Our Blog

Shell efficiency: mkdir and mv

By Jon Jensen
March 10, 2017

Little tools can be a nice improvement. Not everything needs to be thought-leaderish.

For example, once upon a time in my Unix infancy I didn’t know that mkdir has the -p option to make intervening directories automatically. So back then, in order to create the path a/b/c/ I would’ve run:

mkdir a; mkdir a/b; mkdir a/b/c

when I could instead have simply run:

mkdir -p a/b/c

In working at the shell, particularly on my own local machine, I often find myself wanting to move one or several files into a different location, to file them away. For example:

mv -i ~/Downloads/Some\ Long\ File\ Name.pdf ~/some-other-long-file-name.tar.xz ~/archive/new...

at which point I realize that the subdirectory of ~/archive that I want to move those files into does not yet exist.

I can’t simply move to the beginning of the line and change mv to mkdir -p without removing my partially-typed ~/archive/new....

I can go ahead and remove that, and then after I run the command I have to change the mkdir back to mv and add back the ~/archive/new....

In one single day I found I was doing that so often that it became tedious, so I re-read the GNU coreutils manpage for mv to see if there was a relevant option I …

360° Panoramic Video on Liquid Galaxy

By Ben Witten
March 6, 2017

End Point’s Liquid Galaxy recently had an exciting breakthrough! We can now show 360° panoramic video effectively and seamlessly on our Liquid Galaxy systems.

Since our integration of seamless 360° panovideo, our marketing and content teams have been loading up our system with the best 360° panoramic videos. The Liquid Galaxy system at our headquarter office has 360° panoramic videos from National Geographic, The New York Times, Google Spotlight, gaming videos, and more.

The technical challenge with panoramic video is to get multiple instances of the video player app to work in sync. On the Liquid Galaxy, you’re actually seeing 7 different video player apps all running at the same time and playing the same video file, but with each app showing a slightly adjusted slice of the 360° panoramic video. This synchronization and angle-adjustment is at the heart of the Liquid Galaxy platform, and allows a high-resolution experience and surrounding immersion that doesn’t happen on any other video wall system.

We anticipate that our flawless 360° panoramic video will resonate with many industries, one of whom is the gaming industry. Below we’ve included a video of 360° …

Become A File Spy With This One Easy Trick! Sys Admins Love This!

By Josh Williams
February 28, 2017

We had an interesting problem to track down. (Though I suppose I wouldn’t be writing about it if it weren’t, yes?) Over the years a client had built up quite the collection of scripts executed by cron to maintain some files on their site. Some of these were fairly complex, taking a long while to run, and overlapping with each other.

One day, the backup churn hit a tipping point and we took notice. Some process, we found, seemed to be touching an increasing number of image files: The contents were almost always the same, but the modification timestamps were updated. But digging through the myriad of code to figure out what was doing that was proving to be somewhat troublesome.

Enter auditd, already present on the RHEL host. This allows us to attach a watch on the directory in question, and track down exactly what was performing the events. Note that other flavors of Linux, such as Ubuntu, may not have it out of the box. But you can usually install it via the the auditd package.

(output from a test system for demonstration purposes)
# auditctl -w /root/output
# tail /var/log/audit/audit.log
type=SYSCALL msg=audit(1487974252.630:311): arch=c000003e syscall=2 success=yes exit=3 a0 …

FOSDEM 2017: experience, community and good talks

By Emanuele “Lele” Calò
February 13, 2017

In case you happen to be short on time: my final overall perspective about FOSDEM 2017 is that it was awesome… with very few downsides.

If you want the longer version, keep reading cause there’s a lot to know and do at FOSDEM and never enough time, sadly.

This year I actually took a different approach than last time and decided to concentrate on one main track per day, instead of (literally) jumping from one to the other. While I think that overall this may be a good approach if most of the topics covered in a track are of your interest, that comes at the cost of missing one of the best aspects of FOSDEM which is “variety” in contents and presenters.

Day 1: Backup & Recovery

For the first day I chose the Backup & Recovery track which hosted talks revolving around three interesting and useful projects: namely REAR (Relax and Recovery), DRLM, a wrapper and backup management tool based on REAR and Bareos, which is a backup solution forked from Bacula in 2010 and steadily proceeding and improving since then. Both REAR and DLRM were explained and showcased by some of the respective projects main contributors and creators. As a long time system administrator, I …

Full Cesium Mapping on the Liquid Galaxy

By Dave Jenkins
February 7, 2017

A few months ago, we shared a video and some early work we had done with bringing the Cesium open source mapping application to the Liquid Galaxy. We’ve now completed a full deployment for Smartrac, a retail tracking analytics provider, using Cesium in a production environment! This project presented a number of technical challenges beyond the early prototype work, but also brought great results for the client and garnered a fair amount of attention in the press, to everyone’s benefit.

Cesium is an open source mapping application that separates out the tile sets, elevation, and markup language. This separation allows for flexibility at each major element:

• We can use a specific terrain elevation data set while substituting any one of several map “skins” to drape on that elevation: a simple color coded map, a nighttime illumination map, even a water-colored “pirate map” look.
• For the terrain, we can download as much or as little is needed: As the Cesium viewer zooms in on a given spot, Cesium uses a sort of fractal method to download finer and finer resolution terrains in just the surrounding area, eventually getting to the data limit of the set. This gradual approach …

Liquid Galaxy Success at U.S. Embassy’s Cultural Center

By Ben Witten
February 2, 2017

The U.S. Embassy to Jakarta features a high-tech cultural center called “@america”. @america’s mission is to provide a space for young Indonesians to learn more about the United States through discussions, cultural performances, debates, competitions and exhibitions.

Since Google generously donated it six years ago, @america has had a Liquid Galaxy deployed for use at the center. Not until recently, however, has @america taken advantage of our Content Management System. This past year, End Point developed and rolled out a revamped and powerful Content Management System for the fleet of Liquid Galaxies we support. With the updated Content Management System, End Point’s Content Team created a specialized Interactive Education Portal on @america’s Liquid Galaxy. The Education Portal featured over 50 high quality, interactive university experiences. Thanks to the CMS, the Liquid Galaxy now shows campus videos, university statistics, and fly-tos and orbits around the schools. The campus videos included both recruitment videos, as well as student-created videos on topics like housing, campus sports, and religion. These university experiences allow young Indonesians the …

Smartrac’s Liquid Galaxy at National Retail Federation

By Ben Witten
January 25, 2017

Last week, Smartrac exhibited at the retail industry’s BIG Show, NRF 2017, using a Liquid Galaxy with custom animations to showcase their technology.

Smartrac provides data analytics to retail chains by tracking physical goods with NFC and Bluetooth tags that combine to track goods all the way from the factory to the distribution center to retail stores. It’s a complex but complete solution. How best to visualize all that data and show the incredible value that Smartrac brings? Seven screens with real time maps in Cesium, 3D store models in Unity, and browser-based dashboards, of course. End Point has been working with Smartrac for a number of years as a development resource on their SmartCosmos platform, helping them with UX and back-end database interfaces. This work included development of REST-based APIs for data handling, as well as a Virtual Reality project utilizing the Unity game engine to visualize data and marketing materials directly on several platforms including the Oculus Rift, the Samsung Gear 7 VR, and WebGL. Bringing that back-end work forward in a highly visible platform for the retail conference was a natural extension for them, and the Liquid Galaxy …

TriSano Case Study

By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
January 24, 2017

Overview

End Point has been working with state and local health agencies since 2008. We host disease outbreak surveillance and management systems and have expertise providing clients with the sophisticated case management tools they need to deliver in-house analysis, visualization, and reporting—​combined with the flexibility to comply with changing state and federal requirements. End Point provides the hosting infrastructure, database, reporting systems, and customizations that agencies need in order to service to their populations.

Our work with health agencies is a great example of End Point’s ability to use our experience in open source technology, Ruby on Rails, manage and back up large secure datasets, and integrate reporting systems to build and support a full-stack application. We will discuss one such client in this case study.

Why End Point?

End Point is a good fit for this project because of our expertise in several areas including reporting and our hosting capabilities. End Point has had a long history of consultant experts in PostgreSQL and Ruby on Rails, which are the core software behind this application.

Also, End Point specializes in customizing open-source …