Kevin B. Carpenter

Hosting Excellence

I always try to do my best in whatever I do.  I may not always hit the mark, however it doesn’t deter me from continually striving too.  This last week the hosting provider I have used for the last two years had an opportunity to do the same.

After an unexplained outage for roughly 12 hours, myself and their other clients received and email deciphering the past hours happenings.  The way the outage affected their systems was a total blackout.  Not even support emails where flowing.

Not only did they use it as a learning experience to improve on their processes they also stood up and offered their SLA credit to all their customers.  This morning I received a 25% refund for the time our servers where down.  When considering the minimal amount VPSLink charges per month, that’s quite a sum.

In the end, this is the first significant down time we have seen as a client for the past two years.  All other issues and support have been astounding as was their form for handling this issue.  If you need reliable hosting – I highly recommend VPSLink.  Further, following any of the links I have here and you will receive a lifetime 10% discount.

I can think of several companies I wish would learn from their example – including a few local schools here in Costa Rica.

QIF2CSV 1.30 – Updated Release

As the subject says, a new version is available.  I had to take a couple weeks off from it because I had been staring at the code so much trying to find a couple bugs that I just wasn’t seeing the forest from the trees.  I was reminded about it this morning while working on another AHK script which I use in some of my daily activities.

This afternoon having some time to myself here at home I decided to dig back in and find out what was amiss.  It important sometimes to take that walk away from things in order to clear the mind and to simply come back and look at things differently.  That different look produced this version. 

The program now handles:  Account Lists, Categories, Memorized Transactions and Accounts.  If you happen to have a file that contains these items and perhaps multiple accounts, by all means please give it a test run and report how it works for you.  I am trying to do all the testing I can, however even though I have produced several different test files, they are all from the same accounts.

If you don’t already own Quicken or if you need to update to the latest version, then help support this software and site by making your purchase via this banner here:

Download Link Here

QIF – The Documented and Undocumented

As I have been working on the QIF2CSV converter I have of course done lots of searches for information about the format.  Intuit has their original documentation located here: http://web.intuit.com/support/quicken/docs/d_qif.html which is good, but seems to be a little dated.  For instance using Quicken 2007 and exporting some investment data to test with, I noticed types of Security and Price that are not listed here.

Another good location for information (of any sort) is of course Wikipedia.  There section is smaller and doesn’t list out all the various types, however it does give a good overview of the format.  A bit more of a big picture view if you will.  The direct link is of course a subset of its main page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QIF.  Another good page on their site is the Open Financial Exchange format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Financial_Exchange.

Finally on the topic of OFX, one of the final pages I have been using more is the main website at http://www.ofx.net/.  They have the specification linked right at the top of the page.  Quoting from their website:

Open Financial Exchange (OFX) is a unified specification for the electronic exchange of financial data between financial institutions, businesses and consumers via the Internet. OFX is not a financial institution.

So if you ever need more information about the QIF format and such – there you go. You can find out some more important information about previous versions and the future of it with Quicken from http://web.intuit.com/personal/quicken/qif/.

QIF2CSV Update to 1.15

An update a day later?  Yes I know perhaps I should have just waited but then again…  Anyway here is an update with Categories completed and working.  It converts them to CSV as well as the primary account.  It properly displays them in the application after converting, and saves them out to the CSV as well.

I believe I will just continue working to add the rest of the conversion items that are necessary and increment the number’s as I go.  I have a version 2.0 in the SVN, however before I do that rewrite, I want to complete the full functionality here.

The main item I am not too happy with in my design is the fact that its one large loop that must go through to test each line and see where its at.  The logic though working, just doesn’t sit well with me and I have been beating my head trying to figure out a cleaner more efficient way.  However till then, I will at least get all the functionality out this way as it works.  Then when I rewrite it, I will consider the better way to arrange the code itself.

So if you needed categories, they are in there and working.  Will be adding more this week; but the day job calls so I don’t expect to have another update post for at least a few days if not till next weekend.

Source and EXE have been updated and are on the Downloads page.

QIF2CSV Update to 1.05

Based on input from users, I have setup a small update to this program.  It fixes the problem of deleting files without confirmation.  It also handles the tabs generated when converting files better.  A couple of new items where added including a status bar, as well as some code to help with debugging.

The next items I am working on adding is the ability to handle the Categories, and other items that are imported from the data files.  I have almost a version 2.0 in progress that is a complete rewrite.  From dumping data (via export) from my current version of Quicken, I have found several tags that are not in the QIF documentation for investments.  Some of these include !Type:Price and !Type:Security.

Anyone who uses this software, please drop me a line of feedback with your ideas.  I look forward to putting out a new release here in the next few weeks with more compatibility and features.

Also – both the Source and the EXE files have been updated on the download pages.  Again, thank you Abe for pointing out the file deletion problem.

QIF2CSV Converter

I wanted to post a note that a user sent me concerning this script.  As it turns out, when you run the program and select the file to open, the program will automatically delete any file with the same name and a .CSV extension.  It should only limit itself to that, however there has been issues where this is not the case.

I have already fixed the code here, however I have not posted a new version yet.  I am working to fix a few other bugs, as well as add new features to handle investments, memorized transactions, categories, and classes.

On that note, thanks to Abe Rovin. for pointing out the file deletion problem and also thanks to Gene Wester. for providing me with more investment information.  I look forward to posting a new version of the software around the 28th of March.  Until then, please make sure you are working with a COPY of your data and that your original data is ALWAYS backed up.

Screen’s and Putty

Yes I know its been a long time since I have added anything.  That just shows how busy life has been.  Between family, work, taxes, etc.   However I am writing this short entry about a terminal utility that’s installed on most Linux servers called screen.

One disadvantage to using terminal emulators like Putty is that if you need to do more then one task you find your opening up more and more windows.  Perhaps that’s OK for you, but maybe your using one of those new Netbooks like the Acer One which has a smaller screen.  Or how bout you just need to save resources on the local computer.  Screen is the answer.  It allows you to have multiple screens running in one session.

I won’t bore you with the details here when Linux Journal has already done a bang up job describing it.  You can find their most excellent article right here.  Next time you putty or SSH into that Linux box, make it your only local window by using screen on the remote side.

Link: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6340 if you wish to type it by hand.
Plus Sven Guckes’ screen pages at www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/screen.

My new One Upgraded

On the 12th of February or so, the Lifebook I have been using for the past almost year finally stopped displaying information.  It booted fine, but to see what was going on was no longer an option.  I don’t leave the house much, but when I have to, I like to have a machine that’s small and easy to get around with.

Currently I am trying to do a volunteer project for a hospital.  Its requiring me to convert a rather large program’s template files to Spanish.  So for that and a few other reasons I decided to grab one of these on Valentines Day. 

Of course not too soon after I learned that you could still push the memory up a bit further then what they come with.  Mind you the machine (for its use) is no slouch.  Its definitely better then the Lifebook I was using which was a Pentium M mobile processor that max out at 512mb of ram.  However Clear Health takes 100mb per session alone.  As the 1GB chip was just about $30 and the manual said it could be upgraded - I figured great - easy as pie (there’s a nice little easily removable panel on the back). WRONG!

That panel leads to nothing ness.  In fact to upgrade the memory you have to pretty much open it wide (and some say void the warranty but I didn’t pull any sticker or break any item that said I was doing so.  That plus being here in Costa Rica - after seven days it goes to the manufacturer if your that unlucky anyway’s.  So upgrading the memory on a Acer One looks like this:

Open the machine completely up, removing the keyboard, unseating the daughter board, etc.  To reach that one nice little memory holder…. would it really have been that hard to add a simple cut out into the frame molding?

I guess Acer thought so.

But in the end, its a machine I love.  Will look forward to getting a larger battery for more life without a cord but otherwise it fits the bill for me.  Couple good links I found:

Aspire One User Site, Aspire One Guide Site (drivers here!)

The Vista Aero is a Hog (Resources that is)

Out of pure curiosity this evening, I chose to revert my Vista theme to the classic windows.  I had been pondering this decision for several days as the Windows Vista experience ranks my dual core 2 Ghz/2GB system with a 16X PCI Express NVidia card at a whopping 3.5.  With the slowest aspect being the video.  Mind you this system runs off of a reasonably fast SATA hard disk and I keep a minimal software running.

Then result?  I recovered 66% of my CPU usage.  So much for fancy interfaces, I’ll use my CPU cycles for something more progressive.  Mind you my voice recognition is working like a charm.  Yes it has it’s occasional issue, but it is far more usable than it ever was.

Vista Speech Recognition, The Good and The Bad

Perhaps it’s because Windows 7 is set to come out, or perhaps it’s the release of service pack two, or maybe as just because I really needed to upgrade my voice recognition software.  Either way a week ago I decided to upgrade to Vista.  So far it’s been worthwhile.

My primary deciding factor was everything that I’ve read about the voice recognition upgrades and Microsoft Vista.  All in all they have been well founded.  With the addition of the windows speech recognition macros I am very excited about the future possibilities.  As my hands get worse tools like this provide me hope.  At least hope to be able to continue working and providing for my family.

All of this entry as been done using voice recognition.  This last section which will be a collection of links and resources will be more a conglomeration of copying and pasting been speaking out a group of URLs.  However whether it’s correcting misunderstood words, or the command options for manipulating the operating system I am over all impressed with the new upgrade.  Its not perfect but it’s better than the voice system that was provided with Microsoft Office 2003.

Resources

Robs Rhapsody - A blog dedicated to speech recognition and the new speech recognition macros.
ChuckOp - All the cool developers use speech APIs, a blog from Charles Oppermann a program manager at Microsoft.
WSR Macros - A code gallery site holding many of the macros from rob’s blog.
MS-Speech - A Yahoo forum on Microsoft’s speech recognition.
Speech @ Microsoft - Microsoft’s blog about speech recognition.

Finally an excellent set of information on speech recognition has been produced by a gentleman name Itamar Even-Zohar from Tel Aviv.  They are unbiased and provide an excellent set of straightforward information not just from Windows but even some information for Macintosh as well.  If there is bad, you will find it covered there because from my point, its all good for now.