OpenITI Starts Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
September 10, 2019
Photo by Free Quran Pictures 4K, cropped, CC BY 2.0
Congratulations to the Open Islamicate Texts Initiative (OpenITI) on their new project the Arabic-script OCR Catalyst Project (AOCP)! This project received funding from the The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation this summer.
End Point developer Kamil Ciemniewski will be serving the project as a Technology Integration Specialist. Kamil has been involved with OpenITI since 2018 and with the affiliated project, Corpus Builder, since 2017.
Corpus Builder project version 1.0 made collaborative effort possible in producing ground truth datasets for OCR models training. The application acts as a versioned database of text transcriptions and a full OCR pipeline itself. The versioned character of the database follows closely the model used by Git.
What is remarkable about it is that it brings the ability to work on revisions of documents whose character isn’t linear as text in the Git case. For the OCR problem, one needs both textual data but also the spatial: where exactly the text is to be found.
A sophisticated mechanism of applying updates to those documents minimizes (with mathematical guarantees) the chance of introducing merge conflicts. …
clients machine-learning natural-language-processing
Campendium: A Responsive, Fancy Detail Page
By Steph Skardal
September 9, 2019
This week, I was very excited to deploy a project for Campendium, one of our long-time clients. As noted in my recent post on Campendium updates for the year, Campendium has thousands of listings of places to camp and provides a great infrastructure for the development of a rich community of travelers around North America.
For the past few months, I’ve been working on a significant update to Campendium’s campground detail page, the page template where in-depth information is provided for each of Campendium’s locations. This is equivalent to a product detail page on an ecommerce site.
The “guts” of the update included a new detail page design with expanded responsiveness, the introduction of 360° videos, and expanded user driven content in the form of Question & Answer (Q&A or QnA), reviews, notes, nightly rates, etc. Read on to find out more and see video examples of several of the features!
User Interface & Responsiveness Updates
One of the things the Campendium team and I are most proud of here is the responsiveness of the new design. In the case of traveling and camping, responsiveness is important since a large amount of traffic comes from mobile devices, relative …
rails solr sunspot react maps javascript user-interface ruby clients case-study
National Braille Press Releases Redesigned Website
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
August 28, 2019
End Point congratulates National Braille Press on the recent release of their redesigned website, launched earlier this week! National Braille Press (NBP) supports the blind and low-vision community with events, initiatives, resources, children’s programs, and a bookstore. NBP has been working with End Point since 2002 and hosts and maintains their website, which is based on the Interchange open-source ecommerce platform.
Project Phases
End Point started working with NBP on this redesign project in late 2017. We began with a user experience (UX) review & content strategy project which resulted in design directives for our in-house team. Design and plans were completed in mid-2018 and implementation began then. End Point built a new, more powerful search feature and developed a number of ‘cornerstone’ pages while NBP staff worked tirelessly in-house to convert the rest of the pages on their website to the new designs.
Leveraging NBP In-House Resources
NBP’s wide reach in their community and long history means their website has hundreds of content pages. This can be costly to convert, and for some non-profits, can make a redesign project cost-prohibitive. End Point engineers …
clients design case-study interchange accessibility
Fix for cdparanoia segmentation fault
By Jon Jensen
August 27, 2019
Photo by Alberto Cabrera, cropped, CC BY 2.0
It had been a while since I last needed to rip a CD into audio files (and compress them), but the need recently arose. This particular disc was a language learning supplement to a book, and a CD was a reasonable way to distribute that.
(Even though audio file downloads and streaming have become a far more common way to distribute audio than physical CDs, electronic formats don’t preserve our same rights to resell, lend, and make backups. But that is a topic for another blog post!)
I was ripping the CD with abcde (A Better CD Encoder), a text-based CD ripping, tagging, and compressing front-end I have used often in the past. Unexpectedly I got an error, as shown in this terminal output:
Executing customizable pre-read function... done.
Getting CD track info... Querying the CD for audio tracks...
Grabbing entire CD - tracks: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42
abcde: attempting to resume from /home/user/Music/abcde.2a0e162a..
.
Grabbing track 28: Track 28...
cdparanoia III release 10.2 (September 11, 2008)
Ripping from sector 131363 (track 28 …tips open-source audio
The Dollars and Sense of Hiring Software Consultants
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
August 16, 2019
Photo by Nik MacMillan on Unsplash
I’m often asked by family and friends about End Point’s market and how software consulting fits into the business landscape and I thought I’d write up some thoughts for the general public in how hiring a consultant is actually the smartest thing to do for your business and it makes a ton of sense financially.
Let’s talk some math about hiring an in-house developer:
-
According to Glassdoor, the average software developer salary is around $50,000–$120,000. Let’s say $85,000 per year. You typically pay for health insurance, other benefits and overhead expenses, so let’s just round the total cost of hiring one person to $110,000 per year (I think that’s actually pretty conservative).
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You’d probably need to hire two people to support anything essential to your business, since having a single developer is risky (illness/vacation/employment change, etc.).
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Your total cost of getting two developers in-house is around ~$220,000 per year
| Hiring your own developers | Software consulting agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Senior developers | ✓ | ✓ |
| Diverse skillset | ? | ✓ |
| Protection from staffing changes | ✗ | ✓ … |
company training
How to set up a local development environment for WordPress from scratch
By Kevin Campusano
August 7, 2019
I recently got pulled into a project for a client who wanted to have a new WordPress website developed for them. I started by setting up a development environment with the niceties that I’m used to from my other application development work. That is, a development server, interactive debugging, linting, and a good editor.
Another thing that I wanted was not to have to deal with LAMP or WAMP or XAMPP or any of that. I wanted a clean, from scratch installation where I knew and controlled everything that was there. I’ve got nothing against those packages, but I think that, by setting up everything manually, I’d be able to better learn the technology as I would know exactly how everything is set up under the hood. The shortcuts could come later.
Luckily for me, there aren’t many pieces when it comes to setting up a basic, running development environment for WordPress. You only need three things: 1. MySQL, 2. PHP, and 3. WordPress itself. I also wanted a few other goodies and we’ll get there.
Let’s go through the steps that I took to set all of this up:
1. Set up PHP
In Ubuntu, installing PHP is easy enough. Just run the following command:
sudo apt-get install php
After that’s done, …
wordpress development mysql php ubuntu vscode
A Moon Landing and the Education of Our Children
By Jonathan Perlin
August 6, 2019
As Liquid Galaxy flows from city to city, a big museum in small-town Kansas welcomes its newest exhibit to the collection. Amidst authentic NASA artifacts and real remnants of the space program, an array of seven screens glows in the shadow of the full-size replica of the lunar module that put man on the moon. In the wake of the 50th anniversary of the monumental mission, Liquid Galaxy arrives right on time to educate and awe patrons of all ages.
“Jim and I had a great time experimenting with it…and while we were doing so, we talked with three different guests—one couple and two singles—who said how much they appreciated us adding it. What Jim and I appreciated was the variety of content that we can see teachers using when they have classes here.” —Mimi Meredith, VP of Development, Cosmosphere Museum, Hutchinson, Kansas
In the initial stages of installation, passersby cocked their heads in curiosity as large displays were lifted onto their mounts and the form of Liquid Galaxy emerged. The scene dramatically changed as the screens came to life and images of Earth and the Moon flew across the screen to the delight of children and adults alike. Witnessing the joy and wonder …
visionport education
Campendium v2019: A Summary of Recent Updates
By Steph Skardal
August 5, 2019
This year has brought a handful of exciting changes for Campendium, one of End Point’s long-time clients, by yours truly. Created by campers for campers, Campendium has thousands of listings of places to camp, from swanky RV parks to free remote destinations, vetted by a team of full-time travelers and reviewed by over 200,000 members. I thought I would take some time to summarize these recent updates.
Maps and Clustering
Campendium uses Mapbox for map rendering to display campgrounds and locations throughout North America. One of the new features added this year was clustering of campground locations, where campgrounds are grouped together and presented in a “cluster” with a size relative to how many campgrounds are in the cluster.
If a user is searching for campgrounds in a broad location, they can see where campgrounds might be more densely grouped by location. Once a user zooms in zoom in a couple of clicks, the campgrounds are no longer clustered and individual campgrounds locations can be seen. While working on this update, we spent a good amount of our time tweaking and troubleshooting the optimal clustering behavior to provide the most benefit to those searching for a …
rails solr sunspot react maps javascript user-interface ruby clients case-study