I’ve been working on my rent tracking app over the past few weeks.
I still have a lot of work I want to do with it, but at this point, I think it works well enough to make it publicly accessible.
So far what do I have? … NW Indiana and the Indianapolis area.
NW Indiana was my first trial into this, and uses a much more limited and weaker method to pull in data than what I’m using for Indianapolis. Indianapolis, the way I have it setup, pulls in much more data, and it much more accurate (to the point that I’ll add in a mapped location of the data points later).
My current plan is to work out a few bugs I see here and there in it, and to convert the NW Indiana method of data collection to match Indianapolis.
From there, I may start pulling in other regions, and providing that data too.
I would say that this data I’m pulling may be somewhat similar to rentometer.com, though I also have an interest in the trends, and if rents are rising or falling, and other specifics like rent per sq ft.
If your interested, you can find these at http://www.hedgesadvantage.com/
also, click on the ads if you wan to help make more of this possible. I recently added it in the hopes that I can actually see some sort of benefit to me for writing all the code and making all this available for free.
Update– what I’ve been up to
I haven’t posted anything in a little while…
it’s been a busy few years, and a lot I’ve been working on!
what I’ve been up to in my free time is working on pulling together some scripts to arrogate rental information in the area’s I’m interested in, and allow me to track trends in rates.
I’ve put together a script that pulls in all this info form internet sources, then filters through and places them into a database.
from there I’m able to pull up statistics and weekly / monthly averages of the rates.
I want to build it out a bit more, and try to expand to some other areas I am interested in too, but I’ll see if I can get that in soon.
I’m also wanting to try to figure out where I can pull data for locations outside the us.
otherwise for my first test with it, I’m coming near having 1 year of rental data for the areas near where I live!
… and from what I see so far.. the news makes it sound like rental rates are going up at an alarming pace, but my data doesn’t really look like that is the case, at least not near me.
Teaching Entrepreneurship
For Easter I gave both of my boys (8 and 9 yrs old) $12-14, found in Easter eggs I had hidden. After they had found them I gave them a challenge: “Find a way to double what you have in a month and I’ll give you $5”. They went into action thinking up ways they could do this, and how they could employ their friends to offload some of their efforts. So far, this is what I’ve seen.
They had me go to the store with them, where they bout a lot of candy.
When we got home, they set prices on the candy and left for the day (they did this again the next day too).
Half way through the weekend I was being asked to go back to the store because one of their products had just about sold out.
By the end of the weekend, they were at the point where they had recovered all of their costs, and starting to make a profit. (even donating part of it to church).
If they continue this way, maybe I’ll have to give them the $5 a little sooner than I thought
Cisco ASA Emulator
I ran across this site again (http://7200emu.hacki.at), I think I had posted about it in the past with a cisco pix emulator. They have a few short tutorials on their site about how to use DSL linux and a cisco ASA ios image to emulate or run the ios, and how to get the asdm image running also. I haven’t had any time to look into this too much, but if I have time this week, I’ll give it a shot and try to post something on it.
This isn’t as easy as they make it sound.
I suspect that part of this may be because I’m trying to do this in vmware ESXi 5.
up to this point, I’m able to build get it to boot, but it just locks up. This is without trying to do the qemu method. I’m building out a ubuntu server to attempt that next. I had also run across this site trying to find info, it has a script that will repack the pix os and build a boot cd (that doesn’t seem to work in ESX 5 either).