Technology

We recently worked with a client that has a variety of hardware instruments generating loads of data that is consumed down the road by an assortment of software systems and applications. These software systems function independently (they don't need to communicate to do their job), but in a big picture view one system could be reliant on the results of another — it is a workflow with a lot of manual intervention. The dirty work to generate the data users care about was a distraction that we saw an opportunity to remove.

I always enjoy learning more about other businesses in the tech industry and had a chance to explore several during the CR Tech Crawl. Tech Crawl was created to be an evening of exploring different locations in major cities across Iowa while getting to know fellow Iowans in the industry. Last year the two largest metros of the state played host to a Tech Crawl in both Des Moines and Cedar Rapids.

On the weekend of July 12th I attended Startup Weekend IC, a startup competition held at Merge. The event had three stages. In the first stage, participants pitched their ideas to the crowd and attempted to win a popular vote for their ideas. The six most popular pitches were chosen to continue into the second round. I pitched an idea for self-assembling furniture, but sensing the idea was overly ambitious, was happy it did not go on to the second round.

Community involvement has always been important to us. We embrace as many chances to share our experience as we can. One of these chances came in the form of a great local event that has been a huge catalyst for action in the Eastern Iowa community of entrepreneurs: EntreFEST 2019. As soon as we heard there was a new technology track added to the 2019 event, Mike Smith and I applied to be speakers.

Internet Explorer (and Microsoft Edge) is widely joked about as the bane of any web application developers existence. This is only somewhat true these days as Microsoft contains to make improvements to their browsers and bring them towards web standards compliance (Edge in particular has come a long way to support HTML5 features); but for those of us that have to support old versions of IE it is as true as it is today as it was nearly 10 years ago.

We're a small shop here at Bio::Neos and spend a lot of our time wearing different hats. We try to make switching hats as easy as possible by finding the right tooling and environment to make us as efficient as we can be. Code reviews are a crucial part of our development process that we use to (1) ensure code quality, (2) improve our skills and (3) share knowledge between our developers, at both a project level and a professional level. But because we spend a majority of our time designing and writing software, the code review can be at times an easy part to leave out of the process.

We have been interested in developing training tools for various diseases (inherited eye diseases, deafness, cancer, and others). Here is a nice site that provides "radiology tutorials." Nice example of using images, image annotation, and wiki-style background information.

The site is here:

http://radiologymasterclass.co.uk/tutorials/chest/chest_pathology/chest_...

So apparently Chrome maintains a list of "unsafe" ports (or maybe a list of safe ones). I did not know this... and got a minor headache from it.

I was trying to setup a new printer remotely on one of my workstations that currently is configured to allow access to CUPS only locally on port 631 (default setup). That's easy enough, I'll just use SSH's port forwarding to allow my connection to appear local to cups:

UPDATE (2015/03/09)

There was a release of denyhosts that finally fixes this bug! (Maybe the RHEL EPEL maintenance crew read my blog post, haha). So as long as you patch through 2.6-6.el5 (or equivalent if you are running a newer version of CentOS/RHEL/etc) then you will not have this issue. Thanks EPEL team!

Original article for reference

So, I hesitate to call this a vulnerability, but it definitely is a critical issue.

Recently we have begun to create a few projects using Apache Cordova. It is a great system that has come a long way from the last time I looked into using it (when it was still "PhoneGap"). It allows you to create a cross-platform mobile app using HTML/CSS/JS, which is great for us as we have plenty of experience using web technologies. There are some limitations as to what native APIs are supported but overall there is a ton that you can do!