Mobile Money

By Jacob Allred | Published: March 10, 2010

I’ve been want­ing to make an iPhone app for the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor for months. The prob­lem is, I don’t own a Mac, an iPhone, and the half dozen devel­op­ers that have promised to make me an app haven’t actu­ally done so. To make it worse, the Android has come out, cre­at­ing yet another plat­form that I’d want an app for. Frustrating.

I decided if I can’t have an app, I’ll just make a mobile ver­sion of the FNG that works well on the iPhone and Android. I don’t have either of those, so I’ve been using the Android emu­la­tor that works in Eclipse. With just a few hours work, I was able to get a decent look­ing and fully-functioning trimmed down mobile ver­sion of the FNG.

I fin­ished it last night, threw an AdSense for Mobile ad on it, and made $1.26 off of it before I woke up this morn­ing. It hasn’t been long enough to know if I’ll get steady rev­enue from this page, but I’m optimistic.

If you have an iPhone or Android, check out the mobile FNG.

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SVG Barcode Generator

By Jacob Allred | Published: March 9, 2010

The past few days have been spent writ­ing a PHP class that will gen­er­ate bar­codes and save them as SVG files. This class is going to be used in an upcom­ing barcode-related web­site I’m building.

Cur­rently it supports:

  • UPC-A: The nor­mal bar­code you will see on most prod­ucts in the US.
  • UPC-E: A smaller, com­pressed ver­sion of UPC-A. Typ­i­cally seen on prod­ucts that do not have enough space to fit a full UPC-A barcode.
  • EAN-13: The new inter­na­tional stan­dard for bar­codes. All stores in the US are sup­posed to be capa­ble of using EAN-13 bar­codes, but most prod­ucts are still labeled with the older UPC-A barcodes.
  • EAN-13 w/ EAN-5: An EAN-13 bar­code with an EAN-5 bar­code next to it. The EAN-5 bar­code indi­cates the rec­om­mended price for the item. These are typ­i­cally seen on books and peri­od­i­cals, although it is com­mon for books to have the EAN-13 w/ EAN-5 bar­code on the back, and a UPC-A bar­code on the inside of the cover.

The advan­tage of gen­er­at­ing an SVG file instead of a PNG or JPG is that SVG graph­ics are vec­tors. This means you can make the bar­code as large or small as you want with­out any loss in qual­ity. Once you’ve sized it as large or small as you want, you can export it to a PNG, JPG, GIF, whatever.

Any­ways, I’m not releas­ing the source yet (sorry). Exit­Blue is design­ing my new bar­code site (should be ready by the end of the month), and then I’ll need a week or two to get the PHP back­end stuff work­ing, and then maybe I’ll release some of the code. In the mean time, you can check out the online bar­code gen­er­a­tor.

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I’m a DMOZ editor

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 27, 2010

A few years ago I became an edi­tor on DMOZ. The cat­e­gories I chose were pretty sta­tic, so even­tu­ally my account got deac­ti­vated because I wasn’t using it.

But I recently got re-excited about being able to edit the direc­tory, so I’ve got­ten my account re-activated and I’m back in busi­ness! Maybe after a week or so of main­tain­ing my cur­rent cat­e­gories I’ll branch out and pick up another one.

Any­ways, edit­ing is pretty fun and adding or remov­ing sites from the direc­tory can dras­ti­cally effect their search engine list­ings, so the changes you make actu­ally matter.

Get­ting approved for a small cat­e­gory is very easy and only takes a few min­utes of work. So head over to DMOZ, pick an unedited cat­e­gory, and apply for it using the link at the bottom.

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Making Eclipse for PHP Useful

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 25, 2010

Out of the box, Eclipse for PHP is lack­ing a few vital features.

Prob­lem: How do I run SQL queries in Eclipse?

Solu­tion: The SQL Explorer plugin.

To install:

  • Go to Help->Install New Soft­ware.
  • Add a new site called SQL Explorer with the URL http://eclipsesql.sourceforge.net/
  • Select SQL Explorer.
  • Keep­ing click­ing Next/Finish until the plu­gin is installed.

Prob­lem: Okay, I can run some queries now, but not against Microsoft SQL Server!

Solu­tion: Use the jTDS JDBC dri­ver. (Note: In my expe­ri­ence, this dri­ver is much faster and more reli­able than the dri­ver you can get from Microsoft.)

To use:

  • Down­load the lat­est driver
  • Unzip the down­load and put the jtds-1.2.5.jar file some­where safe.
  • In Eclipse, go to Window->Preferences.
  • In the Pref­er­ences win­dow, go to SQL Explorer->JDBC Dri­vers. Select Microsoft MSSQL Server JDBC Dri­ver.
  • Go to the Extra Class Path tab. Click Add JARs and select the jtds-1.2.5.jar you down­loaded earlier.
  • Click List Dri­vers and ensure that net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver is in the Dri­ver Class Name box.
  • Your exam­ple URL should look like jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://<server_name>:<1433>

Prob­lem: What about edit­ing files on a remote server? The built in Remote Sys­tem Explorer doesn’t seem to work…

Solu­tion: Use CDT and Tar­get Man­age­ment (this includes a work­ing ver­sion of Remote Sys­tem Explorer).

To install CDT:

  • Go to Help->Install New Soft­ware.
  • Add a new site called CDT with the URL http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/galileo
  • Select Eclipse C/C++ Devel­op­ment Tools.
  • Keep­ing click­ing Next/Finish until the plu­gin is installed.

To install Tar­get Man­age­ment (requires CDT):

  • Go to Help->Install New Soft­ware.
  • Add a new site called Tar­get Man­age­ment with the URL http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/updates/3.1/
  • Select TM and RSE 3.1.1.
  • Keep­ing click­ing Next/Finish until the plu­gin is installed.

To con­nect to a Linux box over SSH:

  • Open the Remote Sys­tem Explorer perspective.
  • Cre­ate a new con­nec­tion, and select SSH Only as the sys­tem type.
  • Fol­low the wizard.
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Jumbo Jenga: It is finished!

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 21, 2010

After nearly 2 months, my jumbo Jenga set is fin­ished! I would have fin­ished sooner, but it kept snow­ing and/or being below freez­ing nearly every week­end for weeks.

I rubbed the fin­ished blocks with some min­eral oil to pro­tect them stains and split­ting, and it had the ben­e­fi­cial side effect of mak­ing them look amaz­ing! And they con­ve­niently fit into two pro­mo­tional Win­dows 7 bags for easy storage.

Any­ways, check out the orig­i­nal post if you want instruc­tions on how to make your own!

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What is my IP?

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 18, 2010

This past week­end I found a fun domain name for a project: ipaddr.es. Yeah, it is miss­ing an “s” at the end, but I think it is still a fun domain.

So I threw up a “what is my IP” style page and am hav­ing some fun with it.

What makes IP Addr.es bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion? A few things:

  • The IP address is the pri­mary ele­ment on the page, located in a big, modern-looking green box.
  • The IP address is included in the page title. I’m sur­prised how few “What is my IP” sites do this…
  • You can get your pri­vate IP. I only found one other site that does this.
  • Each page has a “How does this page work?” link at the bot­tom that explains what you need to do to copy me. For exam­ple, the pri­vate IP “how does it work” page includes the source to the Java applet I am using, and explains how to use it.

It has been up less than a week so it isn’t as feature-packed as I hope to get it, but it is already bring­ing in some ad rev­enue, which is always a good encour­age­ment to keep adding fea­tures. I have a few ideas of basic things to add:

  • Basic inter­net tools (ping, trace, reverse DNS, host­name resolver)
  • DNS record lookup
  • Spam IP black­list check
  • Domain WHOIS (maybe.. these tend to get abused by spammers..)
  • Basic encode/decode fea­tures (URL, base64)
  • Maybe some basic bin/dex/hex converters..

Any­ways, what do you think? Check it out at IP Addr.es and let me know!

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Oracle rocks!

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 13, 2010

Cur­tis, an Ora­cle employee, con­tacted me a week or two ago to ask for per­mis­sion to use data from the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor at Ora­cle. I freely license the data under both a Cre­ative Com­mons license and the GPLv3. While these licenses are won­der­ful licenses for peo­ple work­ing on open projects, they leave a bit to be desired for closed-source com­mer­cial projects.

Because I like Ora­cle and I know they aren’t going to do any­thing nefar­i­ous with my data, I promptly gave Cur­tis and Ora­cle per­mis­sion to use the data from the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor under the CC license with­out the “Share Alike” con­di­tion. This basi­cally gives them per­mis­sion to use it how­ever they want as long as they give me credit.

As a “thank you”, Cur­tis sent me a cou­ple fun good­ies: an Ora­cle pen, hat, t-shirt, and cof­fee hot cocoa mug. I’m look­ing for­ward to the next casual Fri­day at work!

Just one more rea­son I love Oracle. :)

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I made it!

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 8, 2010

I made it! I’ve hit my earn­ings goal for Cor­ban Works!

Back in March 2009, I decided I’d start track­ing my online earn­ings, and set a goal for where I wanted to be. My gross earn­ings at the time were about $160 per week with all my sites run­ning off of a shared host­ing account. I set my goal to be 40 hours of min­i­mum wage per week (gross). At the time, this made my goal $262 per week, but in July I increased the goal to $290 to match the increase in fed­eral min­i­mum wage. To make sure I didn’t meet my goal thanks to a fluke, I decided that I had to earn this amount 4 weeks in a row.

It’s now 11 months later, and I’ve come a long way. I’ve built sev­eral more sites, paid for a major re-design of my largest site, and dropped non-performers. I’ve ditched the shared host­ing account for a ded­i­cated server at The Planet (and even had to upgrade to a big­ger ded­i­cated server due to increased traf­fic), and have earned an aver­age of $358 per week over the past 4 weeks. This is $68 per week more than my goal!

My next goal was going to be to net 40 hours of min­i­mum wage (i.e., $290 per week after expenses, such as domain reg­is­tra­tions and host­ing), but I acci­den­tally hit this goal at the same time as the orig­i­nal goal. Because of this, I’ve decided my new goal is to reach the 50% mark of the $40,000 per year I need to earn in order to quite my day job. This works out to $398.50 per week, aver­aged over the pre­vi­ous 8 weeks. Not a huge increase, but a nice round per­cent­age that I think I can hit in the near future.

Posted in Goals, Money, My Sites | Leave a comment

PIC Code Site

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 6, 2010

When my wife leaves town, I like to spend my time work­ing on web­sites. With her out of town check­ing out Rice Uni­ver­sity, I put some time into a project I’ve been mean­ing to do for a few months.

A while back I found this site, a very old school ghetto PIC/CIC search site. Hav­ing had a lot of suc­cess with the ABA Num­ber Lookup and the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor — both data-driven sites — I decided to make my own PIC site.

I used jQuery and a few plu­g­ins, and came up with this. I couldn’t find a good domain for it, so I re-used an old one I’ve had for­ever. My wife is going to make a logo for me, and once that is done I’ll start dri­ving traf­fic to it.

Any­ways, sug­ges­tions are wel­come. I know it isn’t per­fect, but not bad for being thrown up in less than 24 hours and def­i­nitely quite an improve­ment over that other site. Check it out at AllredTech.com.

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Unemployment negotiations

By Jacob Allred | Published: February 3, 2010

On Tues­day night, my wife and I dis­cussed my unem­ploy­ment. Don’t worry, I’m still hap­pily employed. The prob­lem is: I don’t want to be!

My goal for a long time has been to make enough money from my own busi­ness to be able to quite my day job and work from home full time. My wife is very sup­port­ive of this (really, she is!) but she is also right­fully con­cerned about our family’s finan­cial well-being. So we sat down, talked it through, and came to an agreement.

I can quite my job (or at least, sig­nif­i­cantly reduce my hours) and work from home once the fol­low­ing con­di­tions are met:

  1. Becca must be employed (being a grad stu­dent counts) and earn­ing an income.
  2. Becca must be able to obtain health care for the two of us through her employer.
  3. My busi­ness must be earn­ing an aver­age of $770 per week (gross) for 8 con­sec­u­tive weeks (roughly $40,000 per year) — or in other words, at least $6,160 over an 8-week period.
  4. To keep things sim­ple, the $770 per week includes any money that Becca’s web­sites earn.

I have a ways to go. $770 per week is a lot of money, but I’ve made some really good progress over the past year in increas­ing my earn­ings, so I’m con­fi­dent that I can get there in the next 3 to 5 years.

Posted in Goals, Money | Leave a comment