Archive for the 'Internet' Category

An Easy VPN on EC2

Saturday, September 15th, 2012

I’ve become a little bit more paranoid over the last few weeks about computer security. I used to think I will be fine – why would anyone want to hack my computer and find my personal files. But after a bit of reading I’m more concerned about the far more likely situation of mass spying [...]

Mixing HTML5 and Native iOS

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

There’s a lot of people out there who have their favorite technologies and there are few more passionate debates than the issue of using HTML5 or native development for mobile apps. It’s still early days for HTML5 on a mobile platform, the technologies are still maturing and so there are fewer libraries out there for [...]

Fabric For Development

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Fabric is a pretty awesome tool for deploying projects. But it turns out that it’s also pretty awesome for lots of other stuff. At PyCon 2012 there was a talk given by Ricardo Kirkner (which you can watch here) that inspired me to play around with fabric in some new ways. It’s possible to use [...]

iAd Report Downloader Script

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

I was surprised that there wasn’t already a script out there to download iAd reports from Apple’s iTunes Connect website. Apple released a Java based command line tool to download the sales reports for Apps but neglected to provide something similar for iAd publishers. Some Googling around I was further surprised that I couldn’t find [...]

iPhone App Backend In Development

Saturday, September 24th, 2011

After getting UFO Invader published there were a couple of things that became obvious points of improvement from a marketing perspective. Web sites have the advantage that you can count on having internet access when visiting a website so it’s easy to tie things in dynamically all over the  place.  Things such as Adsense ads [...]

Perplexing Advertising Numbers

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011

I’m still doing a lot of testing around how this iPhone Apps stuff works but yesterday I ran an experiment to see if mobile advertising would help boost sales of my game. The results were very odd. Firstly, I have been running various ad supported websites for about 8 years now so I’m pretty confident [...]

UFO Invader Submitted – Waiting Again

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011

Waiting seems to be something that you have to get used to when dealing with Apple.  Granted, the whole process is vastly more efficient than it was back in the days of physical distribution.  And I’m thankful that that I don’t have to hire a publisher and deal with box designs, CD duplication and the massive [...]

iPhone App Store SEO

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

The Apple iTunes App Store search engine is a bit of a black box. Unlike Google which has some transparency (though they keep a lot of things close to the chest). With Google you have the opportunity to find trends through Google Trends, or see competition and search volumes by keyword within the Adwords Keyword [...]

Closing Automatic Blog Machine Tomorrow

Friday, May 20th, 2011

The initial launch of Automatic Blog Machine has exceeded my expectations so I’m very happy to have my first users who have been plugging away at the system and building their own personal blog networks. To the people that have signed up already: Thank You. I’m looking forward to personally helping make Automatic Blog Machine [...]

Schrödinger’s Programmer

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Schrödinger’s Programmer is a thought experiment. A real-life paradox which comes as a result of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The thought experiment presents a programmer that may or may not have written software. You have a closed office. In this office is a computer (with internet access) and a software programmer. She is [...]