Ed’s Tech Blog

testing gelatin

So, I recently bought Quicken for the first time, so that I could do line item tax deductions. Too bad my main credit card company, Chase, artificially limits the data I can import to Quicken. Only 45 days worth. I needed the whole of 2006 to do taxes.

Chase does advertise 6 years worth of statements are always available, but the devil is in the details. They only let you have pdf’s of each month’s statement.

It’s late, so here is the short. I learned Ruby and wrote a script to convert a folder full of these pdf’s into Quickens XML format, QFX. Well, I actually used the free PdfTextReader to initially pull the text out of the pdf’s. I had started using the java library, iText, to do the pdf manipulation, but they say that their library cannot pull text out of pdf’s. So, faster to use someone else’s tool.

Had to brush up a lot on my regular expressions as well. The pdftextreader pulls the text out of the pdf’s differently each time, so you can’t just count spacing to find the different columns. You have to come up with a pattern that matches for thousands of transactions. In the end, I altered a few foreign transactions by hand rather than figuring out special code for them. Also, the automatic payments by Chase broke their normal pattern too.
Anyway, all the data back into 2005 is in Quicken now! So, I can go through and find the line items. (I found out today that my tax bill is pretty steep for some 1099 work in 2006, so hopefully this will keep my travel the world plans alive.)
Originally, I was going to write this program in Java, and post it for the Quicken community to use. I figure there are many others who are in the same jam, and they might hit the donation button if I save them many hours of tedious labor. However, after iText revealed that it couldn’t help me with the pdf’s, I changed my position to “how can Ed get this done fastest for himself?” Find a pdf text extracting tool and use a language like Ruby.

Worked out pretty well. I’m satisfied, even if it conceivably took me longer to write the program than to cut and paste by hand. I’d rather spend the time gaining programming skills than getting carpel tunnel and being bored.

If anyone wants the ruby code, just leave a comment. Maybe I’ll post a link to it tomorrow.

Download the new Java Netbeans 5.5

Several of the samples are broken. Totally unprofessional.

Click on ‘Help’. Sun’s entire document website cluster is down. Totally unreliable.

What is Sun thinking? Do they realize how poorly the represent their company and technology?

If Sun can’t make the samples work, then why should anyone bother with their latest offering(s)?

Talked to an SBC/ATT rep today.

They said SF gets Fiber Optic laid to new apartment buildings and select newly built homes.

They said that my neighborhood, Western Addition, will not get the copper replaced with fiber optic (ever), because the state of California does not require SBC to offer higher speed than what we get. We currently max out on the 3Mbps ADSL, though they offer 6Mbps to neighborhoods w/ fiber lines.

This isn’t fiber to the home. SBC never plans to pay to replace copper to the home. (unlike Verizon).  If you are one of the lucky few to live in a brand new place in SF with the fiber, SBC will offer 25Mbps download speeds. (Didn’t get the cost or the upload, but it would not be synchronous).

At least they keep dropping the price for the crappy DSL. It’s down to $25/mo, but that is really $40/mo b/c we have to pay for a phone line. The phone is only used to dial in for DirectTV Tivo listings.

Crazy how San Francisco has the bottom of the barrel residential broadband for the entire United States.

Hopefully, WiMax will get offered to residents in the next year or two and change the whole scene.

Can’t be done as far as I can tell.

But here are the steps I tried after trying many tutorials.

#install ruby
mkdir ~/bin/ruby
cd ~/bin/ruby
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz
tar -zxvf ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.5
./configure prefix=~/bin/ruby
#replace ext/openssl/ossl.h with updated version.
#refer to:
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google/browse_thread/thread/8f17987659b4c59d/8ef4d94184abb473?lnk=st&q=ossl_bio.c%3A+In+function+%60ossl_obj2bio%27&rnum=1#8ef4d94184abb473
wget http://edwardotis.com/public_files/ruby/rubyossl.patch
patch ext/openssl/ossl.h  rubyossl.patch
make
make install
export PATH=~/bin/ruby/bin:$PATH

#install rubygems
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
tar -xzvf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.0
ruby setup.rb
#ruby setup.rb config –prefix=~/rubygems
#ruby setup.rb setup
#ruby setup.rb install

#install rails and necessary gems for rails
gem install mysql #choose option 3
gem install fcgi
gem install rails –include-dependencies

# In the file:
#~/bin/ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rails-1.1.6/dispatches/dispatch.fcgi
#Replace
#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
#with
#!~/bin/ruby/bin/ruby

Plus, I setup mongrel and everything. Still no love.

Big waste of time. Much better to find a host who supports ROR and pay them separately for development environment. I love my 250GB on 1and1.

This zips wp-admin and all its subdirectories into a file named test.zip.

>zip test.zip -r ./wp-admin/*

Use >unzip utility to unpack it.

Despite the information on their website, wiline will only provide service to apartment buildings of 30 units or more. (aka they will only cut a deal with the building management.) Therefore, Wiline does not actually provide any residential service as far as I am concerned since only a small business can order their service.

So, I go to Amazon and buy a paper novel.

Read it. Done with it.
I put it back on Amazon’s Used Book section and sell it to someone else.

All good and legal.

Now, let’s say I go to Amazon and buy the same novel in digital format it.

Read it. Done with it.

Can I:

Sell one digital copy of it, if I erase my own copy(s)?

Is there a market that needs to be created here? For instance, adding a feature into the Digital Rights Management for management and commerce of used goods. If I buy old media versions of a novel or a song, I have the right to sell it if I don’t want it anymore. It looks like we are losing that market with the current DRM model. Of course, all the media companies hate the used book and CD market, but they couldn’t do anything about it until DRM came along.

So, if media companies want everyone to accept DRM, then they have to give us the ability to exercise the same rights we had with old school media. Otherwise, people will go to some lengths to avoid DRM plagued media.

I wonder if Amazon is already working on the ‘Used Goods’ Marketplace for DRM based media.

Or by nature of DRM, does this mean that Apple, Adobe, Microsoft and others will have to necessarily control the Used Goods marketplace for all media that uses their particular DRM schemes? I suppose they could make them work with Amazon and others, if they wanted to. Basically, the records of the license transfer for using the media would need to be maintained by a central repository for it to work. (And they already maintain this repository for your initial purchase to work.)
heh, this starts to get into the Orwellian world where the big corporations (and NSA) know ‘everything’ you read and listen to that is DRM compatible.  In fact, I bet the US intelligence community absolutely loves the thought of having this much information about everyone. Of course, then there is China and the lot. I suppose the Chinese government will try to impose laws that they have access to all Chinese citizens’ DRM records if a given company wants to sell digital goods to Chinese citizens.

Scary and scarier.

But that’s ok because strong encryption is free and open sourced. Because of this, people will always be able to circumvent their governments’, corporations’, employers’ domestic spy programs with varying degrees of effort.

Now, can I sell my digital copy of ‘Altered Carbon’ to you?

In 7.0x,

I have an 8 hour playlist. Frequently, Itunes won’t play the next song or video in the list. I don’t get it. This should have been debugged, oh, 4 years ago!  Wtf? Shoddy, shoddy work here. Can’t even get through a playlist. Again Winamp and Media Player do this simple task without a hiccup.

I have an 8 hour playlist. Itunes doesn’t scale for working with large playlists.

Also, 8 hour playlist. How about a feature to show me the time as I scroll down the big playlist. Could be simple or could look cool like Google Picasa timeline feature. Either way, I want to know that a group of songs is going to kick in about 3 hours into the set, and I don’t want to add up all the times by hand.