Bear Process

I thought I’d pay a friend with Dogecoin instead of the typical Vemno / Cash App I’ve been using for payments between people for the past few years. Dogecoin is everywhere, Elon tweets about it monthly. I’ve been hacking around with bitcoin and cryptocurrencies since pretty early on in 2011 just before Bitcoin broke $1. I remember thinking it would never break a dollar per coin! That would be nuts. The majority of people back then thought it was technically cool but the price would never hold. Woops. While it was easiest to join a mining pool or wait under...

So you’ve set up Django with Copilot on Fargate. You’ve deployed your environment, now you need to run migrations. How to do it? Well it wasn’t really possible until a few weeks ago, when Copilot relaesed a new feature called exec. Previously, I could only run tasks which would run in their own siloed containers. With exec, I can run commands and tasks in my running Docker container! In my case, I have a Django instance running as a Load Balanced Web Service, deployed by AWS Copilot into my test environment. To run migrations, I can jump into the running...

In the past, I’ve managed my ECS and Fargate deployments with the AWS and ECS CLI. Being a good record keeper, I try to avoid clicking randomly at the UI until things work (which can be surprisingly effective if you don’t care to ever reproduce your steps). I’ve also written Node and Python CLI apps to do a bunch of this orchestration. These apps start to get amazingly complex very quickly. Well lucky for us, AWS released Copilot. Copilot replaces some of the scripts and apps I’ve built to try to manage these things. I found it after looking for...

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).

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

Read more...