The Substantially Similar Weblog

CoopOrder is a free software web-based buying club cooperative ordering system written by Adam Kessel in perl 5.8. It is intended to work with United Northeast’s system (formerly Northeast Cooperatives), which is a bulk whole foods supplier, part of United Natural Foods, Inc., but could conceivably be adapted to other systems as well.

Why don’t you try it and see what you think? I always need comments and bug reports. You should log on as ‘guest’. You have free reign of the system as guest—try everything out, it won’t do any harm at all. You can even submit your order (it won’t really go in).

See the changelog for the latest updates.

There is also a low volume email list to which you can subscribe to talk about CoopOrder or other wholesale food buying club issues.

Here’s a list of some of the more recent features; in the near future I’ll organize this and present it more systematically:

• Multiple Buying Clubs. CoopOrder can now support many buying clubs, each with their own delivery schedule, pricelist, contact information, message board, splits, etc.. Each club can has a coordinator who can clear, lock, submit, or archive the order. The coordinator can also add new members to the buying club, and deputize them as coordinators as well. A buying club coordinator can only effect her own buying club—she can’t interfere with anything with any other buying club. Note that both the New Oxford and Brattleboro pricelists are available.
• Password protection. Although every member by default has no password, you can click ‘password and settings’ and set a password for yourself (except the guest user, who always has no password). If you forget your password, the buying club coordinator can reset it for you.
• Export to FoodLink Format. I need someone to try this out and see if it actually will import into FoodLink! “Import From FoodLink” is coming soon as well.
• Better (I hope) user interface all around. Clearer menus. More logical groupings of buttons. And a spiffy logo.
• Better handling on invoices. This will need some testing, but I believe the program is smarter now about handling out of stock, ordered but not on invoice, price change, random weight, etc..
• More stable/robust design. This is mostly internal but it should make it easier to maintain and improve CoopOrder.
• You can now search for things in plural or singular. E.g., “apples” will return thing with “apple” or “apples” in it.
• Categories are now searchable as a pull down list, so you don’t need to know the name of the category you wish to search in.
• “Incomplete Splits Only”. If you check this box, you will see splits that still need to be completed within your buying club. It will tell you how much you need to order in order to complete the split and give you the option of doing it right there. Note that splits are done as fractions in CoopOrder: 0.5 = half a case, 0.25 = one quarter, etc..
• You can do “google” like searches on description. For example, “apples -juice -pie” gives you everything with apple or apples but not juice and not pie.

I have lots of photos of social justice events (Protests, Rallies, etc.) My personal photos have moved. If you know my mother’s maiden name, you can enter that as the username and password (all lower case) by clicking here; otherwise please e-mail me for access to these photos. I figure this way you’ll either be a friend of the family, or my credit card company. These photos are displayed using salonify, a free software program I’m working on.

Tantek Çelic presents some interesting comments on hand-rolled blogging code, and promises to provide reciprocal links for other hand-rolled bloggers. (Clever viral marketing strategy.)

As I wrote to a friend who is moving from a hand-rolled blog to blogger:

I fall into the category of people who find the very act of writing code for their blog to be part of the creative / hedonic rewards of blogging. (See this entry).
Whenever I code, I discover something useful to put in my bag of tricks. Someday later it will be invaluable in solving another problem. That’s why I personally will stick with a hand-rolled blog.

Peru’s state property rights agency on Tuesday crushed 50,000 pirated music CDs with a steamroller on a Lima street as part of a plan to deter a rampant trade in counterfeit goods. Musicians and singers danced atop the pile of thousands of compact discs protesting pirating that the government says inhibits artistic creativity and starves a cash-strapped state of needed taxes.

Peru has gone on the offensive against piracy. Not only did the steamroller destroy CDs and videos, but also chewing gum. Pirated chewing gum? I suppose they’re talking about trademark or trade dress infringement, but unless the chewing gum is actually stolen (of which there’s no indication), it seems a little silly to steamroll it. In fact, even if it were stolen, steamrolling wouldn’t be the best option. Wouldn’t it jam up the roller?

But what do I know?

The article also claims that the steamrolling saved the industry $750,000. This probably means that the materials destroyed, had they been sold at monopoly prices (i.e., by the copyright holders), would have resulted in profits of $750,000. Of course, just given simple economics, there’s no way the same quantity of stuff would have been sold at the higher price. Nor is there anything to suggest that destroying this pile of stuff made an appreciable dent in the supply of pirated goods. It’s all faintly reminiscent of the drug busts that occur on a daily basis here in the United States.

But there’s got to be some better solution than this.

A while back, the son of a victim of the World Trade Center attack went on the O’Reilly Factor (see also oreilly-sucks.com) to speak against military action.

This transcript is an interesting reflection of the quality of discourse in American society. According to Harper’s Magazine, O’Reilly threatend to tear Glick to pieces after the cameras were turned off.

Apparently, Madonna is flooding Kazaa with spoof files of her song, containing an audio clip of her voice: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”.

It will be interesting (and instructive) to see if this increases sales. Apparently, some people are using the audio clip as their system error sound. Other people hacked Madonna’s website and put up links to “free” downloads of the very music she’s trying to protect with her spoofing!

The trademark blog speculates as to whether this could constitute “self-tarnishment” of a mark, and what, exactly, that would mean.

I wrote this response to my school’s general interest discussion list, following a controversial discussion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where someone posted an email including several large image files to make their point.

From: Adam Kessel
To: …
Subject: A technical suggestion

Not to add fuel to the fire, but I would like to interject a technical suggestion:

Enclosing large unsolicited attachments is bad netiquette (see, e.g., http://www.georgedillon.com/web/netiquette.shtml #3, Action #1: “Never send large unsolicited attachments”.) [Note: this page seems to be unreliable, here is a local copy.] Students who receive their email on their NUSL accounts or from free email services such as Yahoo! have limited mailbox space, and Jeremy’s 1M attachment could conceivably block other messages from getting through. There have been cases of people actually losing job offers when the offer, sent by email, bounced because the recipient’s mailbox was full, and the employer went on to the next candidate.

A much better approach would be to post links to the images you want people to see. It’s almost certain that all of the images that were enclosed in the message are already available online. Rather than duplicate the 1M of images 1000 times in the mailbox of each and every member of the law school community (taking up 1000M or 1 gigabyte of space), you could simply post links to the images. Also consider that many people download their email over a slow modem connection, and this one message could easily take 10-15 minutes to download. For some this will also mean a higher phone bill.

If the images aren’t already online, there are plenty of free sites that will host your images, and then you can provide links to these. Just search google for “free image hosting”.

We should all support a right to free expression and debate on important issues in this community. Our message is likely to be taken more seriously, however, if it is done with respect for the resource impact of our mode of communication.

—Adam

• Why They’re Wrong About Critical Mass: this essay was included in Critical Mass: Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration [Powell’s Books], published by AK Press. I recommend the book to velorutionaries and their allies; it’s funny that Powell’s categorizes it in “Sports and Fitness-Bicycling” as well as “General”.
  Updated: April 16, 2002
• Moral Reasoning in Constitutional Interpretation: This essay, written for a Constitutional Law class, responds to a question about the proper role of judicial moral reasoning in a case where a terminally ill patient, Mr. Cohen, is challenging the constitutionality of a State prohibition on medical marijuana use. For the purposes of this question, I ignore federal drug law and any issues of federalism or conflict-of-laws. Also available as a PDF (available soon).
  Updated: April 15, 2002
• Alternative Dispute Resolution in International Intellectual Property: I wrote this paper for a seminar on mediation, addressing some of the shortcomings of alternative dispute resolution procedures when intellectual property is involved. See also PDF (available soon).
  Updated: August 16, 2002
• Personal Statement of Purpose: My response to an alumni scholarship application, “Describe how you plan to use your legal skills to promote progressive social movements, systemic change, or solutions that address the root causes of social and economic injustice.”
  Updated: January 22, 2003

• benjamin the well read cat ()
  Written: Spring, 1998
• The Silence of Angels (After Rilke) ()
  Written: Spring, 1998
• titled morning ()
  Written: Spring, 1998
• particular car
  I wrote this when I was 17, an exchange student in Belgium. It was the only poem I ever posted to USENET.
  Written: January, 1994

Written Spring, 1998 |