a classic JavaScript pitfall: failure to explicitly convert stringy numbers to actual number types.

You see, JavaScript tries to be clever. JavaScript tries to get it right. JavaScript tries to say “the thing you are doing looks like something that you would do with numbers so …

Kubernetes 101: Deploying a web application and database

By Kevin Campusano
January 8, 2022

The DevOps world seems to have been taken over by Kubernetes during the past few years. And rightfully so, I believe, as it is a great piece of software that promises and delivers when it comes to managing deployments of complex systems.

Kubernetes is hard though. But it’s all good, I’m not a DevOps engineer. As a software developer, I shouldn’t care about any of that. Or should I? Well… Yes. I know that very well after being thrown head first into a project that heavily involves Kubernetes, without knowing the first thing about it.

Even if I wasn’t in the role of a DevOps engineer, as a software developer, I had to work with it in order to set up dev environments, troubleshoot system issues, and make sound design and architectural decisions.

After a healthy amount of struggle, I eventually gained some understanding on the subject. In this blog post I’ll share what I learned. My hope is to put out there the things I wish I knew when I first encountered and had to work with Kubernetes.

So, I’m going to introduce the basic concepts and building blocks of Kubernetes. Then, I’m going to walk you through the process of containerizing a …

Fixing a PostgreSQL cluster that has no superuser

By Jon Jensen
January 7, 2022

Normally in a newly-created PostgreSQL database cluster there is a single all-powerful administrative role (user) with “superuser” privileges, conventionally named postgres, though it can have any name.

After the initial cluster setup you can create other roles as needed. You may optionally grant one or more of your new roles the superuser privilege, but it is best to avoid granting superuser to any other roles because you and your applications should generally connect as roles with lower privilege to reduce the risk of accidental or malicious damage to your database.

Let’s break something 😎

Imagine you have a cluster with two or more superuser roles. If you accidentally remove superuser privilege from one role, you can simply connect as the other superuser and re-grant it.

But if you have a cluster where only the single postgres role is a superuser, what happens if you connect as that role and try to remove its superuser privilege?

$ psql -U postgres postgres
psql (14.1)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# \du
                       List of roles
 Role name |            Attributes             | Member of …

Setting up SSH in Visual Studio Code

By Couragyn Chretien
January 6, 2022

Visual Studio Code is a powerful code editor that can create a customized IDE for your development. VS Code’s default configuration is great for working locally but lacks the functionality to give the same experience for remote SSH development. Enter the extension Remote SSH.

Installation

Installing the Remote SSH extension is really easy! First you access the Extension Marketplace with Ctrl+Shift+X or by clicking View > Extensions in the menu, then you just search for and select Remote - SSH.

Setting up your SSH config file

To configure your connection, you’ll need to add a few lines to your SSH config. Click the green Open a Remote Window icon on the bottom left corner:

Select Open SSH Configuration File... and select the config file you want to use. I use the Linux default, /home/$USER/.ssh/config. Add the Host, HostName, and User as required and save:

Host MySite
  HostName site.endpointdev.com
  User couragyn

Connecting

Click the green Open a Remote Window icon on the bottom left corner, select Connect to Host..., and pick your desired host, in this case MySite. If your public SSH key isn’t on the remote server, you will be prompted to enter a …