trainedmonkey
cranking along
a few weeks ago, i got it in my head that the ideal time to switch to using scat, the web-based point-of-sale system that i have allegedly been working on for almost 18 months, would be after the new year. this is despite the fact that it was barely even a rough prototype of some ideas. but i’ve been cranking along on it over the last couple of weeks, and it looks like i might just have something that we can use by my arbitrary deadline.
it’s still just barely a rough prototype of ideas, but i there should be enough there on the surface for us to be able to use it, and needing to fill in the gaps because we are actually using it will probably provide plenty of motivation to make it better.
even in the very rough state it is in, it should alleviate some of the pains of our current system. and save us the $30/month we were paying for not-very-helpful support and slow-to-arrive upgrades (trading that for my time to support the new system, of course).
banker’s round for mysql
for some reason, nobody has ever exposed the different rounding methods via mysql’s built-in ROUND() function, so if you want something different, you need to add it via a stored function. the function below is based on the T-SQL version here.
CREATE FUNCTION ROUND_TO_EVEN(val DECIMAL(32,16), places INT)
RETURNS DECIMAL(32,16)
BEGIN
RETURN IF(ABS(val - TRUNCATE(val, places)) * POWER(10, places + 1) = 5
AND NOT CONVERT(TRUNCATE(ABS(val) * POWER(10, places), 0),
UNSIGNED) % 2 = 1,
TRUNCATE(val, places), ROUND(val, places));
END;use at your own risk. there may be edge conditions where this fails. but this matches up with the python and postgres based system i was crunching data from, except in cases where that system gets it wrong for some reason.
one thing you might notice is that it does not use any string-handling functions like the other “correct” solution floating around out there.
it takes everything.
a diversity of friends is a credit to your flexible nature.
building an order
it feels like i’ve been thinking about this point-of-sale thing long enough that when i find time to sit down and write some code, the pieces actually fall together pretty quickly. today i was able to rough together an order-building interface with a few bells and whistles (literally: it has audible cues).
still a long way to go, but this should be a useful little toy to let us take advantage of a spare computer and barcode scanner to more easily price items from incoming shipments and get them out on the shelves.
one of the things that this screenshot shows is what happens when a scan or search matches multiple different items — it adds a (crudely presented) list of the possible matches, and clicking on any one of them adds that item to the order.
three kinds of people
progress on scat continues to be slow, because i have not found a lot of time to work on it. but every week i have to deal with processing our weekly in-take of products with our current point-of-sale system, i kick myself a little more and get motivated to spend a little more time on it.
the big addition today was a table for people, which is pretty straightforward. our current system divides people up into three types (and stores them in the same table as products, thanks to a normalization scheme i have not carried over into scat), and currently i don’t make any such distinction because sometimes customers can become employees and vendors can be customers and we have few enough of all three that keeping them distinct doesn’t seem worth the extra complexity.
from raw materials to finished artwork
one of the things that celia made as gifts for a few friends (and ourselves) is paintings of their dogs (and cats). this one is wonton, of course, but you can click through to the gallery with a few more.
best day ever
actually, today is the anniversary of the best day ever: four years ago, celia and i got married.
we continued our tour of oscar-worthy films in seeing the king’s speech. probably not at the top of my list, but it was great. the production design was particularly notable, as well as all of the performances. its flaws were smaller than some of the other films we have seen recently, but i also felt like it didn’t take as many risks.
scattered progress
scat is the name of the web-based point-of-sale system that i’ve been working on. you might have guessed this if you had been paying attention to the tags on my earlier posts. you can also find the source code for scat on github. there is not much to see, as i am still tinkering and throwing code together to test ideas out.
the progress so far is that i can load all of the item data over from our checkout data, and search those items. one of the most painful things for us right now is receiving orders, so i have cobbled together the start of that functionality to use. we will be able to receive the order using this as we unpack the order, and then go back to checkout and receive the order there all at once through its stock room interface.
(the reason that receiving orders through checkout is so painful for us is that using the stock room interface cripples the performance of checkout. and since we are just using checkout on a single computer, it makes it hard to receive orders while we also want to serve customers.)
this is starting to get fun.
love is the first feeling people feel, because love is nice.
