Sunday, 1 January around 10 o'clock am
Note: you can find much more information about ledger on ledger-cli.org, including links to official documentation and other implementations
For the last five years I've kept my personal finances in order using the ledger system, a sophisticated command line program that consumes a lightly formatted text file. It's helped me repay debts and get everything in order, helping me financially absorb an injury last month that would have been extremely detrimental just a few years prior.
The stock ledger program is exclusively command-line oriented. For quick checks and greping over output, this is fine. For some time, though, I've wanted a more graphical, more robust way of looking at my finances. I've also wanted a more familiar query language, since version 2.0's queries were someone limited and version 3.0's query syntax is not very well documented yet. Last year I wrote a simple system that pushed monthly reports out to static HTML files, which got me part of the way there but I really wanted something more flexible. Something where I can just write an arbitrary query and have the output dumped to HTML.
Thus, I present Ledger Web. In Ledger Web, your ledger is kept in a text file, just the same as always, reports are ERB files, and queries are SQL. Ledger Web watches your ledger file and whenever it changes dumps it into a PostgreSQL database table. It's also quite customizable, letting you set hooks both before and after row insertion and before and after ledger file load.
Tagged:
Personal Finance
Ledger
Projects
Ruby
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Sunday, 18 December around 6 o'clock pm
Note: you can find much more information about ledger on ledger-cli.org, including links to official documentation and other implementations
I've been using Ledger for almost five years now to keep track of my personal finances. For three of those years I've lived with a roommate of one form or another. Part of living with a roommate is splitting up bills. Some people decide to do this by dividing the bills up between roommates. For example, Pete pays the electric and gas bills and Andrew pays the water and the cable. Other roommates decide to nominate one person to have all of the bills in their name and post the amounts due every month for everyone to see. This is what my girlfriend and have been doing and it's been working great. All of the bills are in my name and I give her a summary every month and she hands me a check. Easy peasy.
Of course, being a complete and utter nerd means that I have to make this more complicated than it needs to be in the name of reducing the amount of work I have to do.
Tagged:
Personal Finance
Ledger
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Wednesday, 14 December around 6 o'clock pm
The very first post on this blog was about how I wanted a completely static blog and how it'll be great and wonderful and boy howdy was it ever. Over 500 lines of rather dense perl plus almost 20 separate template files because the kind-of-mustache that I decided to implement can't handle inlined templates for loops so I have to do everything as partials.
Needless to say, it isn't very fun to work on. It mostly does what I want but adding new things is pretty painful, as is changing any of the templates. Yesterday I decided that I would see what a Sinatra port would look like. Why Sinatra? It's fun, that's why. Ruby and Sinatra make writing new webapps easy and fun.
Tagged:
Meta
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Wednesday, 30 November around 11 o'clock am
Literally ten minutes after hitting the publish button on my last post I took a little tumble and broke a rather important bone in my back, and now I'm on medical leave from work for awhile.
That doesn't stop me from doing fun things, though, so this morning I cooked up a tiny webapp using Sinatra, DataMapper, and Bootstrap that will help me keep track of when I take painkillers. It's called Painkiller Jane after the comic book character.
There's not much interesting going on here to be honest. Basically it's just one database table and an in-app configuration hash that lays out what pills are available, their dosage, and their cooldown period. I can click the buttons when the cooldown is over, but when it's not they tell me what time I can take the next dose.
The only other feature that I might add is a lockout so that it helps me manage which pill to take when because I'm alternating tylenol and advil.
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Projects
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Sunday, 27 November around 6 o'clock pm
I started a small product a few weeks ago called FivePad, a simple easy way to organize your apartment search. It's basically the big apartment search spreadsheet that you and me and everyone we know has made at least three times, except FivePad is way smarter.
The initial versions of FivePad did everything in the web request cycle, including sending email and pulling down web pages. The other day I was about to add my third in-cycle process when I threw up my arms in disgust. The time had come to integrate resque, a great little redis based job queueing system. Except if I ran it the way Heroku makes things easy my costs would get a little bit out of control for a project that isn't making much money yet.
Tagged:
Heroku
FivePad
Projects
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