Author Archives: Jacob Allred

Unexpected Traffic

By Jacob Allred | Published: March 11, 2010
I woke up this morn­ing to find a nice lit­tle sur­prise wait­ing for me in my Google Ana­lyt­ics account: Woah! Where did all that traf­fic come from? After look­ing at the refer­rers, I dis­cov­ered that the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor was fea­tured on Existenz.se (sort of a Swedish ver­sion of I Am Bored, I think..). So how much money [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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