Happy birthday to me

Tomorrow, May 27, is my birthday...

Image from arstechnica

Maybe this is the time to do a little balance in my life ... even if I do not like to do this sort of things, I think that every decision I made in my life, bad or good, helped me to be the person I am today.

Maybe I should have a working experience in USA, or maybe I should just take a little vacation to reorder my thoughts.

Too many "maybe" in this post, don't you think so?
Yes,I think so... well, it is my birthday, so just relax and eat your cake :-) this is my day...

Nero d'Avola

The wine I ordered some days ago is just arrived:



It is Nero d'Avola from Sicily, it is perfect with red meats so now I just need to organize a BBQ in my garden :-)

Nero d'Avola is a native vine from Silicy and takes its name from the homonimous town of Avola in the Southern part of Sicily.
Ruby red in color, intense bouquet with hints of black currant and blackberry, full and velvety texture...

Planning a new product

I am planning a new product, SQLiteConverter:


I'll post more information about it soon.
Do you want to guess what it could be? :-)

I'll also post a new SQLiteManager 2.0.3 version probably tomorrow...

iChat and Skype

I used to have a voice mail number in the support section of my site, but I really do not like this approach, it isn't really very interactive and it seems a bit "the old way" for a company and a guy so projected into the future like me :-)

I purchased an IPEVO Skype phone some weeks ago, so I have decided to update my support section:



You can now contact me via Skype or via iChat (preferred).
No problem for me if you want to chat but please speak slowly if you want to call me :-)

Vampire Software

In 1999 I founded Vampire Software with the mission to create useful MacOS utilities (it was the OS9 era).



The most succesfull product I developed was SmartZip (a WinZip compatible application) but unfortunatly due to a series of unfortunate events I lost its source codes :-( so I never updated it after the initial 1.0.1 version.

SQLabs is more focused on professional and REALbasic solutions so I am really thinking about reborn Vampire Software and develop some new useful application for MacOS X...

My PayPal store

I am really satisfied about my new PayPal store, it is fast, easy to use and quite powerful. It can handle coupon codes, duplicated orders, backups and so on. It was written by me in PHP with mySQL and even if mySQL for some reasons is down then it automatically creates a csv copy of the order ... so nothing is lost.


Today I added another very cool feature ... each time a new order is received , an SMS is sent to my cellphone with all the most important details about it. I really like real time alerts :-)

Maybe I should package my store and try to sell it as a new product from SQLabs... Hmm, something to think about...

Sales

SQLiteManager is selling well, in the first day it was able to repay me for all the investments. Now I expect sales to be stable or to reach some "mean" level.

This is the first time that I think that I could box the product and maybe find a reseller.

In the meantime I am experimenting Google AdWords ... Keywords was choosen, the budget was set and the campaign is started in Germany, Japan, Australia, Italy, United States, United Kingdom and France.



This process seems to be an art more than an exact science ... I'll keep you informed about how it works for me and if it helps my sales...

Compile an universal binary version of the sqlite 3 library

So far my blog didn't contains a lot of technical posts, maybe this could be the first of a long series...
I'll show you how to compile an universal binary version of the latest sqlite 3.3.5 database engine library.



This is a step by step tutorial...

Open the Terminal and grab a copy of the latest sqlite library:

curl -O http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-3.3.5.tar.gz

Expand the archive:

tar xzvf sqlite-3.3.5.tar.gz

Go into the folder and create a new directory:

cd sqlite-3.3.5
mkdir bld
cd bld

Run the configure script with some custom parameters:

../configure --enable-shared=no --enable-threadsafe --disable-tcl
--enable-cross-thread-connections --enable-threads-override-locks
--enable-debug=no

Now the interesting part...
Edit the newly created Makefile and add these after the empty TCC += line:

TCC+=-isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -arch i386 -arch ppc

Now save your changes and run:

make

In the .libs directory there is now an universal libsqlite3.a that you can use with XCode or with gcc.

SQLiteManager 2.0

After many months of hard work, SQLiteManager 2.0 has been released.