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3D Audio Fundamentals

By Matt Vollrath
December 5, 2020

Photo by PT Russell on Unsplash

It’s easy to prove to yourself that you need two eyes to perceive how far away things are in the world around you. Shut one eye and the world appears flat. This ability is called stereoscopic vision. A lesser-known exercise is proving that you also need two ears to perceive which direction a sound is coming from. Shut one ear and the world outside your vision is harder to track. This ability is called binaural hearing.

As VR technology continues to push the boundaries of sight immersion with increasing accessibility, sound reproduction has not lagged behind. In fact, the consumer hardware needed for sound immersion has been accessible for decades. By leveraging 3D audio techniques, a pair of headphones can be turned into the aural equivalent of a VR headset.

The magic of stereophonic audio reproduction was first demonstrated in 1881 when French inventor Clément Ader connected microphones on the stage of the Paris Opera to listening rooms in the Palais de l’Industrie through telephone lines, where visitors experienced remote live performances on pairs of receivers. The exhibit was extremely popular and got a glowing review in Scientific American.

The …

Demonstrating the QuickBooks Desktop SDK

By Daniel Gomm
December 4, 2020

Photo by Clarisse Meyer

Is your client or company thinking about switching to QuickBooks? If so, you might be discovering that migrating your existing financial and sales data out of your old system and into QuickBooks is both time consuming and tedious. You might even have an existing ecommerce site or database with tons of data and no clear way of getting the orders into QuickBooks without manual entry.

Recently I was tasked with solving this problem. Our client needed to migrate data from an existing MySQL database into QuickBooks, and automatically add orders from our ecommerce site directly into QuickBooks going forward.

In this article I’ll go over how to use the QuickBooks Desktop SDK (also referred to as QBFC for “QuickBooks Foundation Classes” in the API documentation) to send and receive data from QuickBooks.

QuickBooks primer for developers

For the uninitiated, QuickBooks is an accounting software made by Intuit. It can be used to manage lots of data, including lists of customers, inventory items, sales orders, and invoices. All of this data is stored in a “company file”, which is a file with a .qbw extension that uses a proprietary data format. This file gets created …

A great gift for the holidays: No ads!

By Ardyn Majere
December 3, 2020

Many people will bring home a pie during the holiday season, but perhaps you’ll find a place in your home network for a Raspberry Pi instead?

With more people than ever working from home, many more people are using their personal infrastructure to conduct business, and aren’t able to rely on a crack team of network engineers to make sure their system is secure. While there are many things one can do to improve network security, from using a VPN to ensuring you update your system, a Pi-hole is one quick, inexpensive way to help keep your network a little safer not just on your phone or laptop, but on every device that connects to your router.

It’s great not only for technical types, but for everyone who connects to your network. You can even set it up with remote access and gift it to a relative, as long as you’re willing to fix it if it breaks. With the holiday season coming up, it’s surely something to consider.

Shut the door with Pi-hole

Pi-hole is an open source DNS server for your local network which blocks advertising and, after adding some extra block lists, some malicious websites.

This is done before the data even gets downloaded, by redirecting requests for ads and …

Svelte: A compiled JavaScript front-end framework

By Kevin Campusano
December 2, 2020

It seems like JavaScript frameworks are a dime a dozen these days. In the JavaScript world, there are frameworks and libraries for almost every task that you can imagine, and there is much overlap. In the front-end web development area though, there are three who reign supreme: Angular, React, and Vue.js. Whether you’re building single-page apps or traditional web apps with some front-end zest, you can’t go wrong with any of these three.

Recently though, I discovered a new player in this field that promises to offer a similar developer experience to existing frameworks with great performance gains. Its name is Svelte, and it achieves this promise in a very interesting way: it’s a compiler.

This is a novel approach to the front-end web development problem. While traditional front-end frameworks are libraries with runtime components that get loaded and executed in the browser, Svelte itself only runs at development/​build time, on your development machine. Svelte takes the JavaScript components that we write, compiles them into pure, lean JavaScript and emits only that to the browser. No big library, or runtime, or interpretation of components ever happens in the browser. It doesn’t …

Advanced WordPress customizations

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
November 27, 2020

Photo by Chris Harrison on Flickr, CC BY 2.0, cropped

WordPress is the most popular CMS, allowing you to create a professional-looking website at a relatively low cost. It also has a really strong community behind it, creating great content and supporting developers across the world.

But being popular also means being the main target of hacker attacks, and that’s why it’s crucial to keep the CMS, the theme, and all the plugins updated. When the requirements go beyond what WordPress offers on the surface, we need to find an efficient way to add our custom logic into the CMS without interfering with version upgrades, keeping the focus on security.

Custom CSS and JavaScript

A pretty common scenario in WordPress consists of installing a theme that fits most of our requirements and writing an extra layer of functionality over it to get that custom look and user experience we are looking for. Updating the theme files means that we cannot easily upgrade or change the theme without backing up our changes, and then restoring them after the upgrade, so that’s definitely not a good approach.

To make our way around this issue, some themes offer a section to add custom JavaScript or CSS rules. …

Demonstrating the HotSwap JVM

By Josh Tolley
November 25, 2020

Photo by Neil and Zulma Scott

For a recent Java development project I spent a while setting up an environment to take advantage of the HotSwap JVM, a Java virtual machine that automatically reloads classes when they change. This feature can potentially eliminate the need to redeploy each time code changes, reducing development cycle time considerably. While setting up the environment, I found I wanted a simple example of hot swapping available for my own experimentation, and I thought I’d share that example here.

First, let’s create a simple Java program. It needs to be slightly more complex than the ubiquitous “Hello, World!” application, because we need it to keep running for a while; if it just prints some message and exits immediately, we won’t have time to compile new code and see the hot swap feature in action. Here’s an example that uses a simple infinite loop, wherein it sleeps for one second, prints a message, and then repeats.

import java.lang.Thread;

public class HotSwapTest {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    while (true) {
      try {
        System.out.println("Hi");
        Thread.sleep(1000);
      } catch (InterruptedException e) { …

Availity: An API for Health Insurance

By Patrick Lewis
November 16, 2020

Photo by Sergio Santos, used under CC BY 2.0, cropped from original.

I have been working on a tele-therapy application for a client in the health care industry over the past few months and had the opportunity to do some interesting work in the area of health insurance coverages and claims.

I was tasked with creating an integration of the Availity API for insurance coverages which provides the ability to make requests for details about a patient’s health insurance coverage and returns responses containing information like the patient’s primary care doctor, their copay amounts, and their deductibles.

The ability to query this health insurance information from an API in an automated fashion helps streamline the process of billing clients by validating their health insurance details and also determining what a patient’s financial responsibility will be for their online therapy sessions. Availity provides information for over 11,000 insurance companies; a full list of supported payers is available on their site via a web interface and a downloadable CSV file.

Availity provides both REST and SOAP APIs in addition to a batch processing system that functions over SFTP. For the purposes of …

Job opening: Java & JavaScript developer

By Jon Jensen
November 13, 2020

This position has been filled. See our active job listings here.

We are seeking a full-time Java software engineer to work with us on our clients’ applications.

End Point is an Internet technology consulting company based in New York City, with 50 employees serving many clients ranging from small family businesses to large corporations. The company turned 25 years old this year!

Even before the pandemic most of us worked remotely from home offices. We collaborate using SSH, Git, project tracking tools, Zulip chat, video conferencing, and of course email and phones.

What you will be doing:

• Develop new web applications and support existing ones for our clients
• Work together with End Point co-workers and our clients’ in-house staff
• Use your desktop OS of choice: Linux, macOS, Windows
• Use open source tools and contribute back as opportunity arises

What you bring:

Professional experience developing and supporting web applications in these technical areas:

• 3+ years of development with Java and front-end JavaScript
• Frameworks and libraries such as Wildfly, Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Play, and Vue.js, React, Angular
• Databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Solr, Elasticsearch, etc.
• Security consciousness
• Git version control
• Automated testing …