STS maven "Select Dependency" not giving you any result?

The folks behind STS has purposely disable downloading the index of maven repositories.

Just turn it back on in the STS preferences > Maven - Check the option "Download repository index updates on startup" and restart STS.

In the Spring forum thread, Christian Dupuis mentioned "a lot of people were suffering from this behavior" (the behavior being the index downloading).  I wish he would elaborate on what he meant...

First online sale: Through Paypal and shipped internationally from Hong Kong

After completing the web-store with PayPal option, we had our first online sales! This is an international sale to Mauritius. Although the sale was small, it does provide an opportunity/excuse to look into international shipping arrangement.

After some back and forth email with the customer and looking into the shipment process, I finally shipped out the product today!

It is shipped out, but it is not over yet. I have done some online research and it looks like fraudulent chargebacks are quite prevalent in PayPal. Some more reading also showed chargebacks are actually out-side of the control of PayPal. Paypal is just the conduit. The chargebacks is initiated  by the customer directly with the credit card company (pay by credit card via PayPal also applies).

Further reading and you will find that the seller ultimately is the one who loses out when fraud occurs.  Let's examine the payment parties involved in the payment process:

Buyer -> Credit Card Issuing Company -> Payment Processor (Gateway) -> Acquiring Bank -> Seller

When a chargeback occurs, the above process simply reverses, except the withdrawal of money is done without the seller's consent.

If a fraudulent charge back does occur, it would not be so bad. After all it is for a small amount and it is just old inventory sitting around in our warehouse. This does not mean if it happens, I will ignore it.  I will fight it until my last breath.  Not because of the money or the "principle", but as an learning opportunity/excuse to explore the options available to fight online fraud from a seller's perspective.

For those who does come across this post, I would love to hear your stories and experience on e-commerce!

Preserve transparency when dynamically resize PNG images with joomslide

Here is a quick hack on joomslide to fix issue when transparent background PNG images are resized and a black background is used instead.

in plugins/content/joomslide.php find the line

if ($this->pluginRegistry->doCrop) $this->CalculateCropArea();

Append the following after the line above:

imagealphablending($dst_img, false);
imagesavealpha($dst_img,true);
imagefilledrectangle($dst_img, 0, 0, $this->pluginRegistry->thumbWidth, $this->pluginRegistry->thumbHeight, IMG_COLOR_TRANSPARENT);

Viola!

Happy Chinese New Year: Demise of thesnapp.com

First thing first, happy Chinese New Year.  This year is the year of the Rabbit.  In this festive time, it is also a time for reflection.

A few months ago, I came across thesnapp.com.  From what I can tell from my brief review of the site, it is a  local Hong Kong knock-off/imitation of Foursquare.

The site is now gone.

The site appear to be well design with an active community.  Although I did not register for an account, the front page refresh with users activity.

It is sad to see it go.

Wire-Free, Real-time Environmental Monitoring Solution / Online Web-Store

The Wire-Free monitoring solution we put together at QDS has been gaining more interest. We have been busy going around to our partners, showcasing this technology. We believe the combine Wire-Free sensors hardware and the Visual Hierarchical Maps software is a powerful combination which helps facility manager gain insight into their data center environment.  A deployment for this solution is also coming up and I have been busy preparing for it. It is a big data center.
Just to share a sense of the scope, it is a using 5 readers and each reader can cover 2,000 - 5,000 sqf of space.  At the moment, it is only using small amount of sensors >100, but the great thing about this technology is, you can simply buy more sensors, stick it to the location you want, add it to the software and you are done (provided it is in an area with existing reader coverage).  Traditionally, adding sensors to a data center or anywhere is quite a laborious project itself.  You will need to plan for network, power, rackspace (rack-mountable appliance base solution), cabling, etc.  This hassle is simply not necessary with a wire-free solution anymore.

Our first venture into online purchase on the web is also available. The goal is to handle the consumer traffic and our consumer products.  Some of the products we carry are also of interest to consumer.  However, they are just looking to buy maybe one or two units, and it does not make much sense for our Account Manager, who's focus is to serve our partners, to spending too much time handling these inquiries.

On the technical side, we are using PayPal to handle all the customer information as well as payment processing.  The decision is a good one IMHO.  First of, we bypass the whole issue with PCI compliance.  We have off-load the payment processing (including credit card) to PayPal.  Secondly, we do not store any customer information either.  This is also handle on the PayPal side.  With this setup, there is absolutely no customer information processed or stored on our side, therefore We do not need to "harden" the website at the moment.

Quantum Data Systems in Google Maps

Quantum Data Systems is in Google Maps!

Business Transformation phase 2 write-up turns into ERP rambling

After a month or so of hard work, the very alpha of the front-end application for the sales team is released.  Although the functionality is very limited, I am a believer of the release early, release often motto.  It is vital not to hide in the corner, spend lots of time to work on your "brilliant idea", release it then realized it is quite disconnected from reality.

In our current utilization of the Access-based ERP system, we have stretched it to its limits.  For example, we are using it for quite a bit of analytical work such as average sold and purchase price calculations, customers sales history, cash flow reporting, product sales activity, etc.  With 15 years of sales history, this queries are a little bit too much for MS Access and its Simple JET-Engine architecture.

Some may then ask: What is the point of building the MS-Access ERP system and only to begin migration of it in 1/2 year?  Isn't it a complete waste of time and money?  Since a lot of business folks would like to compare software development with car manufacturing(1), I would use the car analogy too:  It is not a complete waste of money to buy a car for 1/2 year only to dump it for another car.  What is the ROI? Blah, blah, blah ... ...

This is a classic pitch from ERP software vendors to make you buy their ERP.  Why waste time developing your software when you can simply by a COTS products.  Yes, they love their TLA just to look smart.

No doubt some business should buy off-the shelve software to use it to solve well defined problems such as tax returns, restaurant POS/order entry/reservation management, but since a lot of business have this expectation, of it being this in-all, be-all system, well all information and all business process in to their ERP system, is your business a "off-the-shelve" business?

To be fair to the business folks, their expectation is probably inflated by the rogue vendors, salesman and all these marketing BS trying to prey on the unsuspecting folks.

Since I love the car analogy, let's go back to it with a software development-twist:

Buyer:  I need a car.
Salesman:  It is your lucky day, the new Prius just came in! It just won the "Best Resale Value" award from Kelley Blue Book's, it was named one of Forbes "Tougheset Cars on the Road", blah blah blah ... (and the list goes on)
Buyer: This must be a great car with all these recognitions
Salesman: Best of all it is a Hybrid, using Green Technologies and all.  You know, some the planet, save some trees. (What the hell is green technology?)
Buyer: Wow! I can really help the world with this car.
Salesman: It has great on mileage too!  That means this car will saving YOU money at the gas pump.
Buyer: Wow, I am really saving money buying this car.

No problem with the story? Here is where the analogy breaks down.  We never know what the buyer wants to do with the car!

In the software world, many buyers probably never driven a car before, have only seen piece of the car (think just the dashboard, the steering wheel, engine) but never seen the car as a whole.  They have read some fancy, vague, sales pitches in article in the latest magazine of how great a car is, for example:

•  "A car can take you from point A to point B very fast!" - buyer thinks he could use it to go from America to China really fast.
• "Save you money going to and from work!" - buyer walks 5 minutes to work, but since he doesn't really know what a car is, he really think it will save him money.
• "Revolutionize the way you travel" - now he thinks he can go to all these exotic countries he saw on the Travel Channel.

But you might think, the car buyer is being really stupid. How can he not know about what a car is. This comparison is complete bogus and unsound.  If that is what you are thinking, here is a question for you: What is an ERP system?

This post started off with the intention to write about our effort in business transformation.  It went complete off tangent into a rambling.  Oh well, I probably have ADD.  That's the beauty about blogs right?

(1) Disclaimer: I have not read the book.  I have only derived some basic understanding of the book from a blog post by Jeff Atwood