Our Blog

Cesium Labels

By Dmitry Kiselev
May 24, 2023

Improving place labels in CesiumJS, the open source JavaScript library for 3D globes and maps, has been a longstanding request from some of our VisionPort clients. The display of labels embedded in imagery has not been up to their expectations. The names look upside down as the globe is rotated and there’s no option to change the language:

Cesium has vector labels which allow you to anchor some text to a point on a map which will always be aligned with the camera. However, there is no ready-to-use solution to display city names in particular and no way to load them according to a specific zoom level.

To improve performance when displaying labels in Cesium it would make sense to load labels as a tile tree and only show some of the top of the tree at different zoom levels in a manner similar to how KML Regions with NetworkLinks work. Unfortunately, although Cesium supports KML, it doesn’t support KML Regions and NetworkLinks updates on Region change.

Another off-the-shelf solution that might conceivably work would be to use Cesium 3D tiles, but unfortunately, tiles do not support 2D Billboards.

Calculating regions and their level of detail is complicated, but Cesium already …

eCR Coordinator job opening

By Shannon Sandall
May 23, 2023

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

We are seeking a full-time Electronic Case Reporting (eCR) Coordinator to provide high-level expertise in the validation and automation of eCR messages.

This position is responsible for establishing complete, up-to-date, timely, and automated reporting of individual-level data, and automation of incoming EHR data. Position is remote, in the United States only.

The person in this role will be responsible for coordinating and overseeing the eCR onboarding process for our clients. Additionally, the person will become our subject matter expert for the NNDSS Modernization Initiative (NMI) and how systems in place within EpiTrax can be configured to report through the NMI module.

Job responsibilities

1. eCR onboarding—40%

   • Assist the on-boarding team with eCR reporters.
   • Develop Structure, Dictionary, LOINC and SNOMED codes in EMSA.
   • Assist in eCR message structure approval.
   • Assist with EMSA management.

2. Troubleshooting—30%

   • Issues found by the program epis and the LHDs.
   • Issues found by the surveillance team.
   • Create trouble tickets for issues.

3. Testing—15%

   • Test the structure for incoming messages.
   • Test new enhancement functionality.
   • Test bug fixes.

4. Grant document development—5% …

How to use the Caps Lock key as an Escape key on Windows, macOS, and Linux

By Trevor Slocum
April 17, 2023

On most keyboards, the Escape key is distant from the most common keys. In order to reach it, you likely need to lift your hand from the keyboard. This interrupts the flow of typing and, over time, may cause repetitive strain injuries.

When using modal applications which require frequent use of the Escape key, such as the text editor Vim, shortening the distance your fingers travel to and from the Escape key helps prevent injury and saves time.

After following the instructions below, you may need to restart your system in order to finish applying the changes.

Windows instructions

Download and install PowerToys, a set of utilities created by Microsoft.

Open PowerToys and browse to the Keyboard Manager. Enable the Keyboard Manager and click Remap a key. Choose Caps Lock -> Escape.

Note that this fix requires PowerToys to be running.

macOS instructions

Go to Apple menu -> System preferences -> Keyboard. If you have multiple keyboards, make sure your active keyboard is selected.

Click on the Modifier keys button to open a popup dialog. Open the dropdown next to Caps Lock and select Escape.

Linux instructions

There are separate instructions for Linux depending on whether you …

SSH host key verification: a few useful tips

By Selvakumar Arumugam
April 13, 2023

The SSH connections between a client and a remote server begin with a host key verification as an initial handshake. If the default key algorithm is not supported between the client and server, the SSH connection attempt is closed with no matching host key type response.

$ sftp username@domain
Unable to negotiate with xx.xx.xx.xx port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa
Connection closed.
Connection closed

In this article, we will explore the host key verification process and discuss ways to handle the non-matching host key issue to establish the connection.

Host keys

By default, OpenSSH automatically generates a public-private key pair on the server and stores it in /etc/ssh. These keys, known as host keys, are created using several encryption algorithms including RSA, DSA, ECDSA, and ed25519.

The pair of private and public keys is available on the host server at the path /etc/ssh.

$ ls /etc/ssh | grep key
ssh_host_dsa_key
ssh_host_dsa_key.pub
ssh_host_ecdsa_key
ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub
ssh_host_ed25519_key
ssh_host_ed25519_key.pub
ssh_host_rsa_key
ssh_host_rsa_key.pub

How does OpenSSH decide which host key to use?

During SSH connection establishment, the …

How To Set Up pgTAP for Writing PostgreSQL Database Unit Tests

By Edgar Mlowe
April 12, 2023

In a previous blog post, my colleague Josh Tolley introduced the concept of using pgTAP, a set of Postgres functions designed for writing unit tests within the database. This post will serve as a supplement to Josh’s post, focusing on the process of setting up pgTAP for testing a Postgres database.

Installing & setting up pgTAP

Note: make sure you have Postgres installed on your system. If you don’t have it, you can follow the Postgres documentation to learn how to install it.

To install pgTAP for Postgres, you will need to follow these steps:

1. Download the pgTAP source code from its GitHub repository.

   git clone https://github.com/pgtap/pgtap.git
   

2. Navigate to the pgtap directory.

   cd pgtap
   

3. Install with make.

   make && make install
   

4. Finally, connect to your Postgres database using psql or any other Postgres client and run the following SQL command to create the pgTAP extension.

   CREATE EXTENSION pgtap;
   

Now you should have pgTAP installed and ready to use in your Postgres database. If you face issues with installation, visit the pgTAP documentation for further help.

Writing simple database tests with pgTAP

Test to check if a table exists:

SELECT plan(1); …

Tennessee Hackathon 2023

By Darius Clynes
March 30, 2023

We just had our first company gathering in our Tennessee office after a hiatus of several years. About 20 End Pointers came to our Johnson City, Tennessee office to work on various VisionPort projects. For several of us, it also provided an opportunity to meet each other in person for the first time.

End Point Tennessee office (EPTN)

Other than our Johnson City-based team, for many of us this was our first look at our Tennessee office from which the VisionPort systems are assembled, tested and shipped.

Our Content Management System (CMS) team worked on some exciting updates to our VisionPort CMS, including important modifications to our touchscreen systems and improvements to the user interface.

Meanwhile our Research & Development team worked on upgrades to the VisionPort system itself, focusing on integrating large and small touchscreens for multimedia presentations. One such improvement was support for 8 tabletop touchscreens integrated to serve 16 museum visitors simultaneously.

Our support team worked on testing and spinning up documentation to bring our inventory up to date and prepare for the next wave of our new VisionPort CMS installations.

Casablanca

The luxurious …

Identifying Vulnerabilities in Code Using Horusec

By Indra Pranesh Palanisamy
March 28, 2023

Horusec is an open source tool which, by orchestrating other security tools, identifies security flaws and vulnerabilities in source code. It puts all the possible vulnerabilities it finds into a database for analysis.

Currently, Horusec supports C#, Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Swift, C, Dart, Elixir, shell, Terraform, Kubernetes, nginx, HTML, and JSON. You can see an up-to-date list of supported languages in Horusec’s docs.

It can also be integrated with CI/CD to execute the scan every time a developer creates a pull request or merge request.

Horusec CLI Installation

Requirements: Docker, Git.

The easiest installation method listed in the docs is curling Horusec’s install script and piping it into bash:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ZupIT/horusec/main/deployments/scripts/install.sh | bash -s latest

Be aware that there is risk to piping unseen commands into the shell like this: It can lead to unintended consequences and it is a bad security practice.

If a user blindly pipes the output of a website response to be run by a shell without fully understanding what each command does, they may inadvertently execute malicious …

Interchange 3rd Party Tax Support

By Mark Johnson
March 21, 2023

New 3rd-party tax API support has been added to core Interchange¹.

In the wake of the Wayfair court decision², many businesses running Interchange catalogs lack the necessary tools for full compliance. A new translation layer has been created in Vend::Tax to connect the standard sales tax structures and routines that operate within Interchange, and the development of vendor-specific 3rd-party tax providers. The goal of the Vend::Tax framework is to create a space to allow for development of any number of vendor-specific tax services to support tax calculation in Interchange.

Vend::Tax defines 3 new tags to support its function:

• [tax-lookup]: Returns calculated tax amount determined by specific 3rd-party provider. Tax may be estimated or live lookup, depending on settings. Data required to calculate tax will be provider dependent.
• [load-tax-averages]: Requests and stores tax averages for running in estimate mode, for providers that support it. Stores estimates by default in the tax_averages table. Further, allows for local tracking of jurisdictions with nexus, which can be used by live lookups to determine if a particular lookup can be skipped entirely. See load_tax_averages Job …