Month: October 2016

wonderful translation of the word does

Here’s the promised blog update: design patterns for variant products.

A variant product is a product that has various properties (variations). For example, clothing can come in several colors (white, black, red) and sizes (X, XL, XXL). In hybris, there are a couple of ways to implement this concept, which can serve as a basis. I have expanded it with a few new methods, which in some cases can be more efficient, faster, and more convenient.

https://hybrismart.com/2016/10/21/variant-product-modeling/

P.S. The article needs a polish in terms of correct English. If you see any mistakes (and there are plenty), please help me correct them.

If there are any Windows experts around, could you please advise how to track the reasons for issues with coming out of sleep mode? Sometimes (not always) the computer reboots instead of waking up. Event Viewer in System, Application & Security doesn’t show any errors that could be the cause. Maybe I need to enable some kind of verbose mode to get more detailed logs? If there are any experts – please give me a shout.

Funny. Found an unexpected way to fix the black background on the Lock Screen. For that, you need to enable the animation when minimizing windows! Just checked: turn off the animation (and I did it to speed up the interface), and the background stops displaying on the Windows lock screen page. Well, what’s the connection here?…

“…having Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing unchecked in Visual Effects settings will have the lock screen background not show properly when “Show lock screen on sign-in screen” is turned on.

Today we saw several bears in Shenandoah. They are not scary, as the morning tourists suffice them for the entire day. We returned at night, with flashlights.

This weekend, I’ll be preparing an article for hybrismart on the architecture of variant products, like t-shirts in different sizes and colors and such. I want to review a range of approaches at the data model level, the pros and cons of each.

If anyone is interested in discussing the topic, throwing in ideas, criticizing what I already have and what will be by the end of Sunday, etc., I would be glad to include mentions in the article and give thanks 🙂

Ha, great stories about bugs in Blitzkrieg. You can follow the link, or read here:

“…If you believe one widely circulated story, the F-16 fighter jets’ autopilot of the Israeli Air Force would malfunction when flying over the Dead Sea. The altitude of the aircraft at some point crossed the “sea level” mark, causing a division by zero and thus paralyzing the autopilot’s brain.

What to say, if Lockheed Martin can slip up like that, what about us, mere developers of toys?

From my experience, Blitzkrieg 2 from Nival Interactive was particularly fruitful with comedic bugs. For those unaware, it’s a strategy game themed around World War II. Quite funny even without the bugs. We had a strict German publisher, and Germans are particularly skittish about anything related to their Nazi past. Mentioning the Führer’s name was forbidden, as were words like “Nazi”, “fascist”, even our swastika was not real but stylized. And this was while having cutscenes between missions explaining historical events related to the gameplay. The result was a glamorous sort of warfare styled in the genteel era but with tanks and bombers, with no particular claims to historical accuracy. By the way, seeing the mess we were making, our military consultant asked to have his name removed from the credits 🙂

The V-2 rocket was a sort of German mega-firecracker. Germany harassed Great Britain with these at the end of the war, but without much success. This wonder weapon suffered from a slew of childhood diseases and was lucky if it could take off at all. Often it exploded right on the launch table, and if it did get off and flew towards England, that was a real success. The fuel, by the way, 3.5 tons of ethyl alcohol 🙂

Well, we also made this very rocket in Blitzkrieg. Like the Germans, we made it towards the end of the project and based it on an “airplane” object. But the programmers slacked a bit and didn’t remove some of the suspicious functionality for a ballistic missile. It turned out that if it started to rain or snow during its flight to the target, first, the rocket would say in a human voice “Fliege zuruck” (Ger. fly back), and secondly, it would turn around and fly back to the base. After all, the weather was not fit for flying.

And we also had a wonderful unit – a special forces squad. Our troops could gain experience during the mission, and with experience, they acquired interesting abilities. So, overly trained special forces could disguise themselves as enemy infantry. It was enough just to click on a squad of enemy soldiers, and our fighters would change into their uniforms. You could walk around the enemy base with impunity. Well, until the first shot, of course.

But, the trouble was that in Blitzkrieg, besides the actual infantry, there were various set dressing units, like cows, pigs, and dogs. It turned out that the special forces didn’t mind dressing up as Bobik dogs and pigs. Considering that the mechanism of this disguise glitched a bit and part of the squad could be dressed in one uniform, part in another, it was possible to create utterly insane units. For example, a squad made of dogs, pigs, and Panzergrenadiers. Given that the squad could be given various commands like “march,” “crawl,” etc., the player was given a unique opportunity to admire marching pigs. It actually looked terrible, as the skeleton of a pig does not match that of an infantryman and looks like a squad of pigs scooting on their butts. And this circus show could be stuffed into a trench. So there they sit, pigs and dogs in a trench, occasionally peeking out.

Speaking of pigs, by the way, there was another bug related to them that caused the game to crash. At one point, programmers tweaked something, and pigs no longer remained neutral but could belong to a player. You couldn’t control them, but formally they could be “ours” or “theirs.” So, seeing an enemy, the patriotic pig would seek to fight back and would search for a weapon, which of course it didn’t have. If I remember correctly, programmers fixed the bug by just providing the pig with a Luger pistol without bullets. Visually it was not apparent, but formally, now seeing an enemy, it reaches for the weapon, sees there are no bullets, and calms down.

Interestingly, unlike the pig, a dog can bite. And the number of bites it has, if I’m not mistaken, is limited to ten thousand. After that, Barbose runs out of “ammo,” and it becomes harmless. By the way, an interesting question, I haven’t checked, but would the supply truck, which delivers ammunition, bring bullets to the dog?”

“The customer is always right!” – read about how this is reflected in American retail in the new column about life in America.

http://www.eg.ru/daily/family/57412/

Another experiment: using marked areas on Google Maps for various purposes in e-commerce: finding the optimal warehouse, searching for accessible stores for self-pickup or the best delivery service, and maybe even the very fact of being able to sell a product or service to a customer from this zone.

It works like this: the customer enters an address, and the system identifies it as one or more major zones. Different components of the system depend on these major zones, not on the minor components of the address such as the postal code.

At the same time, I got to grips with developing on Google AppEngine. The issue is that determining the polygon (zone) that includes a point on the map (where the customer is), for the situation of “many zones of complex shapes”, can potentially be a quite “heavy” computational task. If there’s a possibility, it’s better to handle it immediately on a cluster that can easily scale, and even better, do so autonomously. And this case is excellent for Google AppEngine, where Google DataStore is used to store polygon parameters, and Google Memcache for storing cache.

https://hybrismart.com/2016/10/19/geofencing-in-hybris-custom-shipping-zones/

Heard that in Moscow, near the Kremlin, they’ve banned catching Pokémon for those who “create noise” on GPS frequencies. Or, alternatively, there’s a rare Pokémon species living there, and now the local Mac and iPhone enthusiasts have no competition