Our Blog

Liquid Galaxy Goes to Chile for IMPAC4

By Bryan Berry
September 26, 2017

Marine Protected Areas: Bringing the people and ocean together

Earlier this month, The Marine Conservation Institute and the Waitt Foundation brought a Liquid Galaxy to Chile to showcase interactive and panoramic ocean content at the Fourth International Marine Protected Areas Congress in La Serena.  This conference was a convergence of marine biologists, ocean agencies, and environmentalists from around the globe to discuss the state of and future development initiatives of Marine Protected Areas worldwide.

 The Marine Conservation Institute is working on a mapping project called MPAtlas that visually catalogs the development of Marine Protected Areas across the globe as well as the Global Ocean Refuge System which pushes for elevated standards for Marine Protected Areas and advocates for a 30% protected marine ecosystem by 2030.

mpatlas.org

We built new content to showcase the GLORES areas in Google Earth as well as data visualizations of the global system of Marine Protected Areas. In addition, we collected any past oceanographic related content we’ve developed for the Liquid Galaxy platform. This included underwater panoramic media from the Catlin Seaview Survey, …

Web Security Services Roundup

By Phineas Jensen
September 19, 2017

Security is often a very difficult thing to get right, especially when it’s not easy to find reliable or up-to-date information or the process of testing can be confusing and complicated. We have a lot of history and experience working on the security of websites and servers, and we’ve found many tools and websites to be very helpful. Here is a collection of those.

Server-side security

There are a number of tools available that can scan your website to check for common vulnerabilities and the quality of SSL/TLS configuration, as well as give great tips on how to improve security for your website.

• Qualys SSL Labs Server Test takes a simple domain name, performs a series of tests from a variety of clients, and returns a simple letter grade (from A+ down to F) indicating the quality of your SSL/TLS configuration, as well as a detailed summary for a host of configuration options. It covers certificates key and algorithms; TLS and SSL configurations; cipher suites; handshakes on a wide variety of platforms including Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Edge, Safari, and others; common protocols and vulnerabilities; and other details.
• HTTP Security Report does a similar …

Client Case Study: Vervante—​Publishing, Production and Fulfillment Services

By Greg Hanson
August 28, 2017

A real-life scenario

The following is a real-life example of services we have provided for one of our clients.

Vervante Corporation provides a print on demand and order fulfillment service for thousands of customers, in their case, “Authors”. Vervante needed a way for these authors to keep track of their products. Essentially they needed an Inventory management system. So we designed a complete system from the ground up that allows Vervante’s authors many custom functions that simply are not offered in a pre-built package anywhere.

This is also a good time to mention that you should always view your web presence, in fact your business itself, as a process, not a one time “setup”. Your products will change, your customers will change, the web will change, everything will change. If you want your business to be successful, you will change.

Some Specifics

While it is beyond the scope of this case study to describe all of the programs that were developed for Vervante, it will be valuable for the reader to sample just a few of the areas to understand how diverse a single business can be. Here are a few of the functions we have built from scratch, over several years to continue to …

Custom eCommerce Development

By Greg Hanson
August 28, 2017

“Custom eCommerce” means different things to different people and organizations. For some eCommerce shopping cart sites that pump out literally hundreds of websites a year, it may mean you get to choose from a dizzying array of “templates” that can set your website apart from others.

For others, it may be a slightly more involved arrangement where you can “create categories” to group display of your products on your website … after you have entered your products into a prearranged database schema.

There are many levels of “custom” out there. Generally speaking, the closer you get to true “custom”, the more accurate the term “development” becomes.

It is very important for your business that you decide what fits your needs, and that you match your needs to a platform or company that can provide appropriate services. As you can imagine, this will depend entirely on your business.

Example scenarios

For example, a small one- or two-person business that does fulfillment of online orders may be well suited for a pre-built approach, where you pay a monthly fee to simply log into an admin, add your products, and some content, and the company does the rest. It handles all of the …

How to split Git repositories into two

By Wojtek Ziniewicz
August 14, 2017

Ever wondered how to split your Git repo into two repos?

First you need to find out what files and directories you want to move to separate repos. In the above example we’re moving dir3, dir4, and dir7 to repo A, and dir1, dir2, dir5, and dir8 to repo B.

Steps

What you need to do is to go through each and every commit in git history for every branch and filter out commits that modify directories that you dont care about in your new repo. The only flaw of this method is that it will leave those empty, filtered out commits in the history.

Track all branches

First we need to start tracking all branches locally:

for i in $(git branch -r | grep -vE "HEAD|master" | sed 's/^[ ]\+//');
  do git checkout --track $i
done

Then copy your original repo to two separate dirs: repo_a and repo_b.

cp -a source_repo repo_a
cp -a source_repo repo_b

Filter the history

Following command will delete all dirs that exclusively belong to repo B, thus we create repo A. Filtering is not limited to directories. You can provide relative paths to files, dirs etc.

cd repo_a
git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm --cached -r dir8 dir2 || true' -- --all

cd repo_b
git filter-branch …

How to check process duration in Linux with the “ps” command

By Muhammad Najmi bin Ahmad Zabidi
August 8, 2017

In certain cases we might want to get a certain process’ elapsed time for our own reason. Turns out “ps” command could easily assist us in that. According to “ps” manual, etime could put the duration of time in [[DD-]hh:]mm:ss. format, while etimes in seconds.

From “ps” manpage:

etime       ELAPSED   elapsed time since the process was started, in the form [[DD-]hh:]mm:ss.
etimes      ELAPSED   elapsed time since the process was started, in seconds.

To use that, we could use (in [[DD-]hh:]mm:ss. format):

ps -p "pid" -o etime

or in seconds:

ps -p "pid" -o etimes

In this case the “pid” should be replaced with your intended process ID.

The following will help to nicely reporting the output. We can put -o etime or -o etimes with other argument, that is “command”, in order to show the executed command along with its very own absolute path:

ps -p "28590" -o etime,command

ELAPSED COMMAND
21:45 /usr/bin/perl ./fastcgi-wrapper.pl 7999

We can also get the start date of the process’ execution:

najmi@ubuntu-ampang:~$ ps -p 21745 -o etime,command,start
    ELAPSED COMMAND                      STARTED
 1-19:47:45 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox      Aug 02

What if we do not …

JBoss 4/5/6 to Wildfly migration tips

By Piotr Hankiewicz
July 31, 2017

Introduction

Recently, we have taken over a big Java project that ran on the old JBoss 4 stack. As we know how dangerous for a business is outdated software, we and our client agreed that the most important task is to upgrade the server stack to the latest WildFly version.

It’s definitely not an easy job, but it’s worth to invest to sleep well and don’t worry about software problems.

This time it was even more work because of a complicated and not documented application, that’s why I wanted to share some tips and problem resolutions for issues I encountered.

Server configuration

You can set it up using multiple configuration files in the standalone/configuration directory.

I can recommend to use the standalone-full.xml file for most of setup, it contains a default full stack as opposed to standalone.xml.

You can also set up an application specific configuration using various configuration XML files (https://docs.jboss.org/author/display/WFLY10/Deployment+Descriptors+used+In+WildFly). Remember to keep the application specific configuration in the Classpath.

Quartz as a message queue

The Quartz library was used as a native message queue in previous JBoss versions. If you struggle …

co:collective Doable Innovation Software

By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
July 26, 2017

co:collective is a growth accelerator that works with leadership teams to conceive and execute innovation in the customer experience using a proprietary methodology called StoryDoing.

Doable, one of co:collective’s recent innovations, is a cloud-based platform designed to empower employees to meaningfully contribute and collaborate on ideas that move their business forward. The tool allows companies to solicit ideas from employees at all levels of an organization, filter down those ideas, make decisions as a team, and then implement a project—​all the while collaborating in a fun and easy-to-use application. Over 200 companies across multiple sectors use Doable to create new products, new features, and problem solve to keep their business growing.

co:collective engaged End Point’s front-end developer Kamil Ciemniewski to work with their in-house development team led by Tommy Dunn. Kamil joined the Doable effort to refactor the Doable application which was moving from a classic Ruby on Rails-based application to an Angular frontend application with a Ruby on Rails backend. Kamil has been working with Doable since March to complete the application re-write and the project has gone …