Automate Your Business

Archive for July, 2009

I need to come up with a better name for my forthcoming software than “SENuke Alternative”.

I was thinking something like “Underground Lead-Lined Bunker”, but that doesn’t explain what the product will do!  So I thought I’d throw open the doors to you, my faithful readers.

The competition: Suggest a name for the product (which – eventually – will provide the same set of functionality – approximately – as SENuke), but at a cheaper ongoing cost. Have a read of SENuke.com if you want to see what my software should eventually be able to do.

The prize for the winer:

1. A free copy of the software, for life.
2. $50 worth of credit into your captcha-breaking account once you’ve got the software installed (good for 25,000 captchas, which should keep you busy for a while!).
3. A 5% commission on all income generated by sales of the software (both the initial cost and the ongoing monthly fees) for the first year it’s available.

Just submit your suggestions as comments to this post, using the “comments” link below - they won’t get approved automatically, so they won’t be visible immediately. I’ll comment-out your actual name, then publish your comment, so you’ll know I’ve got your input.

The closing date for the contest is the 1st September.

If by some chance I think of a name myself that I actually use, or if I tweak the best suggestion slightly, the prizes listed above will still go to the best submitted name.

The winner will be announced here (unless you’d rather remain incognito).

[UPDATE: Competition closed. Winner to be announced in separate post in the first few days of September.]

Aaargh. I hate development sometimes.

I’ve painstakingly worked through the Gmail account creation process, making it fully automated. I cracked the final piece of the puzzle last night, only to end up at a page where Google send an activation code to your mobile. And there’s no way on earth I can automate that piece, not even if you have hundreds of different mobile numbers which the software can provide to Google.

Sigh.

Now that I’ve hit that problem, I remember reading about it elsewhere, so I should have spotted that earlier. Stupid me. I suspect it’s only a problem where the same PC is hitting the registration forms repeatedly, possibly tracked by cookies or IP address. So the code will still be useable if you have a good range of proxies, I think. I’ll need to do some investigation into that.

However, now that I’ve done the hard part – damned hard – it should be relatively easy to modify what I’ve done to work with Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. I started on it last night, and reckon it’ll take me a few hours to adopt, thanks to the plugin-based approach I’m using.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Pay attention to what I said there: “FULLY automated”

Here’s a quote from the SENuke team:

“Yes, any captcha SEnuke ever encounters (apart from the gmail account creation captcha) is sent to our team for solving. The gmail account creation is not outsourced because it would take too long since gmail requires entering the captcha multiple times.”

(Source: http://www.senuke.com/blog/?p=47)

I’ve got ALL Gmail captchas solved hands-free (via a CHEAP third-party service with a bunch of people solving these things all day), even when there are two captchas on a page at the same time.

I’ll try to get a video of it up at some point soon.

I love it when my years of software development pay off

I’ve been playing alot with IE this last couple of weeks as part of the SENuke Alternative software (better name coming up soon!)

And one frustrating thing has been the ability to see the HTML of a page AFTER it’s been modified by JavaScript.

Finally, I found a free modification to IE which adds an option to the right-click menu to see such code. It doesn’t produce the prettiest code, but at least you can see it now!

You can get the modification here.

I’m progressing well with the “SENuke alternative” software, with the result that there are a couple of features you might like:

- The browser remains invisible, and becomes visible if there’s something it can’t process normally. So you can carry on working with “real” work whilst it does it’s thing in the background.

- Get this: even the CAPTCHAs can be processed whilst the browser is invisible. Neat, eh?

- It’s got built in debugging that should (if your proxy and router allow it), let me debug “live” whilst you run the software on your PC, so I can more easily find out what’s happening if you encounter problems.

- It’ll have plugin functionality similar to WordPress. So if some clever programmer wants to write an interface to post bookmarks to (as an example) Delicious.com before I’ve had a chance to write one, they can take my template plugin, modify it, and make it available to download for users of my software.

- It’s actually two softwares in one: A web-based app to do all the stuff that it possibly can without you even having to have your PC on, be in the country, or even be awake. And a desktop app to do the CAPTCHA-specific stuff (and maybe a few other things in future, we’ll see how that goes). Both will have the plugin functionality.

- Virtually everything will be done via plugins (which will be free to users if I write them). So for example, the CAPTCHA breaking is done by one specific third-party service at the moment. If they close down, put their prices up to much, start performing badly, or otherwise cause me to look at other providers, I can fairly quickly write a plugin to work with another provider (if they support software integration, of course).

I must say, I’m enjoying this work!

Something that’s always annoyed me about writing web apps is having to write configuration pages. Each application obviously has different variables that need configuring, so it tends to be a laborious process of writing a unique configuration page per application.

However, I’ve had enough, so I’ve spent a massive amount of time (almost 8 hours!) and come up with something that’s pretty flexible. It’s not a totally user-friendly app, but if you know how to write XML files (to describe the settings that can be configured by the user), how to write custom PHP validation routines, and how to modify Smarty PHP templates, then it’s basically something you can drop in to an existing application.

Anyone interested?

[UPDATE. Later that day]
Here’s the code I now use to create a config page:

$config = new phpConfigWizard();

That’s it. Everything is is done via the XML settings file and Smarty templates.