• Major overhaul of Kawasaki fiche diagram importer
• Bugfix : was locking up while trying to import KVF650 4x4 (2013).   Cause : dodgy image file on Kawasaki causing c9 to enter an infinite loop
• Bugfix : hotspots on 2013 diagrams incorrect
• Recoded importer to use same technology approach used by all other importers. More reliable, faster and easier for me to maintain
• Images are now rescaled and re-sampled. Important for 2013 as 2013 images onsite are very high resolution
• Orderbook tweaks
• Display details on workshop/unit/deal spares order. Including actual customer involved in the service/sales department
• Allow access to view job from orderbook
• Bugfix : following filter condition created incorrect output : sort by supplier, filter by specific customer.
• Ctrl+T Manually open till, now appears in business activity reports as a non-volatile entry (cannot be modified or deleted).
• Point of sale : if you key in a part that is currently on order, c9 will report this to you and give you the option to switch to receive order mode; displaying a shortlist of customers that have that particular part on order.  A large % of shops are not managing their spare parts ordering effectively, and routinely forcibly sell out parts when they should be using customer pickup.  It is hoped that this tweak in behaviour will help curb such usage patterns.
• Workshop : ability to set fixed $ discount as opposed to % based.

This release includes initial, draft versions of some unit sale regulatory paperwork for NSW and QLD.

Includes database changes. You will be forced to log c9 out during upgrade

• Customers : ability to set a visual icon.  Allows to visually flag troublesome or extra nice customers. Icon is visible in most customer browse/select screens
  
• Point of sale : disable deposit reclaim if there is no deposit to reclaim
• Workshop spares report : had sale and cost back-to-front. Now fixed.
• workshop jobs encode an 'effort' value. Effort is displayed and tallied in weekly calender so you can get a feel for day to day workload.
• select job - display start date
• Import BRP Side by Side fiche diagrams
• Receive order : under normal circumstances when you have a mix of parts on order for stock and customer, c9 will reallocate parts to preferentially fulfill customer orders first.  Under a very rare combination of events this will not happen and parts will goto filling a stock item when there is a waiting customer. Now fixed.
• Honda Warranty export.  Although Honda can mass produce a 300km/h street motorcycle, the difference in interpreting date formats '1/11/2012' and '01/11/2012', poses a very challenging software engineering problem; or at least Honda didn't volunteer to fix this at the server side.   C9 now encodes dates with leading zeros on date and month.

• Inventory check
• Yamaha - support either client certificate or hardware VPN access methods
• Eurotread - allow longer user names on login.
• Fixed triumph fiche importer.  Stopped working because of a number of changes triumph made on their site
• Export Honda Warranty
• export format was incorrect. Now fixed.
• Added two new fields requested by Honda:  Gender and DOB
• Bugfix : under some rare circumstances adding cost onto a unit will erroneously record cost onto cash till report.  Depends on what terminal was doing just prior to the add cost, e.g. reprinting an invoice will trigger this bug.  Now fixed.
• Bugfix : sometimes downloading new version of c9 to terminal can fail (local network error) and leave temporary files in \c9 folder. Under some rare conditions attempts to restart c9 will not succeed until these temporary files are deleted.  Now fixed.

Anthony West and Data Racing have released a new mobile app for track day telemetry.

Web page is here: http://antwest13.com.au/App.html

More and more, IT technology is becoming cheaper, more pervasive, and more powerful.

My keen interest as a programmer is how more and more technology segments are becoming 'commoditised' over time.  Previous specialist technology solutions that were once incredibly expensive are becoming cheaper and more accessible.  Desktop computers are so cheap now that they are throw away, the cost to replace is usually cheaper than the cost to repair.

Update: It is not obvious on website how you get the app.  The site seems to suggest this is still a work in progress and not ready yet.  Still a cool tech idea, if it is indeed a real piece of software under development and near completion, and not just vapourware.

• New F12 check availability: now supports Eurotread and Link International
• BMW Fiche import : was importing low resolution images for certain diagrams and wasn't getting hotspots right on those diagrams, typically photographed items.  Now fixed.
• Miner query results : display row count.
• Browse account. Could not filter on name bits : i.e. last name/first name, etc.
• View Account Transactions  : would allow you to jump to corresponding spares/workshop/unit sale but because anyone can keyin a reference number this could cause jumping to non-existant/invalid sale or a sale performed by a completely different customer. Modified and put some rudimentary checks in place.
• Print Statements : as per above. Only print invoices for which rudimentary validity and ownership tests satisfy.
• Quick Books Integration - allow user to select from either Cost of Goods Sold or Expenses chart of accounts. (Previously would only display Expenses)
• Purchase unit : Recent changes made have confused alot of users.   Made some tweaks to help with this : when adding a new unit to purchase automatically pop select unit browse window. From here user can either a) select unit, b) key in it's vin, c) Click add unit to add a new one or d) press Escape and key in new unit details

Trying to get your website to appear near the top of a Google or Bing search is both a black art and to a small extent a zero-sum game, because only 10 websites can occupy the top 10 search results.  You are competing with all other relevant websites who are also trying to lift their search profile.

C9 powered websites now include a number of features to help SEO savvy web designers optimize your site.  The following describes these and how to access them.

Read more...

Inventory checking for Yamaha is now possible. The process of configuring it although is slightly complex.

The complexity arises because Yamaha require something known as a 'client side certificate' in order to access their site.  C9 can handle this no worries, the only additional complexity from c9's point of view is you need to give c9 a Certificate file and the password for that file.

The real complexity although is getting the certificate file in the first place.

If Yamaha have provided it in an email, you can try and just add it into c9 as is and you might get lucky.

Otherwise you need to extract the certificate out of Internet Explorer. This process is complex. Read on for more details.

Read more...

• Suzuki online fiche import
• Bugfix : was not importing diagram part quantities. Now fixed.
• New framelisting included, which includes 2013  GW250
• F12 check supplier
• Fixed unusual bug where it was not automatically logging in sometimes (I could fix it via remote access, but change fixes it for good)
• Include support for Yamaha,  requires some heroic hacking skillz to get setup, more on this in a separate post.

Includes database changes.  You will need to log all terminals out during upgrade

• Website SEO tools - web side of things not yet built.  Will include a post that explains these new functions once corresponding webpage changes have been made.
• Select account by query. Some filters, like last name were not working in the query result screen. Now fixed
• F2 lookup part : now has a wildcard search option. Runs really slow, but allows you to do fine tune searching when existing description search is not up to the task.
• Workshop staff report : was incorrectly including quoted/estimate labour. Now fixed
• Receive spares : print invoice date on receive sheet
• Import price file bug fixes
• Deleted stocked item. Was not properly checking 12 month sale history and would delete parts where qtyonhand=maxqty=minqty=0 but had some recent history. Now fixed.
• New supercession checker gave up on chains longer than 20 parts.  Yamaha have heaps of parts longer than this.  Modified new supercession checker to give up after 100 parts; i.e. the limit of the prior supercession chain tracker.