• SQL FTW

    Posted on by Don Comment

    One of the things I’ve been helping my Mom with are her finances. I started out with spreadsheets to keep track of things, but about six months ago I switched to using GnuCash, an open-source financial program.

    This is a great tool, sometimes a bit more than I need, but sometimes it’s also oddly inadequate: it has all sorts of built-in reports, and they can be customized, but several types of reports are just not available (I am partial to pivot tables). I can export the data I need, but the full export is so complicated as to be almost useless, and the simplified export — they warn about this — doesn’t export certain pieces of data. It was very frustrating.

    (For those playing along at home, I was exporting transactions, specifically ones involving expenses, to CSV, and the simplified export would only list one expense split per transaction. Transactions involving multiple splits were thus incomplete.)

    I happened to come across some online discussions about GnuCash where people were saving their data into databases rather than the standard file, and were then able to use database tools as well as GNUCash to work with their accounts. Well I like databases too, so…

    I decided to use SQLite to make things easier, changed my file format, and opened up the file in DBeaver. The database was a bit convoluted but not crazy, and I tried some SQL snippets I found online to see how it all worked. Then, I wrote a script to export all expenses into a CSV file — it worked like a charm, and I was able to build a pivot table in LibreOffice Calc in like two steps.

    The only person who will ever care is me, but I do like to open the spreadsheet occasionally, and just admire it.


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • It’s Been A While, My Friend

    Posted on by Don Comment

    Whenever we visit my Dad’s grave, I take a little walk to see if I can find my friend Mike’s final resting place, but I’ve never had any luck. My Mom and I were at the grave yesterday, and I had my usual fruitless search, but this time, on the way out, I stopped at the grounds-keeper’s office and asked for help. The guy told us to follow him, drove out — to a completely different section of the cemetery than I’d remembered — stopped his truck, and directed us to Mike’s grave. So much for relying on memory…

    gravestone
    Mike’s Grave in Old Tennent Cemetery

    I’d never seen the headstone; the last time I was there was for the funeral, just before Christmas in 2003. Now, twenty three years later, my Mom and I were there to place a rock on the stone. We stood by the grave for a bit, reminiscing, and then we headed home.

    Here is something I put together just after he passed, a photo collage for his girlfriend, and here are some things I wrote about Mike over the years (though some of the links in that link may be broken).


    📂This entry was posted in day by day looking back

  • Slipped One In Under The Deadline

    Posted on by Don Comment

    Last post before June…

    We went out last night to the concert at the Rose Garden, but the vibe really didn’t click for us (food truck choices) so we went for sushi at Steak & Steel, where Joe & Laura met up with us. We all walked from there to Red Stag for dessert before calling it a night.

    Today I have a little yardwork to do, then this afternoon we’re going on a friend’s “Magical History Tour” of Fountain Hill by bike.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • May Days

    Posted on by Don Comment

    We’ve had a pretty good week: our quartet met last Sunday, Anne and I had Iris a few times and also got in a few rides this week, and last night was opening night at the Velodrome — we went with Joe & Laura. We went to the farmer’s market at the Rose Garden this morning and we’re about to go back there for tonight’s concert (and a food truck dinner). It’s still a bit chilly but life has been good!


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Two Shows, Two Rides

    Posted on by Don Comment

    Shows:

    We went to the Sellersvile Theater Thursday night, to see fiddle-cello legends Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas. We pre-gamed with dinner (burgers & beer) at the Washington House right next door, and also ran into Jeff & Kristen there with some friends of theirs, and then we all went over to the show.

    The music was fantastic. I didn’t know too much about their genre (based on traditional Scottish dance music, which traditionally featured fiddle and cello), but the music was fun and had a lot of high-energy wildness to it, and cellist Natalie Haas was amazing to watch — the style she played had a lot of pizzicato and strumming in it, mixed so effortlessly in with her bowing you could even hardly see it happening.

    Friday night we (us, Ben & Jennie, and Emmi & Kyle with Iris) went up to Schuylkill Haven to see Lorraine and Lori’s collaborative art exhibit “Mothership: Source and Satellite.”

    We started the evening with a somewhat disappointing dinner at a nearby place, but the exhibit itself was amazing — Lorraine’s stuff was almost exclusively knitted or woven fiber stuff (sometimes with Lori’s paintings incorporated), while Lori’s was mostly mixed material (paper maché type stuff, collage and found objects, with a lot of clear resin). All of it was really beautiful, and it all really worked together.

    Rides:

    Yesterday was not one but two rides: I started the day with the season-opener for the D&L’s “Get Your Tail On The Trail” program, a ride up the towpath to Allentown, where we visited the church where the Liberty Bell was hidden during the Revolution. About 40 people went, including a big CAT contingent, and we did about 12-13 miles in total.

    The second ride was a continuation of the CAT Ride Leader training: the group of trainees had been tasked with designing an approximately 2-mile ride loop from CAT, then we would take turns leading the others on our rides. (I’d led my own ride the previous week, so I was just along for the uh, ride.) We did three more rides yesterday, for a total of about 10 miles. It was really fun to see what individual people did with the assignment.

    We hit Joe’s last night for dinner, where we saw Joe & Laura, Marty & Jan, and John & Donna who are leaving for Scotland today.


    📂This entry was posted in cultural ramblings the sporting life

  • Maker Space

    Posted on by Don Comment

    Happy May Day!

    Though I’ve been using my new laptop almost exclusively this past month or so, I’d let the final setup tasks fall by the wayside — not abandoned, just on the back burner for a while. But then, over the last few days, I made some real progress:

    My Header Calculation Program

    I moved the program over to the new machine a while ago, but it wouldn’t run (not even to just give a version number and exit), with an error message saying that it couldn’t find the MXML library. I tried setting up libmxml and ran into another other issue: my code was compiled to a 32-bit architecture (two laptops ago), and the new laptop wouldn’t let me use th 64-bit mxml library with the old program. (Not sure how the old laptops let me get away with it.) The obvious answer was to recompile, which was something I needed to do anyway for some parts of the program, to make it compatible with the new database configuration.

    I got libmxml installed properly, ran make, and as expected I found some errors. I needed to install PostgreSQL’s libpq library, which wasn’t too hard, and after that make ran fine, and so did the program itself. It was kind of cool to run the thing, but ASME header calculations really are something I have no longer have any use for.

    That was Wednesday.

    My Local Web

    Today I got my web server configured to display and run my internal website. I got the server up and running a few weeks ago, but I was dreading this next step — it turned out to be more straightforward than I expected; the only hangup was getting PHP installed, which took all of a minute… And now I have my internal website back, including what I expected to be the most difficult part: my LV commuter map. Granted, I’ll probably have to Marie Kondo my way through the place to get rid of all the old clutter, but that’s a task for another day.

    Most of what I did before this week was just moving files, but these were both firmly on the “porting software to a new system” side of things. What’s left for the new laptop? I will likely set up my background soon, to be like the old laptop — right now I kind of like the current dark generic background though, so we’ll see. And then I should be done!


    📂This entry was posted in tech talk

  • More On The New Toy

    Posted on by Don

    So here I am, posting at home from the new machine. I have it mostly set up the way I want it: photos, music, GRAMPS genealogy are now installed — these all required moving database files, but the transfers went OK. The desktop is mostly the way I like it, and I’m actually using it right now to pay bills today (sigh).

    I’m slowly finding out more about this laptop too. Most interestingly, it has no Ethernet port, no power port (you use one of the USB-C connections), and there is a microSD port rather than a regular one. I guess times change… but there are still two USB-A ports along with the two USB-C “thunderbolt” ports, so I guess things also stay the same.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day tech talk

  • Touching Base

    Posted on by Don

    Man, where to begin…

    I guess the first thing to say is that I usually stop posting when I’m blocked by news in my life, usually bad news, that I don’t want to share yet. I can’t think, or write, about anything else until I get it out of my system, so all writing gets blocked for a while. This has been happening for a while but the latest tale can now be told, to wit:

    This isn’t really my story to tell so I’m deliberately being a bit vague, but my son-in-law had a major health scare. He needed some major surgery, but is recovering now and the surgery seems to have done the trick. We’d all been under a great deal of stress until we got the good news from the hospital, now maybe a week ago. The major problem was found while the doctors were investigating a less severe (unrelated) problem he has, so now he’s back to square one on the original issue, but things are looking up.

    Meanwhile, and I might have mentioned this in passing already, but here’s some good news: Ben and Jennie are expecting — the baby will be here sometime around the beginning of August. We are all over the moon. They also got a new apartment, only a few blocks away from us, and are both now busy teaching.

    Laptop Update: My current laptop is suddenly showing signs of physical wear. It’s mostly a problem with the hinge — the electrical connection to the screen seems to be wearing, and the screen blacks out unless the lid is in just the right spot. So, I bought a new laptop this week. I want to go with Linux Mint, and was thinking of getting a DELL or even another System76, but really I was leaning towards Lenovo, and eventually settled on a Yoga 7.

    This is basically a commodity laptop, pretty straightforward (except for a touchscreen and the hinge’s extra flexibility): 16GB RAM, 1TB storage, Intel CPU and GPU. Not bleeding edge by any means, but at least as good as my old laptop and (most important) it feels physically robust.

    I wiped the drive and installed Mint, which was a bit of a nail-biter but mostly went smoothly. Installed a ton of my favorite software, got my databases up and running, got QGIS going & migrated my projects, and I’m now working through migrating my music/photos and local website. I have a lot still to do but the laptop is now fully functional — I walked with it across the river to a coffee shop, and spent the afternoon configuring software and browsing.

    This afternoon is the No Kings protest in town, and I’ll probably take one of the bikes out for a ride tomorrow.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day tech talk

  • Long And Busy Weekend

    Posted on by Don

    Anne & I went to the Philly Bike Expo yesterday with her brother Joe. We saw a few friends, checked out the exhibits (I favored the rides and trail network booths over bikes & equipment), and went to a few seminars, then we grabbed lunch at the Reading Terminal Market and came home.

    Friday we had a family dinner (Emmi & family, Joe & Laura and Ben & Jennie) to plan for Jennie’s upcoming baby shower. We also pulled the trigger and ordered our new shades for the living room and dining room, and did a bunch of shopping, and I got bunch of Mom’s bills and financial stuff done.

    Thursday was the funeral for my sister-in-law Tara’s mom. She was a sweet woman and very close to our family, and it was a long difficult day. We drove down around 7:00 AM in pouring rain, and came home in a sleety snowstorm. Visibility was garbage, but luckily nothing was sticking on the road. Still, long drive there, long dat, and long drive back.

    This morning we went to a housewarming brunch at Ben & Jennie’s new place, and tonight we’re invited to an Oscars party but I don’t think we’re going. Personally, I’m beat.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day

  • Well That Didn’t Take Long

    Posted on by Don

    I stand corrected: winter came back last night. We got maybe 4 inches, but other parts of our extended area got up to 12″ or even 18″. The snowfall totals didn’t really follow a set pattern either; they were almost random, maybe a bit heavier south and east of us. (It was the same in NJ: my mom’s town got 6 inches while nearby Freehold got 19″.)

    We were out in the storm last night. Joe’s Tavern (our usual Sunday night spot) was closed, but we met Joe & Laura and Sarah at Red Stag. The snow was really beautiful, on all the trees and falling from the sky.


    📂This entry was posted in day by day