Future Retail, CF, IP Spoofing, Pigz / GZip, Browsers / Apps, Cubes-OS, Projects, XLSX / CSV

Post date: Oct 15, 2017 7:06:31 AM

• Watched a set of future retail store videos from Youtube. Some of those videos were kind of funny. I've got a very clear vision of fully automated retail store. But in some of the videos there were extra manual steps which were mostly requiring additional labor and making the process awkward.
• What's my vision for future retail? Afaik, perfect concept would be 100% automation. So basically it's like shopping at any web shop. Some Finnish chains are already offering 'pick-up' service. But it still requires someone to pick-up the goods. In my concept, store is fully automated, and there's no precollection of goods based on orders. Order is only automatically collected when you arrive or are arriving. So if you can't come for the pickup, good won't get collected. If collection system is fast enough, and not the bottleneck of the system, precollection isn't required at all. Adding precollected storage / delivery unit could be used if the collection process is the bottleneck. Let's say that the peak load of the system is 17:00 after people leave from work. In that the collection and temporary storage process could get started a few hours earlier. Minimizing precolection allows keeping the products and goods in right temperature as long as possible. Of course the option currently provided in Finland is great precursor for this. Because the basic concept to end customer remains the same. Web / mobile order & pickup / delivery. If people love and use that. Then it's easy to calculate where the break even for full automation goes. Because it's going to be expensive, really expensive. That delivery option also is perfect fit for future automatic cards / delivery vehicles. These things can be easily integrated to any existing web-shop.
• CloudFlare servers getting MITMed? Yep, so it seems by Airtel. This is just another reason why backlinks from CDN edge nodes should be also encrypted. It's also good to read implications section of this post.
• Strange Loop - IP Spoofing - Awesome talk about DDoS IP Spoofing and attacks. It would make so much sense to filter spoofed traffic, but there are still lot of ISPs not doing it. Nothing new in this post, but it's great overall summary.
• Pigz, which stands for Parallel Implementation of GZip. That's nice. I usually often opt for 7-zip LZMA2 compression when compressing files. Totally unrelated but the multi-threaded parallel PAR2 I'm using seems to segfault often on smaller files.
• Browsers, not apps - I love web browser vs apps. Especially for cases where I'm not using those too often. I don't want too many BS apps. No I won't install your app, go away. Unfortunately many websites try to force users to use their BS app. For no reason whatsoever. I'm sorry that you've got so incompetent web developers and no, I still won't install your crap app.
• Played with Cubes-OS. I really like the application isolation. I would love to get that tab isolation on browsers too. But currently I don't have use cases for that technology.
• Watched a documentary about Google Moonshots aka Google X projects. I liked their approach, it's very similar to mine. Let's take the hardest problem first, if that's not resolved then we know that the project is done, aka canceled. I think that's the best way of taking on projects.
• Had long discussions with one team about XLSX and CSV. They wanted to use XLS / XLSX. I said, XLS sucks, let's use CSV. It took quite a while to make them realize that MS Excel files are horrible mess, when UTF-8 CSV is something beautiful which just works and is compact. It's possible to turn CSV data into XML bloat, but it doesn't actually bring any extra value. It just makes parsing lot slower and might expand the amount of bytes (not data) by order or magnitude or even more. Why bytes not data? Well, that's just because the data is actually the exactly same what would have been provided in CSV format. So, don't ever ask me for excel import or export, I'm gonna hate it. Yes, I can do it,I've got naturally preselected and tested libraries for that, but it's not a really good thing to begin with. As far as I remember there has been only one project so far which has selected XLSX for the official data transport format for integration.