Bear Process

Introduction to Augmented Reality

February 25, 2017

What is Augmented Reality? My current take on the Augmented Reality space after working in it for the past three years. Presentation: What is Augmented Reality I recently gave this presentation at HackAR. If you’re in the San Francisco area, definitely consider stopping by. We’ll be creating things together in the AR space with all kinds of interesting tech (Google Tango, Leap Motion, OpenBCI, Unity, Blippar, Meta, ODG, and a bunch more).

Node and Postmark Email Address Collector

February 3, 2015

Sample Application for Node Email Collector is Here on GitHub. How hard could it be to collect email addresses from interested people on your website? Well, not very hard with Node, Express, MongoDB, and Postmark. #Overview The goal is to allow people to be notified when our startup is further along and actually has a product for sale. How do we gather those email addresses? Where are they stored? How do we send a confirmation email to let the user know they were added to the list? All of these questions and more will be answered by mixing a few...

Visualize IMU Data with Three.js and Node.js

November 25, 2014

Code is posted here on GitHub. The Adafruit 10DOF is an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Adafruit has an excellent guide for getting the device running. This particular IMU uses 3 different sensors: L3DG20H gyroscope + LSM303DLHC accelerometer compass + BMP180 barometric/temperature sensor. My goal was to view movement in the IMU on a web page. The end result looks like this: This was achieved using an Arduino to capture data from the IMU. I loaded code provided by Adafruit onto the Arduino to get AHRS data. Then used Node.js to capture the serial port stream from the Arduino and pass...

PowerShell ADDS-Domain-Controller Feature Name Not Valid

May 13, 2014

This error appeared after running a PowerShell script on Windows Server 2012 R2: The role, role service, or feature name is not valid: “ADDS-Domain-Controller”. The name was not found. This script had been working on Windows Server 2008 R2. Running Get-WindowsFeature on Windows Server 2008 R2 shows these available features, including ADDS-Domain-Controller: However run the same command on Server 2012 R2: Notice ADDS-Domain-Controller is no longer present. Instead, install the feature AD-Domain-Services, which will take care of part of the task. dcpromo is now also depricated for Windows Server 2012. Replace that command with Install-ADDSForest or Install-ADDSDomainController. I’m installing a...

Windows Azure Web Role Startup Task Repeating in Loop

March 26, 2014

Startup Tasks in an Azure Web Role can get into a repeating loop for a variety of reasons. However in my most recent case, the Startup Task itself was not the issue. It was running to completion, then being called again and again and again and… well the role would never leave the Running Application Startup Tasks… phase. ###The Reason: An error from code running in the OnStart method of WebRole.cs. The error was hidden and would cause the whole startup process to restart. ###Solution: Be sure everything in OnStart is wrapped in a try/catch. And be sure anything you...

Download all Blobs from a Container using Powershell in Azure Storage

March 12, 2014

Many common functions in Azure with PowerShell are difficult to locate across the internet. I’ll be posting more here as I work through them. This should have been simple but was suprising hard to get working (like much of Azure). Save this script and run it with your variables filled in to download all blobs from a container in Azure to a folder on your local hard drive. Here, I’m downloading everything from the ‘packageitems’ contianer and placing it into a folder called pstest on my C drive. Be sure to also replace your account name and account key below...

How to Build Single Page Application (SPA) in SharePoint Using Durandal

November 18, 2013

Single Page Apps (SPA) are becoming many SharePoint and .NET developers favorite way to build applications. There are many great frameworks to aid in the process, but one of my favorites is Durandal. Durndal itself relies on some other very well known libraries, such as Knockout, Require.js, and jQuery. Here I will show how to create a Durandal based SPA that can be deployed into SharePoint as a SharePoint-hosted app. This means all code will live client side and we will not need any access to the server or server side code.

The source code for everything we do here is posted at the bottom, so go ahead and grab that if you want it.

###Building and Understanding SharePoint-hosted apps

Open Visual Studio 2013 and create a new project. Create a C# project with the .NET Framework 4.5. I will be creating an expense report manager to demonstrate the capibilities of a SPA in SharePoint, so I named my project ReportManager.

New SharePoint Project

Troubleshooting HTML5 Video in SharePoint 2010

October 25, 2013

As expected, Internet Explorer presents problems rendering the HTML5 <Video> tag in SharePoint 2010.

<video width="320" height="240" controls>
	<source src="mov_bbb.mp4" type="video/mp4">
	Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

I threw this sample into a Content Editor Web Part and had the video rendering perfectly Chrome and Firefox right away. But I took a look in IE, and:

SharePoint Invalid Video

Invalid Source. After digging around, many articles suggest that HTML5 tags, like Video, need the HTML5 DOCTYPE to render.

Setting Up This Blog with Jekyll and GitHub

October 11, 2013

This blog was just created using Jekll and GitHub pages. The number one goal was having control of the files I publish. Word Press, Tumbler, Medium, SharePoint, or anything platform based was out. I just want to push static pages (html/css/js) without anything sever side. But I wanted a bit more ease than having to type each line of HTML myself. No need to insert <h1> and <p> tags if something can take care of simple styles for me. Which is exactly what Jekyll can do. Jekyll is a Ruby script that takes in text files and spits out all of the complete html needed to upload directly to your favorite host. However I was not looking to pay for hosting. Luckily GitHub Pages are free and are coincidently built on Jekyll as well. So how do you use Jekyll? And how do you post your Jekyll generated site for free to GitHub?

How to Use Jekyll

Use this guide!

https://learn.andrewmunsell.com/learn/jekyll-by-example

After looking through a few Jekyll/GitHub Pages guides, I finally stumbled on this magnificant tutorial. It explains Jekyll with a goal of hosting your site on Amazon, but everything up until the Amazon piece can be followed exactly. The high level overview: