Month: October 2016

At my home, I have three things that work SOMETIMES. These are the Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop, a Lexmark S600 printer, and a JBL Flip Bluetooth speaker. They all have one thing in common – they work whenever they feel like it. When they do work, they work wonderfully. But more often, they do not work. The laptop won’t turn on, the speaker produces no sound (neither through cable nor BT), and the printer doesn’t print (neither through cable nor Wi-Fi). It started with the speaker, followed by the laptop, then the printer joined in. And after this, try not to believe in real hardcore computer viruses 🙂

I read that our authorities are considering lowering the threshold for duty-free purchases from Western online stores from 1000 euros to just 22. They say it will kill online trading and all that.

It’s quite interesting that whenever there is talk of a new law, 9 out of 10 people from Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus will automatically think about how to circumvent this law. Under that topic, nearly all the comments are about this. Well, so as to “kind of legally”, of course. Or “slightly illegally”. Some just think about it, some will do something for themselves, and some even for others.

The typical American wouldn’t even think about circumventing the law. From school, they are taught to blindly follow the laws, no matter how (both of them) bad they may be. And if the law is truly stupid, an American would be outraged, but the thought “how to not follow it” just doesn’t come to them at all.

Partly for that reason, our engineering specialties are valued in the USA. Because we live our lives with cunning. Our traffic rules are among the best in the world, but on the road, most drive “by understanding” (in a good sense). Therefore, people in general are indifferent towards corruption. Of course, it’s possible to rant about it in the kitchen, but as for taking it to the square – no. That’s why scandals with American politicians are totally baffling in Russia.

Among the swamps.

Whew, I finished watching! 81 episodes of White Collar are behind me. The last episode was really cool, but overall the series is quite naive. But beautiful and stylish.

Now, I am choosing the next long show to watch. It’s probably going to be Westworld.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1358522/?ref_=nv_sr_1

A major update on the blog about Hybris. I managed to figure out and connect the latest version of Drools Fusion + Drools Server to hybris. This thing is correctly called Complex Event Processing. The point is that if you have a stream of any data for real-time processing, Drools Fusion allows you to do this quickly and flexibly. For example, in the case of e-commerce, there’s a lot of such data. The simplest of these are logs of page visits.

I recorded a demo that makes it clear how it works. Logs are uploaded somewhere into a storage, and from there they go to drools fusion for processing. Rules are written in drools language that extract some new knowledge from the logs. In my demo, it’s simply identifying whether a person is a photographer/not a photographer based on the pages they’ve visited. The result of the rules is returned back to hybris and can be used somehow there. Show a banner or reduce prices.

The main feature of all this is that it processes a stream of events in real-time. In my example, it is finding at least five pages of one thematic group within the last 30 seconds for one user.

The second important point is that the system is incredibly scalable, and it does not require additional hybris servers, which is common for built-in hybris personalization (thus seldom anyone uses it: it just costs extra money, and substantial ones only in licenses required for it to work at all). Here, servers are loaded, whose software costs nothing: it’s free. And in hybris, ready-made solutions are then pushed through, which just need to be visualized there.

http://hybrismart.com/2016/10/17/complex-realtime-event-processing-with-drools-fusion-integrating-with-hybris/

Autumn arrives

Just yesterday, at precisely the time of writing this post (8:05 p.m. EST), I expected to be introducing you to joyful photos and videos from the launch site, but alas! The launch of Antares to the ISS has been postponed again. It has already been postponed at least five times, and now, the news caught up with me almost en route to the east coast. I won’t go tomorrow, it’s a workday and all, they’ve really worn me out, feeding us promises for almost half a year. I hope to watch the recording, hoping that this time it won’t be like the last, when their rocket exploded at launch and the launch site was being repaired and cleaned for a year.

http://www.orbitalatk.com/news-room/feature-stories/OA5-Mission-Page/default.aspx?prid=180

Announcement from the school newsletter

What an imagination these guys have, huh? They started a startup, trolley pub. Fourteen people steer a pedal-powered vehicle through the streets of Arlington http://arlington.trolleypub.com/about.html

Blog update. I created an extension that allows managing text content via the back office. Yes, you heard right, Hybris doesn’t manage all content “out of the box.” For example, if your site displays a message on the homepage somewhere in the footer, it might turn out that to fix it, you’ll need to bother developers and wait a week for a new release.

In the blog, I explain how to make all these thousands of messages (actually, more than 2000 for a typical store) manageable through the back office.

It seems like a simple task, every partner made such a module for themselves. Partners, don’t jump to conclusions – your modules are most likely incompatible with Hybris templates, and you also had to tweak those templates to make everything work as intended. At least, those are the only implementations I’ve come across. My solution is 100% compatible, no need to touch the templates, with zero loss in performance.