Liquid Galaxy at Google for Nigeria
By Brian Zenone
August 6, 2018
Over the years, Liquid Galaxy has taken us to many a far-flung locale, but few of us at End Point were expecting a Liquid Galaxy installation in Africa. Yet that is exactly what happened: In conjunction with Google’s “Next Billion Users” initiative, End Point was invited to install a Liquid Galaxy at “Google for Nigeria” in Lagos, Africa’s largest city, a teeming metropolis of 21 million souls.
With the challenge of getting our equipment to Nigeria and hearsay about intermittent Internet and electricity, we had more than our usual concern about making sure our Liquid Galaxy would function reliably for the event. And given the US Department of State’s warnings about health and safety, the trip would be more involved than most. However, End Point engineer Will Plaut fairly leapt at the chance. More than 20 hours of flying, a bevy of vaccines and a host of visa procedures were no match for Will’s intrepid spirit and sense of adventure — he even took it upon himself to hunt down the difficult-to-find Yellow Fever vaccine in Greenville, South Carolina.
But before simply sending Will off to fend for himself amidst the hubbub of Lagos, the list of logistics problems seemed unending. The …
visionport event
Meet the End Point Windows consulting group
By Chris Hopkins
July 27, 2018
As the share of internet traffic passing through mobile devices hovers around 50%, it’s easy to forget that a lot of computing still happens on desktops and laptops—and perhaps even easier to forget that the majority of those desktops and laptops are running Microsoft Windows.
At End Point, we take pride in being a multi-platform organization and using open source technologies in real-world business environments. Our internal chat service, wiki, and many other libraries and tools we employ across our client base are all open source. However, for various reasons many companies choose Microsoft’s solutions including long-time standards Windows Server, Active Directory, and Exchange.
In April 2017, Dan Briones came to End Point to head up the company’s new Windows infrastructure services. In 2018 we added two new engineers to the mix, Chris Hopkins and Charles Chang, to form a full-service Windows consulting team, all local to our New York City office on Park Avenue.
Dan Briones
Dan is the team lead and has over three decades of hands-on experience in IT systems management, systems integrations, migrations, virtualization, networking, security, orchestration, security, compliance, …
windows integration company
Recommender System via a Simple Matrix Factorization
By Kamil Ciemniewski
July 17, 2018
Photo by Michael Cartwright, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped
We all like how apps like Spotify or Last.fm can recommend us a song that feels so much like our taste. Being able to recommend an item to a user is very important for keeping and expanding the user base.
In this article I’ll present an overview of building a recommendation system. The approach here is quite basic. It’s grounded though in a valid and battle-tested theory. I’ll show you how to put this theory into practice by coding it in Python with the help of MXNet.
Kinds of recommenders
The general setup of the content recommendation challenge is that we have users and items. The task is to recommend items to a particular user.
There are two distinct approaches to recommending content:
The first one bases its outputs on the the intricate features of the item and how they relate to the user itself. The latter one uses the information about the way other, similar users rank the items. More elaborate systems base their work on both. Such systems are called hybrid recommender systems.
This article is going to focus on collaborative filtering only.
A bit of theory: matrix …
python machine-learning
Currency exchange rates with exchangeratesapi.io
By Jon Jensen
July 14, 2018
Several of our clients run ecommerce sites, built on custom software, that allow customers to pay in their choice of a few different currencies.
Some have set up separate merchant bank accounts for each currency and use separate payment gateway accounts to accept payments natively in each currency. But more commonly they use a payment gateway that allows them to accept payment in several currencies, but receive funds converted into their specified native currency in their merchant bank account.
In either case, it is common to store prices for products, shipping, etc. in one base currency (say, USD for companies based in the U.S.) and dynamically convert prices for customers. Non-native prices may need to be marked up to cover the cost of conversion into the native currency, depending on the terms of the agreement with the payment gateway or bank.
Because currency exchange rates change often, and because payment gateways generally do not offer a way to retrieve the exchange rates in advance, we need our own source for ongoing retrieval and storage of our exchange rates (also known as forex rates).
For a while we were very pleased with Fixer.io, which was a free service that …
saas ecommerce api
Vue, Font Awesome, and Facebook/Twitter Icons
By David Christensen
July 12, 2018
Overview
Font Awesome and Vue are both great technologies. Here I detail overcoming some issues when trying to get the Facebook and Twitter icons working when using the vue-fontawesome bindings in the hopes of saving others future debugging time.
Detail
Recently, I was working with the vue-fontawesome tools, which have recently been updated to version 5 of Font Awesome. A quick installation recipe:
$ yarn add @fortawesome/fontawesome
$ yarn add @fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core
$ yarn add @fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons
$ yarn add @fortawesome/free-brands-svg-icons
$ yarn add @fortawesome/vue-fontawesome
A best practice when using Font Awesome is to import only the icons you need for your specific project instead of the thousand+, as this just contributes to project bloat. So in our main.js file, we import them like so:
// Font Awesome-related initialization
import { library } from '@fortawesome/fontawesome-svg-core'
import { faEnvelope, faUser } from '@fortawesome/free-solid-svg-icons'
import { faFacebook, faTwitter } from '@fortawesome/free-brands-svg-icons'
import { FontAwesomeIcon } from '@fortawesome/vue-fontawesome'
// Add the specific …vue javascript
Training Tesseract 4 models from real images
By Kamil Ciemniewski
July 9, 2018
Over the years, Tesseract has been one of the most popular open source optical character recognition (OCR) solutions. It provides ready-to-use models for recognizing text in many languages. Currently there are 124 models that are available to be downloaded and used.
Not too long ago, the project moved in the direction of using more modern machine-learning approaches and is now using artificial neural networks.
For some people, this move meant a lot of confusion when they wanted to train their own models. This blog post tries to explain the process of turning scans of images with textual ground-truth data into models that are ready to be used.
Tesseract pre-trained models
You can download the pre-created ones designed to be fast and consume less memory, as well as the ones requiring more in terms of resources but giving a better accuracy.
Pre-trained models have been created using the images with text artificially rendered using a huge corpus of text coming from the web. The text was rendered using different fonts. The project’s wiki states that:
For Latin-based languages, the existing model data provided has been trained on about 400000 textlines spanning about 4500 fonts. For …
ruby machine-learning
SRV DNS records in Terraform and Cloudflare
By Jon Jensen
June 26, 2018
(Photo by David Goehring, CC BY 2.0, cropped)
At End Point we are using Terraform for a few clients to manage their web hosting infrastructure as code (IaC). Terraform is particularly helpful when working with multiple cloud or infrastructure providers and stitching together their services.
For example, for one web application that involves failover from the primary production infrastructure to a secondary location at a different provider, we are using Cloudflare as a CDN to provide caching, DDoS mitigation, and traffic routing in front of virtual servers at DigitalOcean and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
We decided we wanted to store all of their infrastructure configuration in Terraform, not just what is required for the web application, so we can recreate their entire infrastructure from their Git repository.
This all went fine until we got to their email DNS records. Our client is using Microsoft Office 365 for their email, which requires some SRV records. Terraform’s Cloudflare provider works fine with the universal MX records, but when we first wanted to do this, the Terraform provider for Cloudflare did not support SRV records at all.
Luckily for us, Terraform recently (6 April …
devops terraform cloud hosting
Ecommerce Shakeups: Magento Acquisition and Etsy Rate Increases
By Steph Skardal
June 19, 2018
If you’ve been paying any attention to much in the ecommerce world, there have been a couple shakeups and transitions that could affect how you look at your ecommerce options these days.
Adobe to Acquire Magento
A few weeks ago, it was announced Adobe would acquire Magento in a large acquisition. We’ve seen Magento clients come and go. It used to be the case that the Magento Community version was free and open source, but lacking in features, and the Magento Enterprise version was not free and came with many more features but was closed source.
But, times change, and admittedly I haven’t looked into the current Magento offerings until writing this post. The two current options for Magento are Magento Commerce Starter and Magento Commerce Pro, more details here. These plans are not for small potatoes, starting at $2k/mo. I can see how the cost of this is worth it in lieu of paying a full time developer, but this is not a good fit for small businesses just getting started.
There at not many public details on the acquisition, other than bringing Magento to Adobe’s range of “physical and digital goods across a range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, wholesale, …
ecommerce magento saas