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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

Currently the code uses PHP’s mysql extension. I’ve read in several places that mysqli is better, faster, more attractive, gets more girls, etc, but have been unable to find any remotely recent benchmarks to prove it. I don’t care if the OO approach is cleaner looking, I just want it to be faster.

So I put together a bit of a benchmark (very unscientific) to see if it is faster or not for my very specific needs: I want to generate 50,000 names as fast as possible. Each name requires 4 SQL queries, so I end up making 200,000 queries (yikes!).

For my first attempt, I simply replaced all of my procedural mysql stuff with the OO mysqli equivalent. In other words, I connected to the database, ran each query, then got the result out of the result set. This had absolutely no improvement over my current method of getting data; sometimes mysql was a second or two faster, sometimes mysqli was a second or two faster.

For my second attempt, I used the mysqli::multi_query method to combine the 4 SQL queries per name down to a single trip to the database per name, dropping my total number of trips to the database from 200,000 to 50,000. This yielded a drastic 66% speed improvement. There are several methods in my name generation class that generate multiple queries, so using this technique will make the name generator significantly faster.

Conclusion: As a drop-in replacement for the standard mysql extension, mysqli does not appear to be any faster, even for lots of queries. However, the mysqli::multi_query method makes it possible to shave large percentages of time off of your script’s execution time.

Update (2–4-2010): I just ran an order for 10,000,000 names (with addresses, occupations, etc). This process used to take about 25 hours to run on my server. With the new code it ran in only 15 hours. That is a 40% speed improvement for about 45 minutes of effort! So my conclusion is yes, mysqli can be much faster in certain situations.