• Aug 1, 2007

    Thanks, Time Warner

    My ReeceiptWallet sales yesterday were down significantly (I sold 1 copy) which I thought was extremely odd. When I checked my logs today, I saw that no one had visited my site yesterday which was impossible as search bots hit it all the time. I logged into an outside server I have access to and tried to connect to my site; it failed. Hmmm...my main site (www.gruby.com) worked fine. What was the difference? I remembered that receiptwallet.com was on a different IP address. I switched everything back to the main IP address and will give Time Warner a call in the morning and find out what they screwed up (it appears to be their routing tables) and see about a nice service credit for this. This also explains why someone said that mail to receiptwallet.com bounced, but to gruby.com didn't.

    Uggh, computers suck.

  • Jul 31, 2007

    Boy, I sure feel old

    A few weeks ago in my EMT refresher class, the instructor mentioned something about the movie Airplane! to one of the students. The student, who was about 21 or 22, didn't have a clue what the instructor was talking about. While I can't remember if I saw the movie in theatre (probably not because I was 7 when it came out), I did see it and the sequel sometime during the 80's. I really felt like I was getting old because it didn't seem all that long ago that the movie came out.

  • Jul 31, 2007

    Stop wrapping dmg files in zip archives!

    I routinely download software that ships as a Mac disc image, but when uploaded to a web server is placed in a zip archive. The dmg file is already compressed, so the zip file doesn't reduce the size that much and just adds one step to decompressing (when I decompress, I'm left with the zip file and dmg file; I then have to trash the zip file). My suspicion on why this is done is that the web server isn't setup to send dmg files as binary and people get a mess in their browsers. So solution (for apache servers), is simple. In /etc/mime-types, add dmg to the octet-stream line like:

    application/octet-stream        bin dms lha lzh exe class so dll img iso dmg
  • Jul 29, 2007

    First look at OCR

    A recent comment on my blog struck a nerve where the commenter said that OCR would basically put a competitor to ReceiptWallet above it. While I still don't believe that OCR is all that useful for receipts (if there is one mistake when you're generally only entering 3 small pieces of data, you've wasted time because you have to review each entry carefully), I took a look at an open source OCR package. While this code is a bit rusty, there has been some recent work on it. My first test was a Rite-Aid receipt where I was looking to see if it could read 3 pieces of data, the merchant name, date, and total. It failed on the merchant name because it was a graphic, however, it picked up the date and total in such a way that I could parse the data and grab what I needed. I then tried 2 other receipts, both from Costco and the results were completely miserable such that I couldn't get anything from them. I'll keep plugging away and testing to see if my results are better.

    In addition, I put in a request for a quote for a commercial OCR engine. However, I suspect that it will be cost prohibitive. If it costs $5,000-$10,000 upfront plus a per copy licensing fee, I can't afford that as it would completely wipe out any profit unless I significantly increased the cost of ReceiptWallet.

    If anyone has more information on OCR engines for the Mac (commercial or open source), please let me know.