Monthly Archives: November 2007

Lets’ spy on the competition

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Today I saw that NEAT Receipts has provided more information on their Mac version, and here. Just about a month ago, the founder of NEAT Receipts (or one of his employees) purchased a copy of ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. At first I thought maybe they wanted to talk to me about the products and I contacted them about it, but now it seems that the goal was simply to either look at the competition or learn from it. So it looks like NEAT Receipts has 3 developers working on the program; I wrote ReceiptWallet initially in about 2 weeks part time and have had over a year to perfect it.I just hope that they don’t copy my ideas and interface as it has taken me a long time to get things quite usable. They’re exhibiting at Macworld, so I’ll have to take a look at what they have and maybe change my marketing message, “The original receipt management program for Mac OS X”.

Email and DNS Services turned off!

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I’m pleased to say that I’m out of the DNS and email services businesses. I’m now relying on GoDaddy for DNS and some of my email forwarding and Google/Gmail for email. While it may seem risky to rely on Google’s free service and GoDaddy’s low cost service for stuff as important as mail, but I’m confident that things will be fine. Gmail did have some slowness yesterday, but it cleared up today. The only hiccup is that my brother-in-law couldn’t send mail when he got home. After asking my sister a bunch of questions to nail down the problem, I discovered that Cox blocks outbound connections on port 25 which is great of them to try to prevent spam from originating from customer machines. Luckily, Gmail also accepts outbound mail on port 587, so a quick change got around the problem.

One year of selling ReceiptWallet

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Yesterday marked the 1st anniversary of ReceiptWallet! When I started ReceiptWallet, it was simply out of my own desire for a program to keep track of my receipts. A lot has happened in one year and I’m quite pleased with how mature the product has come as well as the number of users using it. I hope that the next year brings as much success as the first year and then some!

Outrageous sales tax rate

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We were in the Chicago airport yesterday and had lunch. I almost fell off my chair (that seems to happen often with me) when I saw the tax on the bill. It was 10.22%. Wow, that is like VAT in Europe, but I think the highest I’ve ever seen in the US, except for hotel taxes.

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The end of running my own server

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After many years of running my own server, it is finally time for me to wind things down and let the professionals maintain my server tasks. Monday, while away in New Jersey, my mail server stopped responding. I tried to ping it, but the neither the cable modem nor the server responded which lead me to believe that the cable modem hiccuped. Luckily my father was able to goto my house and reboot the cable modem and life was grand again (my server has been running constantly for 4 months, so the issue was connectivity). However, this was the last straw in running my own server. In August, I moved all my web services to a virtual server at VPSLink and it has been running flawlessly. As my virtual server has limited RAM and space, I decided to leave mail running on my own server and since SMTP has automatic retries when mail delivery fails due to connectivity issues, downtime wasn’t a big deal, or so I thought. While the mail wouldn’t be lost, it would be delayed which I now realize is just as problematic.

So, I’ve decided to give Google’s Google for Small Businesses a try. The basic account is free and gives each user their own account with 2 GB of space. I simply have to set it up and point my DNS to it. Over the course of the next week or so, I’ll do 2 things. First, I’ll change all my DNS handling to GoDaddy as their Total DNS Control comes free with each domain registration (currently I run BIND and do my own DNS with a backup DNS elsewhere) and then I’ll move over to Google. In addition, GoDaddy will handle incoming email and redirect it, so I can setup email addresses on a few of the domains to point to other places without actually having to have mailboxes. I have 11 domains to deal with, so this change over is going to take a little bit of time. I’m going to setup 3 separate Google accounts (each account can have multiple email boxes) and then lump mail from the other domains into those accounts. This is something that I need to do carefully or I’ll make a mess and I’ll drive myself crazy trying to fix it.

After I move everything, a few questions remain. I still run my own Asterisk based PBX; should I keep this or simply just have my Polycom phone hooked into the VOIP provider without having my own IVR system and multiple extensions? Second question is about my cable modem account. I have a business cable modem account which costs twice what a residential account does, but lets me run a server. Is this still worth it? I have 5 static IP addresses with the account. I just checked my email and this is a moot point for another year as I signed a 3 year contract for my cable modem. OK, maybe next December I’ll change my service. Third, I run my Squeezeboxes off my server. I could setup an old Shuttle box I have which will be quieter and more efficient which is an option. Fourth, I have my server backup my virtual private server every day and my MacBook Pro backs up to my server daily. So, maybe I still need my server running, but if it goes down or the connection to it goes down, the consequences are minor (if the connection is down, my VOIP provider has voicemail which will pick up calls). Writing this out, helped me decide to keep my server. However, I might be able to scale back on the configuration as RAID1 is no longer as important, nor is a secondary hard drive, nor is a huge box, nor is a 1500 VA UPS.