Liquid Galaxy at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics
By Dave Jenkins
February 13, 2018
The Winter Olympics are in full swing in Pyeongchang, Korea! We’re proud to note that we have a full Liquid Galaxy running onsite there as well.
Our Seoul-based partner, AZero, has been working closely with KEPCO, the Korean power company, to bring Liquid Galaxies to several of their visitor centers scattered throughout South Korea. KEPCO utilizes the Liquid Galaxy to showcase their infrastructure elements of hydroelectric dams, large power stations, and substations to show how they bring electricity to the 40M+ people living in South Korea.
As a lead corporate sponsor of the games, KEPCO wanted to bring that same story to the Olympic venues. AZero developed new content that highlights the Olympic venues and Pyeongchang area and deployed the Liquid Galaxy at the Gangneung branch office (near Pyeongchang, and also a host of several Olympic venues).
Now that the games are in full swing, KEPCO is bringing VIPs, government officials, and a global list of business contacts to their center, and is using the Liquid Galaxy as the central platform to present their accomplishments.
If you’re in Pyeongchang, why not take some time to see this incredible immersive platform?
End Point is …
visionport event clients
Regionation with PostGIS
By Josh Tolley
February 8, 2018
Recently a co-worker handed me a KML file and said, in essence, “This file takes too long for the Liquid Galaxy to load and render. What can you do to make it faster?” It’s a common problem for large data sets, no matter the display platform. For the Liquid Galaxy the common first response is “Regionate!”
Though your dictionary may claim otherwise, for purposes of this post the word means to group a set of geographic data into regions of localized objects. This is sometimes also called “spatial clustering” or “geographic clustering”. After grouping objects into geographically similar clusters, we can then use the KML Region object to tell Google Earth to render the full detail of a region only when the current view shows enough of that region to justify spending the processing time. Although the “Pro” version of Google Earth offers an automated regionation feature, it has some limitations. I’d like to compare it to some alternatives available in PostgreSQL and PostGIS.
Data sets
For this experiment I’ve chosen a few different freely available datasets, with the aim to use different geographic data types, distributed in different ways. First, I found a database of 49,000 on-shore …
postgres gis visionport
New Tools — Old-Fashioned Project Management
By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
January 24, 2018
Photo by Kennisland, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped
In the last year at End Point, I’ve managed projects in Trello, JIRA, Redmine, Basecamp, RT (Request Tracker) and a few others. The market of project management tools is wide and varied…and they are all great. Well, maybe that’s a topic for another post.
However, I’ve been thinking lately—as I kick off yet another project—that no matter what tool you use for managing your project there are some fundamentals you should never forget. For those of you deep in the mud of project management tools I have some reminders for you:
Communicate with your client
No matter what tool you use to manage development, don’t let fancy apps or tools take the place of actual one-on-one time with your client. Hearing from them in their own voice about their needs and how the project affects their business and goals is invaluable. No project can succeed without the stakeholder’s vision.
Don’t stop talking to your client once the proposal is written or the project scope is done…create a way to talk to them often. Talking to your client can take many forms, but an old-fashioned phone call is always a good way.
Show measurable progress
I have noticed that the …
management
YouTube Algorithms, Engagement, and You
By Cody Ressler
January 24, 2018
Photo by Garry Knight, CC BY 2.0, modified
As we move into 2018, it is important to understand how algorithms have automated much of what we see when browsing websites such as YouTube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
While YouTube is certainly facing its fair share of controversies and criticism1, it is unlikely that YouTube will be toppled as the predominant video entertainment source for the current generation of young adults and children within the next five years. With that in mind, it is important that we can understand just how YouTube decides both what videos it thinks you should be seeing and how it places ads on those videos.
So many videos!
YouTube is currently experiencing a glut of uploads and content—with over 400 hours of video uploaded each minute2—and it can be difficult to have a video pick up traction within this never-ending barrage of uploads. While most of the videos you may see on YouTube have view counts ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions, the average view count for videos in the tech sector is just around 6,500—and even this is much higher than the median view counts.
Many videos uploaded to the service do not utilize techniques to maximize …
video marketing
Regular Expression Inconsistencies With Unicode
By Phineas Jensen
January 23, 2018
A casual stroll through the world of Unicode and regular expressions—Photo by Presidio of Monterey
Character classes in regular expressions are an extremely useful and widespread feature, but there are some relatively recent changes that you might not know of.
The issue stems from how different programming languages, locales, and character encodings treat predefined character classes. Take, for example, the expression \w which was introduced in Perl around the year 1990 (along with \d and \s and their inverted sets \W, \D, and \S).
The \w shorthand is a character class that matches “word characters” as the C language understands them: [a-zA-Z0-9_]. At least when ASCII was the main player in the character encoding scene that simple fact was true. With the standardization of Unicode and UTF-8, the meaning of \w has become a more foggy.
Perl
Take this example in a recent Perl version:
use 5.012; # use 5.012 or higher includes Unicode support
use utf8; # necessary for Unicode string literals
print "username" =~ /^\w+$/; # 1
print "userاسم" =~ /^\w+$/; # 1
Perl is treating \w differently here because the characters “اسم” (“ism” meaning “name” in Arabic) definitely …
python ruby javascript golang perl dotnet php unicode
Enhancing Your Sites with Vue.js
By Greg Davidson
December 26, 2017
Framework Fatigue
When developers consider and evaluate front-end frameworks they often think in terms of writing or rewriting their entire project in Framework X. “Should we use Vue, React, Preact?” or “I heard about Sapper the other day, has anyone tried that?” The running joke response (back-end developers especially love this one) is to the effect of: “If we wait a couple weeks there will be ten more choices!”
All joking aside, frameworks like Vue and React offer many great benefits and can be incrementally adopted to enhance existing sites. There is no need to rewrite your entire project as a Single Page Application to take advantage of what frameworks like Vue offer. I have taken this approach on a couple of my projects recently and been very happy with the results.
Start Small
One of the benefits of using a framework in this way is that you’re not forced to adopt its entire toolchain and specific workflow immediately, such as using ES6/2015, webpack, and Babel right off the bat. I simply loaded the minified, minimal version of Vue I needed on my page and I was off to the races.
If you are familiar with Angular, Vue has a similar concept of custom directives. I used this to …
javascript html frameworks vue
End Point Featured as Global Leader in Ruby on Rails & Ecommerce Development
By Ben Witten
December 21, 2017
As the year comes to a close and we reflect on the goals we’ve accomplished and the work that made it all possible, we are proud to announce our inclusion on the Clutch Global Leaders List, encapsulating the 475+ most highly reviewed companies from around the world. We placed as a leader on both Top Ruby on Rails Developers and Top Ecommerce Developers, being the best New York-based firm on the former and in the top three from New York on the latter.
Achieving the status of a Clutch Global Leader in not just one, but two categories speaks volumes on the effort we’ve put forth in 2017. We couldn’t have hit this milestone without skilled work from End Point staff and the great relationships we’ve nurtured with clients. Looking back on these memorable projects, here are some of the things are clients wrote on our Clutch profile:
“I’ve worked with a lot of different service providers. Results can vary across the board. End Point is very transparent about what they’re working on in terms of providing complete details. We don’t have any surprises at the end of the month as a result. They’re very dependable, delivering what they promise every time,” explained the Director of Ecommerce …
company ruby rails ecommerce
Mobile Device and Application Management (MAM vs. MDM)
By Joe Marrero
December 20, 2017
Businesses of all sizes have been increasingly using mobile devices for all kinds of activities. Some of these activities are pretty common, like being able to read and respond to work email and manage work calendars. On the other hand, some companies are using mobile devices for more specific niche activities like checking in customers, using device cameras to read barcodes and UPC stickers, or even temporarily storing sensitive business related data.
As a result of the proliferation of mobile devices for work use, corporations and smaller businesses are finding the need the exhibit finer control over how their employees and customers use their devices. This is where mobile device management (MDM) and mobile application management (MAM) really shine and help solve many of these types of problems.
What is MDM?
Mobile device management (MDM) is a software solution that allows organizations to manage the maintenance, deployment, and configuration of mobile devices that are issued to members of the organization. All of this magic tends to be done via a store or portal application that users download onto their devices.
The app begins an enrollment process when the user enters their …
mobile android ios security