david | rasch -- Management, Software, and Technology

New 401(k) doesn’t even support QIF

drasch — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:18:48 +0000

The 401(k) program we switched to this year happens to have been a step backward as far as support for exporting transactions. In talking with Alan about it, he said he’d downloaded a program to convert the CSV they export into a QIF. In looking at the QIF format, I just decided to whip up something to do the conversion for me. This converts the export from MVP Plan Administrators to QIF and imports successfully into Quicken for Mac 2007.


#!/usr/bin/perl

#based on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QIF

open(INH, "< ". $ARGV[0]);
open(OUTH, ">". $ARGV[0]. ".qif");

print OUTH '!Account
NDavid\'s New 401k
TInvst
^
!Type:Invst
';



while () {
        chop;
        chop;
        s/\$//g;
        @vals = split /,/;

        if ($vals[3] eq 'RECEIVABL') {
                next;
        }
        print OUTH "D" . $vals[0] . "\n";
        print OUTH "N" . $vals[5] . "\n";
        print OUTH "Y" . $vals[4] . "\n";
        print OUTH "T" . $vals[9] . "\n";
        print OUTH "I" . $vals[8] . "\n";
        print OUTH "Q" . $vals[7] . "\n";
        print OUTH "M" . $vals[6] . "\n";
        print OUTH "^\n";
}

close OUTH;

Known issues:

You still need to go through and mark Dividend transactions as such.
Doesn’t handle Sells very well, especially when these are to cover fund fees

FuelFrog and U.S. Gas Prices

drasch — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:01:04 +0000

Our FuelFrog users are paying much more at the pump these days! On average, our users fill up 11 gallons which means they’re paying an additional $5 at the pump per fillup!

FuelFrog with Metric and Direct Messaging Support

drasch — Fri, 30 May 2008 03:05:36 +0000

FuelFrog was updated last weekend with support for metric units. We now support liters, meters, and can show your efficiency in l/100km (lower is better) which gets used by many more sensible countries for monitoring their fuel usage.

Upon releasing this, we got an email from a user in the UK who informed us that they measure distance in miles, volume in liters, and efficiency in miles per gallon. This threw me for a bit of a loop and I had to make some “special cases” for the UK.

In any case, we’re now happy to also offer support for our UK users and hopefully provide them data in the units with which they’re most familiar.

mashups

drasch — Wed, 14 May 2008 23:35:24 +0000

There are really awesome things about being able to put apps together in our connected “web 2.0″ world. There are also downsides and tradeoffs as with any decision.

When Twitter is down, it makes it hard for people to try FuelFrog. Screenshot courtesy of is twitter down?

MySQL and closed-source

drasch — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:22:20 +0000

Apparently someone at Sun agreed with my sentiments about moving to a more closed-source model for MySQL.

While my original comments are self serving, apparently Sun believes that it will make better business sense in the long term to keep these components open-source. Hopefully this is a vote of confidence for the quality of product the open-source model has helped MySQL create.

FuelFrog is out!

drasch — Sun, 04 May 2008 01:49:35 +0000

The answer is, FuelFrog. Over the past 9 weeks, we’ve conceived an idea, branded, implemented, tested, launched, and started to market a brand new web application. I’ll be talking more over the next few weeks about the technology behind FuelFrog and what’s coming up for new features!

We know that you care about how your car affects the environment. What better way to understand and manage this than to start tracking it! FuelFrog will help you keep an eye on your gas consumption, mileage, and also help you understand how gas prices affect your budget.

Through integration with Twitter, it’s easy to keep FuelFrog up to date. Each time you fill up, simply send @fuelfrog miles price gallons for example, my last fillup was @fuelfrog 320 3.539 10.293. We’ll do all the rest!

Log on to FuelFrog now and try it out!

What do Twitter, a 1994 Honda, and 2 pixels have in common?

drasch — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:44:19 +0000

I’ll let you know on Saturday…. Stay tuned.

relevance for searching

drasch — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:01:18 +0000

Just found out tonight about a cool new tool. Youlicit allows you to use your social bookmarking results to help give you more relevant search results.

Not too happy to hear about this

drasch — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:49:49 +0000

Sun to begin developing features only for Enterprise server. While I’m glad Sun will continue development of MySQL, there are many things other than not having access to these advanced features. Mainly the splintering of development, the idea of paying for less-tested software, and whether it’s a trend.

Atlassian Jira and Confluence

drasch — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:58:43 +0000

We’ve started using Jira and Confluence as a replacement for Xplanner (which we used for almost 2 years). Jira’s an extremely flexible issue-tracking software product which allows us to track Bugs, Projects, Sprints, and even Ticket queues (like internal email support) all in one place. We hope to be able to relate issues to one another and discover trends, bugs, and manage our software process more holistically.

The challenge has been defining the mapping between Jira’s entities and our business entities, mainly for managing the work in a given software sprint.

We’ve tried the following
Sprint: Version
Weekly Milestones: Due date
Category of change: Component
Type of task: Issue type
High-level task: Issue
Individual action in pursuit of high-level task: Sub-issue

This sprint we’re trying something different:
Sprint: Project
Weekly milestones: version
High-level task: component
Type of task: description
Individual action…: Issue

Both have their pros and cons, what I’d love to know is how others solve this and whether they might have any advice on how they’ve configured the entities in Jira, use Links, etc to manage their Agile development projects.