Development SSL for .NET Core and NGINX in Docker

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Photo by James Sutton on Unsplash

We’ve all been there. You want to use SSL in development to mirror a production setup but it’s a pain to generate self-signed certificates, share them with the development team, and have them trusted locally.

Thankfully combining Docker and the dotnet dev-certs command makes this nice and easy for .NET Core Applications and NGINX - which I’m sharing here so I don’t forget :)

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Okapi Maven Plugin

people looking at a laptop screen

Photo by Safar Safarov on Unsplash

In the work we did at Lingo24 when I was there, we made use of the Okapi Framework - well a customised fork - as a key component in our content processing.

For those who don’t know the framework, it an excellent swiss-army like toolkit for localisation (l18n)/translation (t8n), which can be used either as a set of libraries or standalone tools.

Whilst the tools available are great, often I wanted to bundle part of the process within an existing CI/CD pipeline or build. As a heavy Maven user, and with winter nights setting in, the idea came to build a Maven plugin to do just that.

The result? The Okapi Maven Plugin.

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Apache Tika Docker Examples

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

For a number of years I’ve been involved in the Apache Tika project as both a committer and PMC member.

With the increase in container technology usage over the past few years we spun up a separate repository for Apache Tika Server in Docker, called tika-docker with convenience images hosted on Docker Hub

This has resulted in questions on how to customise configuration and host instances that link to other services. To help people get started, we’ve created some example scenarios.

So let’s dive in and check them out.

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Apache Tika and the ObjectRecognitionParser for Object Recognition and Captioning Using TensorFlow REST.

people looking at a laptop screen

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

One of the coolest new features added to Apache Tika in the past few years has been the addition of Parsers that leverage Deep Learning to perform object recognition and captioning.

Contributed by Chris Mattmann and Thejan Wijesinghe, through their work with USC Data Science, you can configure Apache Tika to call of to predefined models and get deep learning equivalent of ‘Hello World’ - tagging dog or cat pictures!

So let’s try it out.

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HP Probook Touchpad Slow After Supend Ubuntu 19.04

Photo of a Laptop Touchpad

Having got used to my replacement laptop, I’ve decided to keep using it, but there was one thing annoying me - the trackpad!

The trackpad is definately not the same quality as the MacBook Pro I was used to, but I could cope as the main features are there. However, I often move around a lot going from meeting to meeting, making use of the sleep/suspend capability.

That was when the trouble started…

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Cisco Meraki Client VPN on Ubuntu 19.04/19.10/20.04

Photo of Meraki MX84 Meraki Firewall from Cisco Meraki website

With my beloved, and worn, day to day laptop having to go in for repair, I had to setup a temporary laptop to work on for a few weeks.

At work we use Cisco Meraki devices in many places, including the edge of network for our various offices. Whilst their main use is to form a mesh network around our offices and server infrastructure, we also use them to enable a lightweight Client VPN solution.

The Cisco Meraki Client VPN option provides a L2TP/IPsec based VPN using either its own internal user store, an LDAP Directory, Microsoft Active Directory, or a Radius server to authenticate users.

Cisco Meraki provide great instructions for Windows, Mac and mobile devices, but really old instructions for Linux. Therefore, I am posting this as much to remind me the next time I need to set it up as to help others.

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