Banking

Another problem I've decided to tackle for myself is a program to analyze my spending.  I've used both Money and Quicken in the past, but they really were overly complicated for what i need.  I don't need to track my current balances.  I don't really need to know that I transferred money between accounts.  What I do need to know is where the hell all my money goes every week.

And KnowBal is born.  It will import OFX files (the MS Money format my bank uses) and categorize (tag?) them based on previous categories.  It will even do some renaming to strip off the transaction confirmation numbers my bank adds to the vendor name when maybe payments via their web site.

I will post screenshots and a downloadable version once i get some of the charting and analysis tools cleaned up.

Stay tuned.

CBC Radio 3

I came across the CBC Radio 3 website a few days ago and I must say, I am really impressed. It has a lot of great Canadian bands including live concerts which i assume were recorded by CBC.

The main problem i have with internet radio stations is that i never keep a browser window open all the time. So i did the simplest thing possible, i wrote a little program and embedded a web browser (IE) and pointed it to radio3.cbc.ca. Made a little cbc icon, and bam, done.

Well, almost. Turns out what i also don't like about internet radio is that you can't use the media buttons on your keyboard. But, with a little bit of poking around and some trial and error, i managed to get my little program to trap those keystrokes and call some flash commands the little web player supported.

If you are interested, post a commment and i'll put the program up somewhere.