So relations with our partner, Customer2You, are starting to work out very favorably for us and for our customers. We've now got a few clients up and running with the software, and able to take orders for their restaurants online. Wanna see what the end result looks like? Check it out at https://www.customer2you.com/divinos2.nsf - but please don't place an order unless you live in East Chicago and want to go pick it up. :) I've heard by reputation that his food is awesome, but sadly, living in New Hampshire, I've never had the personal experience. Maybe on my next vacation...
Customer2You works exclusively with our Aldelo for Restaurants sales package. There are other solutions out there for putting retail stores on the web, but this one addresses the unique needs of the food service industry. It's exciting to be working with it.
In other news, life in the lab is enjoyable as ever. We just put the finishing touches on our 2698th box since we started using our new serial number system, think we might hit 3000 by the end of the year? Hope so!
Monday, May 12, 2008
Friday, May 9, 2008
Our Fun in Learning
April Fools' Day is one of a technician's favorite holidays. In an old ISP I used to work at, we used to call it "Troubleshooting Day", because you were guaranteed to come into work and sit down at a brand new, innovative and very deliberate computer problem designed to make you pull your hair for your entire shift. Some of the newer techs found it to be very childish and aggrivating at first, but they didn't understand the reason for the season - dealing with these little pranks inevitably made them better techs by teaching them something new about the way their system worked.
One year, for example, the gang thought it would be fun to take a screenshot of my desktop, move all of my icons off the screen, and hide the taskbar with the start button from the bottom. The practical result of this prank was that every time I tried to click on a program on my desktop, nothing would happen, because I was really clicking on a /picture/ of the symbol that would normally open my program instead of clicking on the symbol itself. Embarrassingly, it took me almost an hour to realize their deception and bring things back to the way they should be, but along the way, I learned the keyboard shortcuts associated with using the desktop (for example, press your pretty-looking Windows key on the bottom left corner of the keyboard, just to the right of your Ctrl button. You'll discover that your Start Menu pops up - whether you've hidden it from view or not), and I learned how to do a search for recently modified files to find my missing program links, and most importantly I learned the concept that sometimes things can seem to be malfunctioning but really be working perfectly.
Yesterday, that knowledge once again saved me a lot of time and energy, as I was called in to help a customer who believed that she had deleted all of her liquor from her Aldelo menus. I was prepared to spend a gruelling three hours ripping apart a backup of her database in order to recover it all without losing any of her sales information, but instead, thanks to that April Fools' Day so many years ago, I first checked to make sure that the database was actually a smaller size. When I discovered that it wasn't, I looked inside the Menu Groups and viola, there it all was, hidden from view because the manager's finger slipped and checked the box that told the program that those items were being discontinued. I reactivated them and twenty seconds later, everything was right as rain again.
Struggles always teach lessons, be they in life, or on the desktop.
One year, for example, the gang thought it would be fun to take a screenshot of my desktop, move all of my icons off the screen, and hide the taskbar with the start button from the bottom. The practical result of this prank was that every time I tried to click on a program on my desktop, nothing would happen, because I was really clicking on a /picture/ of the symbol that would normally open my program instead of clicking on the symbol itself. Embarrassingly, it took me almost an hour to realize their deception and bring things back to the way they should be, but along the way, I learned the keyboard shortcuts associated with using the desktop (for example, press your pretty-looking Windows key on the bottom left corner of the keyboard, just to the right of your Ctrl button. You'll discover that your Start Menu pops up - whether you've hidden it from view or not), and I learned how to do a search for recently modified files to find my missing program links, and most importantly I learned the concept that sometimes things can seem to be malfunctioning but really be working perfectly.
Yesterday, that knowledge once again saved me a lot of time and energy, as I was called in to help a customer who believed that she had deleted all of her liquor from her Aldelo menus. I was prepared to spend a gruelling three hours ripping apart a backup of her database in order to recover it all without losing any of her sales information, but instead, thanks to that April Fools' Day so many years ago, I first checked to make sure that the database was actually a smaller size. When I discovered that it wasn't, I looked inside the Menu Groups and viola, there it all was, hidden from view because the manager's finger slipped and checked the box that told the program that those items were being discontinued. I reactivated them and twenty seconds later, everything was right as rain again.
Struggles always teach lessons, be they in life, or on the desktop.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Microsoft SP3
Goodness, it's been a long time since our last post! We've been exceptionally busy beavers over the last few months, and it's been hard to find a moment to sit down and really research what's been going on in the market today. Of course, like most companies with any kind of technical aspect, we're currently making a plan for how to handle Microsoft XP's imminent cutoff date of June 30th, 2008. For those of you who might not know, Microsoft had originally decided to stop selling XP on January 30th, but pressure from the community of programmers and developers who weren't ready to update their programs in order to make them compatible with Microsoft Vista caused Microsoft to extend the deadline to June 30th. Now the community is trying again to get Microsoft to give us a little more time, but this time Microsoft seems relentless in it's determination to close the books on XP for good. So what we've decided to do is set up two test machines here in our lab that are going to be exposed to every flavor of Windows Vista over the next two months, including both "home" and "business" levels of the operating system, in order to see which of our point of sale programs will function correctly on the new operating system and which will not. For those that work, no problem - we can simply start releasing those packages with Windows Vista for new sales starting in July, and ensure that our standard 30 days of free customer support includes answering any questions our customers might have about how to navigate through the Vista OS. For those that don't work, we're probably going to follow Dell's example and buy the version of Vista that comes with "downgrade rights" to Windows XP, which will allow us to continue providing excellent point of sale service in an XP environment. Then, as our developer partners make their programs Vista-compatible, we'll be able to offer our customers the ability to upgrade back to Vista if they so choose.
Overall, we're doing our best to make sure the transition is invisible to our customers. Both XP and Vista are superb operating systems, and the POS software experience shouldn't be significantly impacted either way.
Ironically, XP is getting the axe just as it's latest new bundle of patches and fixes, Service Pack 3 (or SP3 as we techies call it), hits download centers everywhere. If you've left automatic updates on your computer, then chances are that you have it already. However, if you are a customer using Microsoft Retail Management System, or RMS, you'll find that you did not receive this update from Microsoft. PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS UPDATE ON YOUR OWN! Microsoft discovered in testing that part of the SP3 patch is incompatible with RMS, and causes it to cease functioning. The automatic downloader theoretically checks to see if you have RMS before downloading Service Pack 3, and if you do then it doesn't start the download. We haven't seen any widescale issues with Service Pack 3 on any other platform, so everyone else should be okay.
That's hardly all the news for the moment, but there's a new system being born with Aldelo for Restaurants that wants me to program it's menu, so I'll chat with you again soon. Take care!
Overall, we're doing our best to make sure the transition is invisible to our customers. Both XP and Vista are superb operating systems, and the POS software experience shouldn't be significantly impacted either way.
Ironically, XP is getting the axe just as it's latest new bundle of patches and fixes, Service Pack 3 (or SP3 as we techies call it), hits download centers everywhere. If you've left automatic updates on your computer, then chances are that you have it already. However, if you are a customer using Microsoft Retail Management System, or RMS, you'll find that you did not receive this update from Microsoft. PLEASE DO NOT DOWNLOAD THIS UPDATE ON YOUR OWN! Microsoft discovered in testing that part of the SP3 patch is incompatible with RMS, and causes it to cease functioning. The automatic downloader theoretically checks to see if you have RMS before downloading Service Pack 3, and if you do then it doesn't start the download. We haven't seen any widescale issues with Service Pack 3 on any other platform, so everyone else should be okay.
That's hardly all the news for the moment, but there's a new system being born with Aldelo for Restaurants that wants me to program it's menu, so I'll chat with you again soon. Take care!
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