Alexis Wilke's blog

Order Made!® has its own website

Tue, 04/29/2008 - 16:43 — Alexis Wilke

After a couple of months, we finally released the Order Made! website. Order Made! Demo Page

Order Made! is an online system for ordering food from restaurants. This isn’t new, others have done it before, however, Order Made! uses our Instant Cart technology. This means: it is very fast! So fast, that customers will return to the ordering page over and over again. All the better for the restaurant owners using Order Made!

And it is not just fast, it is also very easy to use. Customers can order an item by clicking on it. Voilà! For the few items that require you to select a specific ingredient ...

Metrics. Why are they needed?

Fri, 04/11/2008 - 13:35 — Alexis Wilke

When managing your life, when managing your work, when managing your business, you need to accomplish a certain amount of work to get where you want to go.

In general, it is difficult to judge how much work will be necessary to do one thing or another until you actually do it. So you setup goals and draw up plans to reach them and then you try to do all the work you assigned yourself to reach these goals.

One reason an Internet Business has an advantage is because the computer can do a lot of the work for you. It can give you information on how many people come to your website every week, ...

Really… What is a goal?

Wed, 03/26/2008 - 16:06 — Alexis Wilke

I’m writing this blog after meeting with a few people with great experience at the NCAE networking group in Roseville.

I have been in business for quite some time now and I have read many things about goals. But what is a goal? How do you set a goal? How do you make sure that you reach your goals?

So, let’s start by setting a goal.

“I want a home worth $1.2 million dollars”

Ah! Is that really a goal?

The truth is that this is so blurry that it cannot be a realistic goal, at least not for most people. This does not mean you won’t be able to get the home of ...

PHP eFax available on our website!

Wed, 02/20/2008 - 12:52 — Alexis Wilke

I’m glad to announce that PHP eFax is now available for sale on our site. For only $95, you can send faxes within minutes.

It took me a whole week to program that object and a lot of testing. Yes, I sent a lot of faxes before to make it work properly.

If your company needs to send faxes via their website (or their customers website) it can easily save money here! By getting PHP eFax, you won’t need to program anything, really. All you need is to set the fax data in an object and call send(). In minutes you will be sending faxes. You can see a sample here:

...

Order Made!® at Cresco

Fri, 11/30/2007 - 01:21 — Alexis Wilke

A quick note… We now have Order Made! on display at Cresco, the largest restaurant equipment supplier in the west. Later today (Fri Nov 30, 2007) we’ll have one of our flat monitor showing our Order Made! presentation during open hours.

Cresco in Sacramento, California is located at 951 Richards Blvd.

If you go by, have a look!

Comments welcome!

Server Switch!

Fri, 11/23/2007 - 17:58 — Alexis Wilke

For the last few days, Doug and I have been working on switching from our old server to our new server. The new one is with JohnCompanies.com that offers VPS (Virtual Private Servers). It was a nice surprise, the computer we have access to has 8 processors running at 3Ghz (”proven” by the Linux Bogomips computation: 5985.31) And so far, I’ve seen about 0.8% of one processor being used. The rest is 100% idle most of the time!

The assert() macro in C/C++

Fri, 10/26/2007 - 21:06 — Alexis Wilke

This is a subject that comes back all the time in C/C++ boards.

Should you use assertions?

The answer is clearly yes. But the C/C++ assert() function is usually defined using a macro. Macros have several problems. The most common ones are: they offer no type checking, they do not warn you about weird side effects, they have a different syntax than the C/C++ language itself.

One good thing: for a fast program, the debug code used to check parameters, results, etc. is gone.

One really bad thing: if the expression in the macro has a side effect, the release program is different from ...

HTML Forms and the action attribute

Tue, 10/23/2007 - 23:15 — Alexis Wilke

Today I had to debug a set of HTML pages. One feature of a website would not work with Internet Explorer. The code was like this:

WordPress at Made to Order Software!

Fri, 10/19/2007 - 20:20 — Alexis Wilke

Welcome on Alexis’ Blog at Made to Order Software Corporation.

This is my first blog! I’m glad I got WordPress to work with the m2osw style sheet. It is quite different from the default blogging board setup! Also I needed to make it work for several people on the same website without duplicating the code each time.

I did make changes to the code in order to achieve this feat. First, I had to access a specific database for each person to have its own blog (this may be just me who did not know how to use all the available features of WordPress, though.)

The following function ...