May 31 2019, 15:17

We have to walk 10 meters outdoors between the garage and the office, and during a rare rain, we need to dash across, and the landlord has placed umbrellas on both sides. Aren’t they great, huh? Sometimes they also treat all tenants (and their family members ;)) to ice cream or organize some other fun event. I’ve never heard of landlords caring so much about their business tenants. Usually, it’s all about the money

May 29 2019, 21:04

Interesting lecture on microservices in ecommerce.

It turns out that at Best Buy, updates used to occur once a year, involving 60 people and taking 8 hours, usually overnight.

Refers (actually it doesn’t, I googled this) to Joel Crabb, Vice President at Target, who at that time was the Chief Architect at Best Buy. As Joel Crabb wrote on his website in A DIGITAL ECOMMERCE TRANSFORMATION – FRONT END MADNESS – PART II, before it was removed (but Google remembers everything), “A minor digression on the state of the ATG system is necessary to understand what we were dealing with. The original ATG system was built in 2003, at the time it was an excellent decision for a mid-sized retailer to build its first ecommerce engine. But over time, and numerous one-off projects, the code base had morphed, intertwined and been generally neglected and abused. As an example, one ongoing project when I arrived was to widen the product detail page (PDP) and move the Add To Cart button from the left side of the page to the right side. This seemed fairly innocuous, but it took six months and well over one million dollars to accomplish this task.”

Reading Joel’s memoirs is quite interesting http://joelcrabb.com/?paged=7&p=339

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xcVkMlnid0

May 28 2019, 16:55

I once made such a tool for myself, and now I realize that I need it again. Perhaps someone knows something ready-made. You select a folder, the system scans all the files there, with their sizes and dates. It creates a little archive that has everything except the contents. Optionally: previews are built for images, PDFs, and office files. The archive is sent to another person, the preview is uploaded somewhere into the cloud. That person selects with checkboxes what they need, if necessary, can see the preview, and with one click creates a file with a list of what they chose, sends the file back. This file is executed on the archive, and the output is a small archive only with the selected files, sent to the requester. I wrote something like this back in the 2000s in Delphi 🙂 and about twice a year I want it again. For example, I have a library of high-quality photos on disks, and I don’t want to unload these terabytes into the cloud and pay for that. I only upload the previews, but how can I give someone a tool where they can click through a hundred photos and make an “order”? Or I have a library of fb2/epub books (true indeed), it has been lying on disks for about five years now. Obviously, I don’t want to unload it anywhere, but I want to have all these folders handy and only upload what’s needed. Or music. Or movies.

May 28 2019, 12:03

At our Asian supermarket, there’s a small section with a hodgepodge of items for sale, from spoons and cups to multicookers and rice cookers. Some of them raise questions and cause surprise (simply because I have no idea about them).

For instance, the CUCHEN PC-1000 rice cooker is sold for 590 bucks. Now, what could possibly be in it worth nearly six hundred dollars? Curious to find out. It’s a pressure cooker, but I also have a pressure cooker at home that cost me 80, and it has a million other functions, from making yogurt to frying. And this one – only one function, but for 600. Really curious to know, no details anywhere.

Well, I’ve never come across electric food dehydrators before. Probably, they can be bought anywhere. But Drumcook – a horizontal rotating drum – that’s something new. It rotates on its own, constantly turning the food inside. And nothing splashes anywhere. There’s something to it.

Did you ever know there was a special device for making soy milk? Inside, it’s a mix of a blender and a kettle.

Or take the open infrared grill, BBQ Grill Plate. The idea is that you set it in the middle of the table, grill meat or vegetables, and eat right there with everybody around.

May 28 2019, 01:48

My new long read is out on hybrismart, this time about the integration of SAP Commerce Cloud (B2B) and USB keys for authentication or verification of critical operations.

The idea is to provide B2B users with a higher level of security (unlike B2C, here it’s really feasible to distribute a USB key to every user).

I tried to describe the technical details in simple terms, and also demonstrate a prototype, with screenshots and architecture.

Despite the title and text mentioning SAP Commerce, the content is generally universal. The most complex part of the integration is understanding its principles, which are explained. There’s nothing specifically tied to Hybris used, hence it’s universal.

Welcome!

https://hybrismart.com/2019/05/23/authentication-with-hardware-security-keys-via-webauthn-in-sap-commerce-cloud/

May 25 2019, 14:07

A very interesting lecture by Mikhail Nikitin about life (Russian biologist, research fellow at the Department of Evolutionary Biochemistry of the A.N. Belozersky Institute of Physico-Chemical Biology)