b2bFront is a Storefront Management System for wholesale businesses.

Designed as a step-in solution with speed of setup/migration in mind; b2bFront provides the horsepower and precision seen in traditional desktop stock management systems yet maintains the simplicity and ease of use that users expect from modern web-based applications.

Written entirely by myself (Damien Walsh), b2bFront comprises a powerful backend inventory system, ordering platform (frontend) and CRM features like Live Chat, Questions, SMS, Bulk Mailing, Order-bound thread based discussions and more.

Today, as my first blog post since the start of the year (sorry!) I’d like to just rattle off a few features of b2bFront.  At some point I hope to create a dedicated site (b2bfront.com) to sell the software; but this will have to do for now…

Inventory

The core of b2bFront. The staff inventory view provides instant “Spreadsheet” editing of prices, stock values and powerful bulk modification and exporting features. Take control of your inventory!

Easily create powerful custom views using the Filter Editor. Gain an insight into your inventory breakdown without complex functions and data manipulation.

Attributes

Provide dealers and end users with more information about your products while building a more comprehensive interlinked portfolio of products.

Spreadsheet-style editing as standard speeds up the process ten-fold.

Statistics Counting

b2bFront contains an easy to use, understandable statistics counting system. Customisable graph views and raw data overviews eliminate spreadsheet work and keep you informed. For real-time information, CCTV, Questions and Live Chat keep you in-tune with how dealers are interacting with your products.

Questions

Help your dealers get issues solved fast while you build a comprehensive product-linked knowledge base, saving staff hours and effort.

Live Chat & CRM

Interact with your dealers on a new level. Solve their issues in real time and expedite their ordering process. Canned responses, quick Item-level linking and hotkeys can help you improve response times. CRM has never been so easy.

Outlets

Get an insight into how your dealers are selling your products. Get notified about price changes and help protect your brand.

Staff Profiles

Fine-grain control over how your staff work on the system. Avoid data compromisations and losses by keeping roles well-defined and structured, but still agile and adaptable in future.

~

So there’s a rundown of some of the features I’ve been working over the past year or so.  If anyone is interested or has any more questions please do feel free to comment.

On a blog-related note, I’ll be trying to post more regularly now, especially once the dreaded exams are over with.

Cheers.

I did the Imagine Cup ,that was probably the highlight of my year really, travelling to the states was incredible and I can’t wait to go back some day.  I still haven’t done most of the things I posted in the list back at the start of this blog.

I’m quitting drinking alcohol for new years, and as a sort of side-resolution I’ll be making a serious effort to improve my physical fitness from now on too.  (I don’t really have any problem specifically, I just feel I’d be happier without alcohol and with a bit more muscle!).

Well, I hope everyone has a prosperous and happy new year!

- Damo

TurnItIn is a system used by schools, colleges and other academic establishments to check for plagiarism and originality in works.  It works by collecting up a huge database off the web of documents, essays, articles and the like, then comparing submitted documents with what it has on file.  If there are blocks of text that are similar, either identical word for word or closely paraphrased, the submission is flagged as unoriginal and questions are no doubt asked of the author.  When I read about TurnItIn, I thought “what an excellent idea” – finally, using the massive computing power and storage resources we have available in the Internet age, we can have a compendium of works that can be used to evaluate the originality supposed of new creations.

I then learned that TurnItIn has another feature – it actually collects work that have been submitted – so every student that writes an essay for a university that uses the service has their work put permanently on file for comparison with future submissions by other students.  I began to consider the legal implications of this behaviour.  Effectively, TurnItIn violates the copyrights owned by every student that has ever submitted a piece of work via their University or college.  Just like a teenager that has amassed a huge quantity of stolen digital music from around the Internet, TurnItIn has collected a truly colossal volume of works.  They aren’t just holding these works for themselves either – they are essentially monetising this collection by making it a cornerstone of their service – without this collected data, TurnItIn wouldn’t have such a strong selling point in this market.

There is another truth to this too.  TurnItIn is owned by iParadigms LLC, and that company has a number of fronts – one being WriteCheck.  This is a paid (starting to get a feel for what iParadigms is all about eh?) service directed straight at students, allowing them to run their work through TurnItIn’s database without the teacher or lecturer in the middle.  I saw one quote from Alex Tabarrok on this behaviour in which he described them as “arming both sides of a plagiarism war” – and I could add “and making a buck off both sides in the process”.

I think some things need to change with regards to services like this.  Firstly, students need to be made more aware that their work will be stored by TurnItIn.  Services such as this one have created an impression that all work produced by students is homogeneous, standardised or simply a compilation of existing knowledge from other sources.  That is not the case – students may have unique, original ideas that are simply being archived away as “taken” by these automated services.  Students should have the choice to exclude themselves from this.  It should never be the case that a tutor or examiner submits work to be stored in this way without explicit permission from the student.  I feel that giving students this option would not have a serious impact on the successfulness of TurnItIn as a service anyway; granted, there will be students that deliberately exclude themselves from the submission process with the intent of passing their work on to friends or selling it.  These will be few and far between, and I suspect part of the same educational establishments anyway and as such will likely be “picked up” by more traditional methods.

Secondly, these services need to be better regulated.  They are handling the work and Intellectual Property rights of hundreds of thousands of individuals over the course of several years; and yet they are allowed to behave in irresponsible and immoral manners in doing so.  Sure, spin-off services like WriteCheck can be wrapped up any way you like by the likes of iParadigms LLC, but surely people can see how wrong they are – allowing students with an obvious intent of plagiarising to know just how far they can push it without getting caught is a unprincipled idea thought up by a company looking to milk an already morally dubious cash cow to death.

~       11 / 11 / 2011      ~

To save you scrolling to the bottom:
You can download my Anti-Guardian FB App User Script for this here.
It works with TamperMonkey in Chrome and GreaseMonkey in Firefox.

If you’re not familiar with what exactly Open Graph is – here’s a brief explanation.  Imagine the original Facebook “Like” thing  as a graph – lots of you could construct a huge diagram with the vertices representing the people and things that can be “liked” and the edges representing the actual “likings” that people have set.  Previously there was only that type of edge – a like. Now with Open Graph, there’s as many as the Facebook application developers like – read, browsed, viewed, listened to, downloaded… It’s a nice idea.

Setting up Open Graph for an Application

This is all well and good, and it makes Facebook a little more interesting, as well as making Facebook applications a little more tied-in to websites and their interactions with Facebook users.  But… and it’s a big but…

The Guardian (and other news sources) have completely overdone it.  They have set up system whereby a person reads an article via their Facebook app, and their timeline gets spammed with this fact.  Other people see this on their timeline, click it and are redirected to the Guardian Facebook app (despite the <a /> element having the title attribute being set to the http://www.guardian.co.uk/… address that you would expect to be sent to).  Users then need to sell their soul to the Guardian Facebook application to read the article, or go trawling off to Google to try and find the same article on the real guardian.co.uk website.  Pain.. or.. what?

Open Graph: The Guardian takes it one step too far

It also has a particularly nasty side effect of showing everyone what articles you are reading – and I think that’s a bit of an invasion of privacy.

So – I have slapped together a quick solution using Greasemonkey for Firefox, jQuery and some nice integration stub .js for using jQuery in GM user scripts from this guy.

Here’s another chance to download my User Script for this here.
It works with TamperMonkey in Chrome and GreaseMonkey in Firefox.

Sort it out Guardian – seriously – you’re one of the better newspapers in the UK and this kind of forced social media integration and privacy invasion hurts my head.

Considering the incredibly low prices they are available for and the relative power; I couldn’t resist.  It’s not as erm… swish… as a Mac, but it is at least packing some decent specs:

•  2 x Intel Xeon 3.00 GHz Processors with HT
• 8GB of DDR 2 RAM (A disappointing 400MHz but still, can’t complain)
• 2 x 36GB HP Hot-Swappable Ultra320 SCSI 15000RPM HDDs
• Redundant power supply

During the writing of my last post, I noticed how well BF could be used to define the behaviour of Turing Machines.  A turing machine is essentially a simple conceptual machine that consists of the following:

• An infinitely long tape of cells that each contain a value.
• A “head” that can be positioned over any given single cell.

Brainfuck Turing Machine - My attempt at creating a better Brainfuck experience. If there is such a thing...

A good friend of mine, Ste, recently reintroduced me to  Brainfuck.  For the uneducated (and right now, probably offended), Brainfuck is an extremely lightweight and minimalistic programming language.  It’s really designed to be a muse for programmers that are bored as far as I can tell.

In any case, after playing around with it for a while, I thought I’d have a go at writing a PHP implementation of the interpreter. In fact I wrote two implementations, a lovely OOP-style one, and also a really short minified one to see just how small I can make the interpreter.

The first implementation I wrote is the OOP version.  It’s a bit over-complicated and full of itself but hey – isn’t all decent programming that way.  You can check out the source in my work repo - http://work.damow.net/work/

The more concise version of my interpreter (also downloadable from the work repo link above) is not exactly written with human readability in mind.  It still works fine however.  Essentially it is a function that takes a string of Brainfuck program characters and optionally an array of input byte values (read by the , character in Brainfuck).  All in 441 bytes of PHP.  I know I know, I’m just cruising for some pro to come and blast me out of the water with a 50-byte beast, but it’s the trying that counts!

<?php function p($p,$i){$p=str_split($p);$d=array();$o='';$c=$p[0];
while($c){if($c=='+')$d[key($d)]++;if($c=='-')$d[key($d)]--;if($c==
'.')$o.=chr(pos($d));if($c==','){$d[key($d)]=pos($i);next($i);}if($
c=='>')if(!next($d))$d[]=0;if($c=='<')prev($d);if($c=='['&&pos($d)=
=0){$l=1;while($l){$n=next($p);if($n=='[')$l++;if($n==']')$l--;}}if
($c==']'&&pos($d)){$l=1;while($l){$n=prev($p);if($n==']')$l++;if($n
=='[')$l--;}}$c=next($p);}return $o;}?>

In terms of future developments, I was thinking during my chat with Ste about Brainfuck that rather than try to expand the language by adding more characters to the command set (which I think would take away a bit of the charm from the language), one could add more functionality by mapping high-range pointers to other outputs, for example pixels on the screen to provide graphical output.  It would be really nice to write a Brainfuck workshop suite to provide functionality like that, but I don’t like to linger on one project unnecessarily for too long.

I’ll try to post more regularly, and make my posts include less of the “f” word in future, I promise.

Laters

A lot of the swish and subtle user interactions we have grown to love in Snow Leopard have rather disappointingly disappeared from Lion; they’re not massive features like Dashboard or Launchpad, rather small, hidden, subtle yet surprisingly useful once you get using them.  And now they’re gone.

1   Among the first few I noticed was the Lozenge – that’s the little grain-of-rice shaped blob that appeared in the top right of most Mac OS X windows.  It used to show and hide any toolbar associated with the window, neatening up UIs when you weren’t going to use the toolbar for a period of time.

Lozenge - RIP

2   Another thing I’m not keen on is the lack of simplicity and introduction of some completely redundant and meaningless UI cues.  Apple seems to have had a swift change in it’s UI design policies recently.  Starting with the introduction of “grey is the new colourful” in which Apple seems to think that colours should be used only where absolutely necessary.  This makes the entire user experience feel like you’re trapped in a 1930s film.  This all feels like iTunes 10 all over again.  Horridly plastered in circular icons and monochrome.  Combined with Apples new love of introducing real-world artefacts in to their UI designs, the look and feel of the OS has, in my opinion, taken a serious turn for the worst.

What next? The spinning spiky monochrome ball of doom?

Grey Finder Icons - Thanks to "Navin" whoever you are - I couldn't be bothered going back to a Lion machine to get a picture myself - but you can see how much more difficult it is to identify the items in the sidebar quickly - and isn't that what icons are for?

3   That brings me to my third issue.  UI components that are what they say on the tin – UI components.  I don’t want my calendar to look like something out of a nicotine coated 1980s office.  I want it to look like a modern, functional application on a modern, functional computer.  The same goes for Address Book.  It looks completely out of place.  Until they redesign Safari.app as a newspaper, Terminal.app as a DEC VT100 and other software designers start making their applications look like appropriate relics from the past, it will never fit in.

Address Book - A blast from the past I'd really rather not have seen.

4   This one is less of a “Things I miss about Snow Leopard” and more of a “Things I hate about the Lion install process”.  Incompatibility of applications and impacts on the existing system are banes of major updates to operating systems.  This was a nightmare for me though.  My Mac awoke from the Lion install and I found that my PHP stack was broken, GNU Radio didn’t work, MySQL and Postgres weren’t working any more and places that had been set up by applications (Eg. locations in /var/ and /usr/) had been removed for no reason – breaking yet more packages.  I know update processes are one of the toughest things to get right no matter what you’re working on, but I sort of expected better from Apple.

5   This one really got to me, because like many of the changes in Lion, there’s no easy way to disable it; not even a defaults modification can undo this one.  The scrollbars.  Now Apples rationale for the new disappear-y almost invisible scrollbars is to provide the user with more screen real-estate for their actual work and hide unnecessary UI components to remove clutter (ehem Address Book…Calendar…Preview…Mail…).  But on serious numbers, how much space do scrollbars really take up?  A few horizontal pixels, and no vertical pixels really because they only extend as high as the container they are in – and this blows the “Screen Real Estate” argument out of the water for me – I mean, look at Address Book – that poncy border saps more space than the scrollbars of 4 windows put together.

So now to the “hiding clutter” rationale – how can you justify hiding something that users use as an immediate visual cue to how much of the document their current screen represents.  The first thing I do when I open a new document that I’ve not seen before is glance at the scrollbar to get an idea of how long it is – and in Lion, it’s not there.

~

To summarise – I’m going back to Snow Leopard.  I can’t deal with the incompatibilities and failed UI changes to Lion.  Combined with the “features” like Versions and Auto-Save that completely overrule any user decisions about behaviour and abstract even more of the file system away in to obscurity; it’s clear that Lion seems to have been yet another vile stab by Apple at pulling the curtains on the Mac and merging it all in to a sticky iOS mush.

Onwards.

Flying the Flag - The flag of the United States of America flying high above Ellis Island

I feel like I need some time to relax before I can properly reflect on how incredible the week has been, but I’ll do my best to sum up some of the general sentiments of the competition.  The ultimate message that has come over to me is that it genuinely does not matter how your team fairs in the competitions; here at the Imagine Cup, everyone is a winner (despite the fact that at least among the UK guys that has become a colossal cliché).  I want to make it clear to everyone reading that once past the initial sting of disappointment upon not hearing your name and country called out by the guys on stage, there are no bitter feelings left behind at all – just being here is more than enough to put a smile on your face.

Kevin's Presentation - Our "1-Man Army" Kevin making his final round Embedded Development presentation

Every single person at the Imagine Cup finals has achieved something incredible already – we are working to change the world for the better, to bring solutions to the world’s biggest problems.  It’s not about money or companies or start-ups or anything else – at the core of it, we’re here to make the world a better place – and the teams that have that at heart are the teams that do the best here – I’ve seen that first hand.

I'll leave you with this wonderful NYC Skyline

I hope that next year we’ll have an even stronger project to bring to the Imagine Cup 2012 UK Finals and that I’ll be writing another post with a similar tone about the upcoming world finals in Sydney.  Although the UK entries didn’t achieve winning positions this year, we’re not disgruntled and certainly not discouraged, we plan to hit next year with a driving force to change the world, after all – that’s what it’s all about.