TigerPay is on App Store now at http://onj.me/29m

After much waiting and futzing around with Apple’s app approval process, I am pleased to announce, TigerPay is now available!  You can now use everybody’s favorite mobile phone as a mobile credit card processing terminal with a credit card processing service that genuinely has its users’ best interests at heart!

Again, for direct link to the App on the App store, see http://onj.me/29m

The app’s App Store description speaks for itself:

“TigerPay: Charge your Customers’ Credit Cards with Stripe”

TigerPay is the incredibly simple and cost-effective credit card processing terminal that runs right on your iPhone!

Using the independently-owned and extremely competitively-priced Stripe.com credit card processing service, you simply sign up for a free Stripe.com account and provide them with your payout information, then enter your Stripe.com API key into TigerPay. That’s all there is to it, after that, you’re ready to accept credit card payments.

If you’re an individual or small business owner who’s fed up with the lack of affordable ways to accept credit card payments, or if you’re looking for a better option for processing your customers’ credit card charges, TigerPay may be the option you’ve been looking for. Stripe’s free-to-use service only takes a very small (30 cents + 2.9 percent) per-transaction charge out of the transaction to cover their expenses, and within 7 days average, the proceeds are deposited to your bank account.

UPCOMING FEATURES:
+ Transaction history
+ Options to refund (partial or whole) card charges
+ Native version for iPad

Please note that I originally submitted a different description to the App Store.  This is the version which should (hopefully) become active very shortly.

Once more, this app won’t appear in search for a few more hours probably, so the direct link you can use until it does show up is http://onj.me/29m

Happy selling!
–Quinn

I am pleased to announce that I am waiting for Apple to approve my first iPhone/iPod OS app for inclusion into the iTunes App Store.  This app, called TigerPay, will allow you to leverage the Stripe payment processing service, to charge your customers’ credit cards, wherever your iPhone or iPod Touch has Internet access.

This app will be a welcome option to you, if you are a business owner.  The two following situations come to mind as great examples:

• Independent on-site technical support and/or consultation provider (like myself) wishing to immediately collect customers’ payments.
• Situations such as being a seller at a flea market, farmer’s market, or festival-type atmosphere where your business could benefit from immediately taking a customer’s credit card payment without your traditional desk and/or point-of-sale setup.

This is also a fantastic option if you were considering a traditional mobile credit card processor appliance.  Simply sign up for Stripe, fill out all their required account details, load the app on your iPhone or iPod (which I’m sure you already love) and take their payment.  Within about a week of each payment processing request on your part, Stripe sends the money to your bank account.  Furthermore, Stripe’s rates are incredibly competitive, and by supporting their service you fund a team of developers who make a payment processor that is easy to implement, user-friendly, and their team is always open and willing to listen to any feedback you may have.

As I’ve previously stated, this app is still pending approval by Apple.  Once the app is approved, I will, of course update my blog with an official release notice.

Thanks Kindly!
–Quinn

I would like to express my thanks to one of my customers who pointed out to me that the QuinnEbert.NET contact form has been broken for some time. I have replaced the existing WordPress module with one that should be seeing much better support going forward. Furthermore, I have tested the new form. It appears contacting me should now work again as originally intended. My apologies to anybody who had issues with the previous system.

Thanks Kindly!
–Quinn

So, recently, I have realized that the Spotlight (file searching and indexing system) on my Mac running OS X 10.7 (Lion) is totally killing my Mac Mini’s performance when I’m doing high-demand tasks like compiling MacPorts packages in a Terminal session.  I have a sneaking suspicion, though I have not verified, that this is due to some fairly severe Spotlight bugs that still remain in Lion.  Desperate to try and reclaim what I estimate to be the 60%-70% loss of system performance caused by Spotlight’s indexing facilities constantly hounding any disk activity it sees and constantly grinding away at my hard disk, I did some online research, and found some fairly simple steps you can take if you’re like me and you want to see a 50% or more gain in system performance.  That being said, these steps won’t be for everybody, especially since they keep Spotlight from updating your file search results.  Again, if you regularly rely on the upper-right-hand or Finder window search features, these steps are NOT for you, and sadly, you will just have to wait and see if Apple fixes Spotlight indexing bugs in future Lion updates.

DISCLAIMER — VERY IMPORTANT WARNING — READ OR LOSE DATA: Well, not exactly, but you could lose data if you aren’t careful with the way you follow these instructions.  If you do not have experience in working with the Mac terminal or Linux/BSD shells, you really should just forget about doing this, you could quite easily do more harm than good, including possibly even losing data, or putting yourself in a position where you could lose several hours of productivity having to restore a Time Machine backup to get your machine working again.

BEFORE YOU DO THIS: If you have Time Machine set up, or if you have a drive or drive space you can use to set it up, you really should take a full backup before doing this.  While I write these instructions as carefully as I can, nobody is perfect and you could make a mistake here even if you know exactly what you’re doing, do us both a favor and ensure you have a full backup on-hand from right before you try this so that you can restore to a working system if something breaks or you happen to break something.

ONE LAST (LITTLE) THING: These steps are designed for Lion, so, you’re on your own doing this for any other OS X release, in fact, you probably have no need to do this on any other OS X release.  Other OS X releases don’t seem to have these performance-killing bugs with Spotlight, or at least, they’re nowhere near this severe.

1. Make sure you are logged into an OS X account that has Administrator privileges, that your account has a password set, and that you know your account’s password.  If you’re the only user of your computer, you should already be good as far as this goes, otherwise a bit of searching online may prove helpful.
2. Open the Applications folder by clicking Finder in the Dock and pressing Shift+Command+A or if that doesn’t work, look in the “Applications” folder at the top of your Mac’s hard drive.  Under the Applications folder you’ll find the “Utilities” folder, and under the “Utilities” folder you’ll find “Terminal.app” (it might also just be called “Terminal” depending on your Finder settings).
3. Copy and paste the following command into the terminal, then press Enter:
   sudo nano -w /etc/hostconfig
   Enter your password followed by pressing Enter if you’re asked for it.  If this doesn’t work, you either have the wrong password, or you don’t have Administrator privileges.
4. Use the down arrow key to get the cursor to the end of the text of this file.  The cursor should hopefully be on a line by itself when it can’t go any further, but if it’s not, hold down the right arrow until the cursor stops, then if you had to do the right cursor hold, press Enter to create a new line.  In some strange cases, if you had a large file here, you might see some text scroll past the top of the screen, that is fine, just keep on working through these instructions.  Now, add this line to the bottom of the file by copying and pasting it:
   SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
   Press the Enter key once when you’re done with that.
5. Press Control-O (O as in “Oh” NOT as in zero), press Enter, then press Control+X.  This saves and closes the file we need to edit.
6. We’re almost done already!  Now, we need to move the file that causes Spotlight to start at boot-up into a safe place.  Copy and paste this into the Terminal:
   sudo mkdir -p /System/Library/LaunchDaemonsDISABLED/
sudo mv /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist /System/Library/LaunchDaemonsDISABLED/
   Press the Enter key once after the second line.
7. You can quit out of Terminal now.  Press Command+Q if you want to do that.
8. Reboot your machine, it should come back to life properly, and if so you should now be Spotlight-free.

1. Open the Terminal again.
2. Again, run this command, copy and paste it:
   sudo nano -w /etc/hostconfig
   Press Enter to run it. Enter your password followed by pressing Enter if you’re asked for it.
3. Use the cursor keys to put the cursor over (blocking/covering) the “S” in this line:
   SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
4. Press Control+K to delete that line.
5. Press Control-O (O as in “Oh” NOT as in zero), press Enter, then press Control+X.  This saves and closes the file we need to edit.
6. Run (copy and paste) this command to move the start-up file for Spotlight back into place:
   sudo mv /System/Library/LaunchDaemonsDISABLED/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/
   Press Enter to run the command.
7. You can quit out of Terminal now.  Press Command+Q if you want to do that.
8. Reboot your machine, it should come back to life properly, and if so you should have Spotlight back.

REFERENCE: OS X Daily, “How to completely disable Spotlight”
http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/22/how-to-completely-disable-spotlight/

Here’s to your happier, faster Lion powered Mac!
–Quinn

Just wanted to make folks aware that I have just posted an updated version of my Stripe payment processor for Mal’s E-commerce integration package.

The following two changes have been made:

• Payment status checking now uses stripe.js for instant and intelligent feedback on the usability of the customer’s credit card information.  This cuts down on occurrences of Mal’s E-commerce presenting your customer with the “did not complete order” type page (whose text, incidentally, is the option you set under “Thank You Message”).
• Variable data sent to and from Mal’s E-commerce is now subjected to a pass of htmlentities() to reduce chances of XSS attacks.

After hearing back from the folks at Stripe (with some valid minor concerns — mainly concerns from Mal’s E-commerce’s perspective) I have made a few minor modifications to the Stripe4Mal package.  While the issues addressed are ones that are likely to not to see any great exploitative use, as a white hat security guy, I can’t help but to take such advisement to heart.

Download the updated Stripe4Mal package (same URL as the previous release)…

Here’s what’s changed:

• Validate length of the CC passed through the script and validate that it is, in fact, a numeric value.
• Validate length and numeric-ness of the expiry year and month passed through the script.
• Validate that the purchase amount the script receives is in the proper format for Stripe to process, including verifying that it is a wholly-integer value, and is a positive number.

There is a possibility that another update will be released soon, I am waiting for a bit more review from the staffers at Stripe, though the need for such another update is yet to be determined.

Happy Selling!
–Quinn

Thanks to a good friend of mine who suggested this, due to ongoing projects between us, we decided that we needed a non-PayPal way to accept credit cards for an e-commerce site we were working on putting together.  We were using Mal’s E-commerce for the cart solution, and we really liked Stripe Payment Processor, but nobody’s apparently found a way to link the two yet, or if they have, it’s not something they’ve made available publicly.

This changes today…  I present to you Stripe4Mal (direct download link to the package’s ZIP file).

Stripe4Mal is a PHP-based script, bundled with a self-written and illustrated (IE: screenshot graphics with generous textual description for my potential blind and visually impaired users), and even comes bundled with a copy of the Stripe API PHP library for your convenience when installing the Stripe4Mal package.

My hope is that this will be found useful by those with a strong desire to open a new online business or who wish to greatly improve the effectiveness of their business’s customer payment options.  I hope also that it will make at least one person successful in their endeavors, as an entrepreneur you have the power to help the world economy on its path to recovery, and for that I thank you and commend you!

Happy Selling!
–Quinn

Just dropping a quick note to let all my readers know that I *am* still alive, but, life has been crazy-busy lately.  I’ll get back to posting interesting things here soon (I’ve already had a few good ideas).

Also, I would like to announce, I will NOT be posting further school discussions.  Sorry about that, but once things fell apart, it just didn’t look like it would be worth the effort to do that again.

More fun stuff again soon!

Thanks!
~~Quinn

A few days ago, CloudFlare, a service which provides advanced caching and security services to QuinnEbert.NET, experienced a major bug in one of their content caching systems, resulting in a sustained outage to this and a number of other sites (I personally know of one other site that I frequent that has admitted to being hit by the same bug).  In similar style to the experiences of that other site’s owner, I wrongly assumed my web site was totally trashed, and got a bit ahead of myself by trying to reinstall WordPress without first verifying that I had working database backups.

For those of us who use WordPress, we know WordPress needs these database backups, to provide the content that we have so carefully assembled and entered into our sites.  So, unfortunately, some data from QuinnEbert.NET has been irrevocably lost (I have some database backups from earlier in the year, but, I still have yet to decide if I want to make the possibly dangerous choice to try and import them).  In the meantime, I am moving forward, trying to slowly re-build my content repertoire.  You’ll notice that the existing look and feel is already back in place, thanks to these being physical files on the server’s disk, but you’ll also find menus still nonexistent and content previously linked all over the place is no-more.  My first efforts here will be to try and restore or re-create my statistically-most-interesting stuff, after which, other content will be restored or re-created as I am able to do so.

Thanks kindly for your patience and understanding!
–Quinn Ebert

PS: I will not be restoring old papers/discussions from class, due to the amount of work that would require, so sorry about that.  I will, however begin re-posting discussions and papers from my next set of classes, which begin on June 13TH.