Random MomBlog

I know this is geeky, but I like it. You can aggregate all of your blogs, twitter, flickr, Pandora, YouTube, or anything else with an RSS feed into a very attractive timeline at Dipity (it’s even free!). This may sound sad that I needed a timeline tool to show me this (I was sleep-deprived at the time!), but having Dipity correlate my twitter posts with my blog posts made it obvious to me that the benefit of following my baby’s routine was that he started sleeping all night!

If you’d rather have your timeline on your own computer, I also like the SIMILE Timeline a lot. Lifehacker has a Quick and Dirty Event-XMLO-Matic to power SIMILE Timeline, just to make it easy on you!

Geek toys to make timeline pictures … and you know a picture is worth a thousand words!

I use certain “boilerplate” text in all of my scripts for work. I use the same toolsets with the same setup in different combinations with different filtering, but getting started is always the same. So far, I’ve been happiest with Idea Knot, but I’ve always wanted to that flexibility in a format I could easily share with others.

So yesterday I started looking for a JavaScript, XML, or PHP way to display external files selectively. I did not find an easy PHP approach with Google. I found an XML merge that I thought would be easiest to configure although a little harder for others to use, but it didn’t work for me. I probably didn’t configure my input XML files properly, although they passed xmllint. I have ideas on what to tweak to get it to work, but I decided instead to maximize my time and move on to what would be easier for everyone (myself included!) to use: JavaScript. I found an excellent tutorial on including other files on a web page, with an example. There’s another example that converts the other file before displaying it. Very cool! So I whipped up a quick variant using my files, and what do you know?: it worked! Since I have no experience with JavaScript, I’m allowed to be surprised that it was easy. I even understand what the code does! Very nice.

On the first pass, I found how to do this with JavaScript with all of the boilerplate contained in JavaScript variables, but that made the monolithic web page so very large. Also, I do update my boilerplate as I learn new tricks and add new toolsets, and updating a monolithic page is tedious to say the least. So that’s when I started looking for a way move from inline variables to external files to store my code building blocks. I feel good about using good code that I understand, and storing my information in multiple external files that will be easy to maintain.

Building the code generation page and moving from Idea Know to external files will take me a while, but at least now I have all of the components needed. This will be a useful tool to share at work!

One of my students this semester (the term that just ended) is on the VoiceThread team. What they say about it on their website sounds pretty cool, but I have to admit that it didn’t suck me in as much as seeing Monte annotate a Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon … while it was playing! The video doodling is remarkable technology.

I downloaded the Import QIF 3.0.0.1 plugin for Buddi 3.0.0.7, but then I had a terrible time importing the data I just exported from Quicken Deluxe 2002 for Macintosh (OS X).

1. Export each account one at a time. (Pain.) Do not check any export options, just a single account with no categories or budgets or anything else. I don’t think I needed to convert line endings (tr '\r' '\n'), but I did anyway.
2. Delete all lines before the date of the first transaction (with the account information).
3. Now I could import that modified QIF into Buddi without ERROR: java.text.ParseException: Date could not be parsed:
.

In retrospect, that doesn’t sound too bad, but I sure did spend a lot of time modifying date stamps before I tried this!

The good news is, I moved my data, and if I’m lucky, I won’t go back to Quicken and Intuit’s terrible customer service!

Macintosh, Software, Tips, Troubleshooting

Rats! Now that I’m totally hooked on Quicksilver, I hear it’s going to die. Read the Lifehacker Interview with Quicksilver’s creator on the (gloomy) future of QS. sigh Maybe I’ll be able to retrain myself to use Spotlight instead.

Macintosh, Software

I installed a Labor Timer just to get ready for the big day when we meet Karston’s baby brother! Hopefully it’ll be a while before we use this, but I don’t want to have to rush to install this either. Looks easy to use … we’ll see if it’s useful! (I didn’t have any contractions to time last time.)

Palm, Pregnancy, Software

One of my software pet peeves is locking me into a file format, so I really like file converters. One that was tough to find was a QIF-to-CSV converter for Mac. What I found was this online qif2csv converter. If you’re worried about posting your financial information online, you can save the page and run the Javascript locally (turn off your network connection if you’re really paranoid). There are libraries to do this conversion, but then you have to write your own application wrapper.

Converter, qif2csv, Software

You’d think it would be easy (possibly even included) to import a text file, probably CSV, into iCal. But nooooooo it’s not. Luckily, there’s iCalTextImport for the job. I just wanted to enter the school year calendar without having to enter the data manually because copy and paste are wonderful tools!

Macintosh, Software

As I noted before, I figured out how to get a clean export from Quicken 2002 that imports into Cashbox. I only exported 2007 data, nothing earlier. Of course, the next thing I noticed was that I didn’t have a balance forward from 2006, so the totals were wrong. So I entered the balance forward amounts manually only to discover the frustration: the 12/31/2006 entry sorted to the most recent position, after all of the 2007 entries. Yarg, well I’m tough, so I went to the raw data (the plist files in ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cashbox/Accounts/) and started editing. First I moved the 2006 entry to the top from the bottom. No dice. Then I paid attention to the 2007 entries imported from Quicken … the year field of the date was 0007 instead of 2007! Since I wanted to change as few entries by hand as possible, I changed 12/31/2006 to 12/31/0006 in the plist files, and now everything looks right in Cashbox. (I suspect Quicken 2002 used YY instead of YYYY, so this is probably more of a Quicken feature than a Cashbox bug.)

Macintosh, Software

I’ve been looking at Cashbox as a Quicken alternative for OS X. I want an application with a nice Mac user interface (preferably Aqua), that shows balances for multiple accounts (preferably with transfers), and has a good reconcile. I know Cashbox doesn’t support investments, but it has import and export options to lure me in.

Except I couldn’t import the QIF file I just exported from Quicken 2002 Deluxe. Show stopper. Too much to re-enter by hand!

Since it was easy, I decided to try the suggestion to change the line endings (even though the application wasn’t Cashbox, maybe some tips are generally applicable; especially since I saw ^M everywhere). In Terminal, I ran the command
cat JustExportedFromQuicken.qif | tr '\r' '\n' > ImportThis.qif
and the updated file imported just fine into Cashbox! Woo-hoo!

I do like the Bill Scheduling in Quicken to remind me when bills are due (but iCal can remind me too), and I figured out how to get around Quicken moving my account windows (if I close all account windows before I quit Quicken, when I re-launch and re-open, the account windows will show up where I put them before), but the company’s support in general and of Mac OS X in specific is miserable. So I’d rather not support Intuit!

Macintosh, Software