Our Blog

Migrating Rails 6 React to Rails 7 React

By Indra Pranesh Palanisamy
June 26, 2023

CasePointer’s disease reporting portal is built on React and Rails 6, and it’s time for an upgrade to Rails 7. This blog post will cover the steps, benefits, and challenges of migrating from Rails 6 to Rails 7, and offer valuable insights into the world of Ruby on Rails.

With the recent release of Rails 7, there are many new features and improvements to explore. One of the biggest changes in Rails 7 is the retirement of Webpacker in favor of using the native webpack for bundling JavaScript.

For those who are not familiar, Webpacker is a Rails gem which is a wrapper around the webpack build system that provides a standard webpack configuration and reasonable defaults.

Steps for migrating Rails 6 React to Rails 7 React

To migrate a Rails 6 React application to Rails 7 React, follow these steps:

1. Update the Rails Gem in the Gemfile

In your application’s Gemfile, update the Rails gem version to Rails 7:

-gem "rails", "~> 6.1.4"
+gem "rails", "~> 7.0.0"

2. Upgrade Rails packages

Upgrade the Rails packages using Yarn:

yarn upgrade @rails/actioncable --latest
yarn upgrade @rails/activestorage --latest

3. Run the Rails update task

Run …

Announcing CasePointer

By Jon Jensen
June 20, 2023

Photo by Diva Plavalaguna, Pexels license

End Point is pleased to announce CasePointer, the expanded branding of our line of public health systems and services. Before this we referred to it simply by the name of one of its components, EpiTrax.

The name CasePointer more appropriately reflects the broad scope of services we provide within the disease reporting and surveillance sector.

This change coincides with the launching of the dedicated CasePointer website at www.casepointer.com and our participation next week in this year’s conference of CSTE (Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists) in Salt Lake City, Utah. We will be staffing a booth there on the exhibition floor. Come visit us!

Starting in 2008, End Point helped develop and maintain the TriSano open source disease surveillance system. In 2019 we migrated our customer, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, from TriSano to a new disease surveillance system called EpiTrax, which was developed by the state of Utah, and is also open source.

This timeline shows those and other key points on our journey:

Due to the need for major additional features and capabilities, especially since the onset of the COVID-19 …

Using EndeavourOS as a daily driver

By Muhammad Najmi bin Ahmad Zabidi
June 16, 2023

Choosing a new distro

I have been using Manjaro Linux (based on Arch Linux) for my work desktop and Pop!_OS (based on Ubuntu) for my laptop for quite some time now, and wanted to find another Arch Linux-based distro for my daily driver. Rather than aimlessly searching through the hundreds of Linux distros out there, I made several requirements the chosen distro should meet:

• Easy to maintain.
• Has strong community support and stable development.
• Has a Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) full-disk encryption option in the installation.
• If possible, the distro of choice should be able to trim down the number of default packages. For example, I am a Gnome desktop user, so I don’t want to install the game packages I won’t use.

I decided to use EndeavourOS. It supports the features that I need: It has a strong community and most of Arch Linux’s documentation/​references are still applicable to it, like they are to most Arch Linux-based distros using systemd.

The most notable differences between EndeavourOS and Arch Linux are EndeavourOS’s GUI-based installer—we can select between installing XFCE, Plasma KDE, Gnome, and several others desktop environments—as well as …

Compressed CZML

By Dmitry Kiselev
June 13, 2023

Let’s talk about CZML, Cesium’s main language for specifying 3D scenes, and how to incorporate external resources such as billboard graphics, material textures, and 3D models into CZML files.

For example, let’s look at how we can include glTF models.

glTF models are composed of multiple files: a single JSON index file along with a variable number of binary buffer files and textures. So, in order to package CZML assets that include glTF models for distribution, you have to read the CZML document itself, then read the referenced glTF files. If they are not binary GLB files, you must also read the glTF files and package all of the files referenced by the glTF models. And if you find this paragraph cumbersome, that’s no accident. Indeed, the whole process is quite cumbersome!

So we are dealing with something like:

• CZML Document

  • glTF Model

    • buffer1.bin
    • buffer2.bin
    • texture1.png
    • texture2.png
    • …

If you want to keep the glTF model as a single asset, you can convert the glTF files into binary (GLB) files, and then embed them as base64 data links into CZML.

Another example would be a set of points with billboards, let’s say a couple hundred points with plenty of …

VisionPort: The Future of Tourism Marketing

By Jonathan Perlin
June 13, 2023

In a world of rapidly evolving technology, businesses and organizations in the tourism industry must adapt to stay relevant and competitive. VisionPort offers innovative and powerful technological solutions that can help organizations and destinations in tourism enhance the customer experience and reach a wider audience.

By showcasing destinations and providing immersive and engaging content, VisionPort can help agencies stay ahead of the competition through the use of geographic information systems and customized presentations.

Showcase destinations

VisionPort’s ability to showcase destinations through interactive panoramic views and virtual tours is a game-changer for the tourism industry. By providing immersive and engaging content, potential visitors can get a real sense of what it would be like to experience a particular destination. This can help to spark their interest and inspire them to plan a trip to that location.

With its support for a variety of media types, including panoramic views, photos, and videos, VisionPort enables businesses to create high-quality content that highlights their unique features and attractions. For instance, a resort or hotel can create …

Rocky Linux 9 via Hetzner Robot for the impatient

By Jeffry Johar
June 12, 2023

Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/go-kart-17122631/

Update: A Better Way to Install Rocky Linux 9 at Hetzner Cloud

Hey everyone, I wanted to share an update regarding the installation process of Rocky Linux 9 at Hetzner Cloud.

After input from Brian Clemens of the Rocky Linux project and some further exploration and testing, I have a more efficient and straightforward method to get Rocky Linux up and running on the Hetzner platform. You can check out the new method in my second blog post here.

About Rocky Linux

Rocky Linux is a free and open-source community-driven operating system designed to be a drop-in replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Rocky fills the gap left by the end of CentOS, which was a popular Linux distribution based on the same source code as RHEL but offered as a free alternative with community support. CentOS Stream is their new offering, but it is just different enough to not be entirely compatible with RHEL.

Another alternative is AlmaLinux, and everything mentioned here applies to Alma with some adaptation.

Rocky 9 on Hetzner

Hetzner is a popular hosting company offering bare metal and virtual servers at very affordable prices. It is based in …

Google Chrome Yum/​RPM package update fails on RHEL/​CentOS 7

By Jon Jensen
June 8, 2023

Painting by Willgard Krause, Pixabay license

One of our clients uses the Chrome web browser running on their continuous integration server with Jenkins for automated e2e (end-to-end) testing of their website. That server runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7—actually the rebuild CentOS 7.

Last month, in May 2023, Google started signing Chrome RPMs with a GnuPG subkey, where they before had signed with the main key. Now yum upgrade fails when trying to update Chrome, giving this error:

warning: /var/cache/yum/x86_64/7/google-chrome/packages/google-chrome-stable-114.0.5735.106-1.x86_64.rpm: Header V4 RSA/SHA512 Signature, key ID a3b88b8b: NOKEY
Retrieving key from https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub


The GPG keys listed for the "google-chrome" repository are already installed but they are not correct for this package.
Check that the correct key URLs are configured for this repository.


 Failing package is: google-chrome-stable-114.0.5735.106-1.x86_64
 GPG Keys are configured as: https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

To double-check, we tried to manually verify the signature on the downloaded RPM package with:

# rpm -K …

Migrating from Universal Analytics to GA4

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
June 1, 2023

Image: Migration by Aivar Ruukel, 2014. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0), obtained from Flickr

Most public-facing websites rely on Google Analytics to track their traffic, analyze the user’s characteristics and behavior, and run reports based on that information to improve marketing strategies, engage their public, and ultimately, increase the user’s loyalty.

Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4

Until 2020, Google relied on Universal Analytics, a system that offered a set of reports that were mainly based on page visits and content visualization. But in October 2020, Google announced that the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was launched, using an event-centered approach for metrics. That allows several improvements in the way the data is collected and analyzed, like taking into account several platforms and devices as a source for the data (for example, combining website traffic with mobile app usage and activity on social networks).

Another improvement is privacy: Among the new features, anonymous IP addresses are now the default setting for GA4. The user’s IP address will be still registered and used to group data when doing the initial collection, but it won’t …