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Liquid Galaxy Support Engineer Job Opening

By Benjamin Goldstein
December 13, 2018

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

We are looking for a full-time engineer to help us further support the software, infrastructure, and hardware integration for our Liquid Galaxy and related systems. Liquid Galaxy is an impressive panoramic system for Google Earth, Street View, CesiumJS, panoramic photos and videos, 3D visualizations, and other applications.

Since Liquid Galaxy is a global operation, we are looking for an engineer who will cover shifts from 5 PM U.S. Eastern Time from Wednesday through Friday; as well as both Saturday & Sunday from approximately 9 AM until 6 PM U.S. Eastern Time. These hours may have to be adjusted slightly.

What you will be doing:

• Remotely supporting End Point’s Liquid Galaxy systems and infrastructure (system updates, availability, troubleshooting)
• Joining a support team with after hours on-call responsibilities
• Creating and supporting the development of presentations built using End Point’s web-based CMS for Liquid Galaxy
• Improving the system with automation, monitoring, and customizing configurations to customers’ needs
• Clearly documenting your work

What you will need:

• Linux system administration skills (Bash, SSH, general networking)
• Experience using Google Earth and …

How to use Zend Framework components in a console app

By Kevin Campusano
November 21, 2018

When Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP in the ’90s, I bet he never thought that his language would become the engine that powers much of the web, even today, 23 years later.

PHP is indeed super popular. Part of that popularity stems for the fact that it can run pretty much anywhere. You’d be hard pressed to find a hosting solution that doesn’t support PHP out of the box, even the cheapest ones. It is also fully functional in pretty much any version of the most used operating systems so development and deployment have a very low barrier of entry.

Both because and as a result of this ubiquity and popularity, PHP also boasts an expansive, active community and a rich ecosystem of documentation, tools, libraries and frameworks. Zend Framework is a great example of the latter.

I started using Zend Framework a good while ago now, when it became clear to me that writing vanilla PHP wasn’t going to cut it anymore for moderately sized projects. I needed help and Zend Framework extended a very welcomed helping hand. Zend Framework is basically a big collection of libraries and frameworks that cover most of the needs that we would have as web developers building PHP applications.

While most parts of …

What’s the deal with ASP.NET Core Razor Pages?

By Kevin Campusano
November 20, 2018

During the last couple of years I’ve been doing lots of web development with technologies like JavaScript and PHP and Zend Framework, with a strong focus on the front end. Before that, however, the vast majority of the work I did as a web developer was with the .NET Framework.

I love .NET. Particularly the C# language. However, the greatest thing about .NET is the vibrant ecosystem full of tools (the Visual Studio IDE, for example, is outstanding), libraries and frameworks that make one’s life easier and more productive. It has, however, a crucial weakness that prevents it from reaching even greater heights: it’s locked to Windows systems. So, whenever the need comes to develop something outside of a Windows environment, you’re out of luck.

So, naturally, when Microsoft announced their initiative to make the .NET Framework open source and bring it to other platforms a few years ago, I was really excited. Fast forward to today and we have .NET Core as the product of great effort from both Microsoft and the community.

I’ve definitely kept it on my radar since its inception back in 2016, but haven’t had the chance to take a really deep dive and see what the technology is about and …

End Point at Google for Kenya

By Will Plaut
November 2, 2018

Last month End Point had the great pleasure of exhibiting a Liquid Galaxy in Kenya’s capital city of Nairobi at the first Google for Kenya event.

Kenya is home to the first Google office in Africa (opened 11 years ago) and Google is planning on growing its involvement in the country. The event was part of Google’s Next Billion Users initiative, and centered around some big announcements for Kenya. Google announced major financial commitments to a broad range of goals aimed at spurring innovation and they also announced the release of Street View for Kenya!

In July we did a similar Next Billion Users Google event in Lagos, Nigeria. The Nigerian event was open to the public and had around 7,000 guests so it was a nice change of pace to have only a couple hundred guests at the Google for Kenya event.

The Liquid Galaxy was center stage and guests took turns finding Street Views of their houses/​apartments and then looking through the spectacular Street View scenes from across the country. The Street View of the Tusks of Mombasa seemed to put a smile on everyone’s face. My personal favorite was a panosphere taken from a drone of the great wildebeest migration in Maasai Mara. …

How I Learn New Technologies

By Árpád Lajos
October 30, 2018

Photo by Marco Verch · CC BY 2.0, modified

If a developer has plenty of time, then the best way to learn a technology is to read a book about it, solve the tasks the book presents, and then to do some very basic work just to get some real-world experience. When this is done, one might want to watch some tutorial videos, consult with people who are either also learning, or, even better, are experienced in the given technology.

When someone gets comfortable with a dev stack, the person might be inclined to prefer to work only in his or her comfort zone. In consulting, this is feasible in the majority of cases. But what if someone gets a new project in a different software stack? Is it a big problem? In my opinion, it’s not a problem, if we are able to determine the minimal knowledge we need to get started. So how can a developer quickly grasp the essence of the problem space? Where are answers to the most frequent questions reachable?

In 2008 I graduated from the university and was looking for a job. In the middle of the world economic crisis new programmers had limited chances at getting a job. So I began accepting very small projects from varied clients, all using vastly different …

Image Recognition Tools

By Muhammad Najmi bin Ahmad Zabidi
October 10, 2018

I’m always impressed with the advancement of machine learning, and, more recently, deep learning. However, since I am not an expert in the field I decided to let the researchers and scholars elaborate more on them.

In this post I will share the existing tools and the associated libraries to make them work, at least for me.

The reason I explored these tools is simple: I plan to deploy a poor man’s security camera in my home with some “sense” of intelligence. Since I am working at home, I want to know who is actually knocking my door. So I thought, what if I could use a web cam to monitor my door and let me know who’s actually standing at the door?

Face Detection

I searched around for existing face detection software and found this Python script using Haarcascade. So I was able to detect faces, but upon sharing the “findings” with a friend he said this only detects faces. How would the computer be able to recognize who’s who? Then I stumbled upon the phrase “face recognition”.

You might have noticed that if you use the image file that you import directly from your smartphone, the output will be displayed in a large file to the screen. You can use ImageMagick to resize the file to …

Immersive and GIS Developer Job Opening

By Benjamin Goldstein
October 2, 2018

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

We are looking for a full-time, salaried engineer to help us further develop our software, infrastructure, and hardware integration for our shared immersive system, End Point Liquid Galaxy.

What you will be doing:

• Develop new software involving 3D GIS, panoramic video, Google Earth, a custom CMS, and ROS (Robot Operating System)
• Improve the system with automation, monitoring, and customizing configurations to customers’ needs
• Provide remote and occasional on-​site troubleshooting and support at customer locations
• Build tours and supporting tools for emerging markets
• Integrate and test new hardware to work with the system

What you will need:

• Sharp troubleshooting ability
• Experience with “devops” automation tools such as Chef
• Strong programming experience in one or more of these languages:
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • C/C++
  • Ruby
• Linux system administration skills
• A customer-​centered focus
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Experience directing your own work, and working remotely as part of a team
• Enthusiasm for learning new technologies

Bonus points for experience with:

• Contributing to open source projects
• Working with GIS, e.g., ESRI, Mapbox, Open Street Map, KML, …

Building Rasters in PostGIS

By Josh Tolley
September 12, 2018

In a past blog post I described a method I’d used to digest raw statistics from the Mexican government statistics body, INEGI, quantifying the relative educational level of residents in Mexico City. In the post, I divided these data into squares geographically, and created a KML visualization consisting of polygons, where each polygon’s color and height reflected the educational level of residents in the corresponding area. Where the original data proved slow to render and difficult to interpret, the result after processing was visually appealing, intuitively meaningful, and considerably more performant. Plus I got to revisit a favorite TV show, examine SQL’s Common Table Expressions, and demonstrate their use in building complex queries.

But the post left a few loose ends untied. For instance, the blog post built the visualization using just one large query. Although its CTE-based design rendered it fairly readable, the query remained far too complex, and far too slow, at least for general use. Doing everything in one query makes for a sometimes enjoyable mental exercise, but it also means the query has to start from zero, every time it runs, so iterative development bogs down …