jamezpolley.com

A mini-review…

I’ve been using PocketMoney from Catamount Software on and off for a long time. It’s very powerful – but I always found that, unless I had a particularly urgent need for budgeting and tracking my spending, I was never motivated to keep up the effort. Every other program I’ve tried, including the ones I’m about to mention, feels like I’ve traded away some subset of PocketMoney’s power.

Currently I’m using two different apps (yes, that does mean that I’m entering every transaction twice. I’m not sure how long I’m going to keep doing this). One app is fantastic for forecasting your cash flow down to the last cent and second, so that you know exactly how much money you’ll have on hand at any given time.

The other app explicitly refuse to enable that kind of forecasting. Instead, it takes the approach that you should only ever make a budget for the money you already have on hand. If you have long-term goals, you can start to meet those goals by setting aside some of the money you have on hand, but you should never start playing with money you don’t actually have yet.

The first app – the one that does the forecasting is MoneyWiz

It’s fairly simple to use, but has almost all the functionality you’d expect to be able to track transactions on your accounts. Its best feature is the ability to set up recurring (eg, $x salary in to account 1 every fortnight, $y for a recurring doctor’s visit every 3 weeks) and one-off (eg, need to buy a birthday present for mum on june 15) scheduled transactions and then generate a forecast. For instance, I’m in the middle of planning to move house – I used this just last night to check how different levels of rent would affect me, taking into account all the other bills and living expenses I already know about.

The iphone, ipad, and Mac versions of MoneyWiz all support all the features and they all sync together, but you have to pay for each version separately (5.99 each for iphone and ipad, 24.99 for Mac). It’s possible to just get the iPhone version and do everything with that, but I find it handy to use the ipad or desktop version to be able to see more detail, especially when I’m looking at the forecast graphs.

The other one I’m trying out is You Need A Budget, or YNAB for short. It comes in Windows and Mac desktop versions, and has iPhone and Android mobile clients to support the desktop program. The mobile clients are free, but they only support a limited range of functions. You need to have paid for the desktop version to use them, and they’re mostly designed for you to check your budget balances or enter a transaction. YNAB has a free 34 day trial, but after that it costs $60.

YNAB doesn’t do forecasting; instead it focuses on having you figure out how much money you have *right now* and what you need that money to do before your next pay. They don’t explicitly say this, but obviously they believe that once you’re collecting the data about what you *have* been spending money on, you’ll be more able to make decisions that support your goals in the future.

As well as giving you 34 days to try it out, they have a comprehensive series of videos (http://www.youneedabudget.com/support – look for “YNAB 4 Video Tutorials” on the right) and tutorials (http://www.youneedabudget.com/support/category/the-ynab-method) which don’t just cover how to use the program, they aim to teach you how to think about budgeting.

If you’re looking for help budgeting because you just don’t know where the money goes, I recommend giving YNAB a go – after all, it’s free to try for 34 days (and there’s your first savings goal right there – have $60 on hand to pay for it at the end of those 34 days!). Take the time to watch some of their videos and sign up for their 9-day email course – Even if you don’t end up paying for it, the information you’ll get from the progam about your own spending, and from their courses about what to do next, will leave you much better able to make informed decisions about your spending.

If you have some idea of where your money goes but need better visibility into some of the trickier patches, MoneyWiz is probably a better choice. YNAB is aimed at helping you spend the money you have; MoneyWiz is much better at helping you plan what to do with the money you’re going to get later.

Personally, I’ve always been *horrible* with money. It comes in, at some point later it runs out, and then there’s a bit of a panic until the next payday. MoneyWiz has helped me a lot: because I was able to see ahead, I started having the panic weeks before the money ran out – which meant that the money ended up *not* running out. However, that’s turned into a steady stream of just-scraped-through paydays. I don’t end up in the same panic any more, but I do end up only *just* scraping through.

I’ve only been using YNAB for a few days, but the way it presents essentially the same information as MoneyWiz in a slightly different format, combined with their propaganda, have already made a difference in the way I’m thinking about budgeting.

I think I might need to keep using MoneyWiz for a few weeks (maybe even months) more to help me past one last tricky place – but as soon as I have a bit of a buffer (nb: thanks to MoneyWiz’s excellent forecasts, I know to the day when that’s going to be) I won’t need to MoneyWiz’s level of precision, and I’ll probably switch to just using YNAB.

This post was written for my own reference, so I can stop recreating the process each of the 2-3 times a year I need to use it

Every now and then, you have a large number of files to transfer across a really fast network, and the usual methods just have too much overhead.

At times like this, Ye Olde Skool Neckbeard Sysadmin reverts to a time-honoured technique known as the Netcat Tar Pipe:


On the receiving end do:
# netcat -l -p 7000 | tar x

And on the sending end do:
# tar cf - * | netcat otherhost 7000

The chiefest drawback of this technique is that you don’t know what’s happening. You know that Some Data is being transferred at A Rate, but that’s about all.

Enter Pipe Viewer, aka pv:

pv – Pipe Viewer – is a terminal-based tool for monitoring the progress of data through a pipeline. It can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.

A minor tweak or two will give you fancypants progress indicators, and a file transfer mechanism that’s almost certainly faster than anything else you can do.

First you need to calculate the size of the data you’re sending:


[/share/polleyj] # du -sk
594409480 .


Now we use a simple modification of the command above on the receiving side:


netcat -l -p 7000 | pv -s 594409480k | tar vx


and on the sending side:


tar cf - * | pv -s 594409480k | netcat otherhost 7000


You now get a fancy progress indicator on the sending side:


959MB 0:03:18 [4.64MB/s] [> ] 0% ETA 33:13:22


and with the addition of the ‘v flag on the receiving side, you can see filenames as they’re unpacked as well:

Bodacious/Downloads/._.DS_Store
Bodacious/Downloads/VERY_LARGE_FILE.ISO
352MB 0:02:41 [4.85MB/s] [> ] 0% ETA 73:41:36


So there you go. May as well go make a coffee or 73 while you wait for that data to copy over.

I’ve been unable to find this information online, so I thought I’d fix the problem.

The hotel pool at Wrest Point Casino is roughly 10m long. For the convenience of patrons, it has handrails at each end, just underwater. I the pool is not ideal for lap-swimming.

Circus the First: Sexuality

I noticed, well over a decade ago, that many gay young men, once they finally accept themselves and their sexuality, over-compensate. They jump straight from self-hatred into embracing extreme gay stereotypes – not because that’s who they are, but because that’s the only way to be gay that they’re aware of. The jump from “I’m okay! I’m gay; gays do X, therefore I must want to do X” has always saddened me.

I think a lot of people would be much happier if they were able to just say “I’m okay! I’m gay” and not think that they have to radically change every aspect of their life. That’s not going to be a common thing until every gay child grows up being aware that they are surrounded by gay people, who are just as diverse as the rest of the people they know.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where teachers, actors, singers, sports people, politicians (to name just a few) all feel they need to stay in the closet in order to have a career; where children are routinely told that gay love is “different” and “inferior” and “we can’t let those dirty gays have our precious marriage”. Until all of that changes, gay kids are going to grow up only having one kind of role model – they’re going to believe that the only way to be authentically gay is to “be here, be queer, get used to it”.

I lucked out and (mostly, I think) avoided this mistake myself – although I certainly went through a period where I was certainly acting the way I thought I ought to behave, and not the way I wanted to behave. A big part of how I got lucky was that I happened to fall in with a crowd of gay men who showed me that I don’t need to change who I am in order to be gay.

I would like every child to have the chance to make the discovery I made *before* they start trying to mutilate their personality until it fits into the only mould they’ve ever been aware of. Until we get a critical mass of public figures being visbly out of the closet, Mardi Gras is one of the best ways to achieve this. It gives a very distorted, one-sided extremist view of what it means to be gay; and that does cause some harm – but it causes much less harm than having children growing up believing they’re the only gay in the village.

Fortunately, I think that this circus is drawing to a close. There are far more out public figures now than there 10 or 20 years ago, when I was struggling. Most of the ways the law treats heterosexual couples different from other couples have been removed. There are still remnants of discrimination that are politically infeasible to remove just yet – but there’s a growing awareness that the political problems stem from a very vocal minority and don’t actually reflect the views of the majority of the population. I’m reasonably confident that children born this decade will be able to mature without going through too much trauma if they realise that their sexuality is something other than 100% hetero.

In short, I believe that Mardi Gras is going to become far less relevant over the next decade or so – and we’re going to see far fewer young gay men making drastic changes to their lifestyle and harming themselves in the process. This won’t be achieved solely because of the noisy extremists who started the gay rights movement in this country 30+ years ago – but it *will* be achieved because their noisy, violent, rude pioneering made it possible for ordinary everyday gay people to make themselves known to the people around them.

Circus the second: Religion

For myself, being able to accept my sexuality meant that I first had to modify some of the religious beliefs I’d grown up with. However, I didn’t happen to fall in with a crowd who showed me that it’s possible to only modify parts of my religious belief. I’d grown up surrounded by one end of the religious spectrum (the end now represented by the ACL, although if it existed at the time I wasn’t aware of it). The only alternative I was aware of – thanks to a lot of very noisy extremists – was right at the other end of the religious spectrum. Consequently, that’s where I went – one huge leap, discarding huge portions of my prior belief system, because that was the only change I believed possible.

I did start to meet people who showed me that there was another I could have taken much later – but by then, it was too late. There’s as little chance of me tweaking my beliefs from my current extreme as their was when I started. In fact, even though I’ve been aware of the first Circus for a long time, I really only became aware of that I’d done essentially the same thing in the second Circus tonight.

I believe that the largest part of why I was unaware of other possibilities is because moderate Christians tend not to speak out publicly against the extremists – at least, not the extremists they regard as being within the fold of Christianity. There are good biblical reasons for this – 1 Corinthians 6:1-11, for instance. Because of passages like this, many Christians seem to feel that the correct way to handle people at the extremes of Christian belief is quietly – within the church, or just maybe, by expressing a very quiet contrary opinion only when directly questioned – but never, ever speaking out loudly against the extreme viewpoints.

I can sympathise with this view. Unfortunately, it means that this circus looks very different from the first circus. The first circus started with loud extremists at both ends of the spectrum – but is going to end because the vast majority of people in the center stood up and made themselves known. The second circus has also attracted loud extremists at both ends – but so far at least, the vast majority in the center refuse to make themselves known.

I’d love to see the second circus draw to an end too. I’d love to see the ACL and their ilk to be understood as the extremist, vocal, minority that I believe they are. I’d love to be able to tell the atheists currently gathering in Melbourne that their conference has no more value than I believe Mardi Gras will have in a few years time – a fun spectacle, perhaps, but not a vitally important way of letting people understand that they aren’t alone. I’d love for children who grew up with a Christian background be able comprehend the enormous diversity of opinion within the Christian churches, and were able to make minor corrections instead of having to ditch Christianity entirely.

However, none of this is going to happen while the only people willing to speak up are the people at the extreme ends of the spectrum. If you’re neither an extreme atheist nor an extreme Christian, it’s *vital* that you be willing to be loud and proud about your beliefs. It’s vital that you step forward and say “The ACL does not entirely represent what it means for me to be Christian” or “Extremists like PZ Myers do not entirely represent what it means for me to be atheist”, just as it was vital for the silent majority of gays to step forward and say “Mardi Gras does not entirely represent what it means for me to be gay”. As long as the moderates refuse to loudly, publicly, visibly repudiate the extremists who claim to speak for all Christians or all Atheists, *those will be the only voices that are heard*.

Wed

As it happens, there’s a fantastic opportunity open *right now* for everyone to have their say. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs is holding a a verbosely-named Inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2012 and the Marriage Amendment Bill 2012 which is calling for public submissions on the topic of marriage equality generally, and two specific bills in particular. The ACL are encouraging their constituency to make their feelings known; and of course, we gasbagging noisy atheists are doing the same. If you’re a moderate, this is your chance! Don’t let the extremists make it look as though there are only two opinions here! Don’t let the ACL or the noisy atheists get away with pretending they talk for you!

All you need to do is answer 5 multiple choice questions (and, optionally, say a few words (very few – only 250 words will be accepted) in response to two more open-ended questions) in order to make sure that our Parliament is able to understand the full diversity of opinions in the community.

Two of the questions on the survey ask you whether you support each of the bills named in the Inquiry’s title. If you believe that any amendments to remove the “Man and Woman” clause from the Marriage Act would be bad, there’s no need for you to read either of the bills.

Everybody else should read both of the (very short) bills before they complete the survey. The bills do differ – for instance, both aim to preserve the right ministers of religion already have to refuse to solemnise any wedding that falls outside of their religious belief, but both bills approach this in slightly different ways.

Both bills – and some other background information, if you want to learn more – are linked from the Inquiry page. If you’d like to read the full text of the existing Marriage Act, that’s available over at ComLaw

And so, to bed

This was meant to be a quick response, just a tiny bit too long to fit in a single tweet. 3.5 hours later, I’m not sure the words I’m writing make sense any more. It’s time for bed.

Spotted in the State Library’s Flickr feed a few days ago: one magnificent Wurlitzer being installed into the State Theater:

I visited the Museum Speelklock while in the Netherlands last year and was amazed by some of the automated music machines they had on display there – simple cuckoo-clocks, clocks that use a circular bow and intricate fingering mechanisms to play four violins at once, all the way up to some enormous steam organs. I was amazed at how much ingenuity went into building some of these instruments.

I’ve been in the State Theatre a few times, but don’t remember noticing any visible parts of this organ. I wonder if it’s still intact?

I took a photo yesterday, on my Android phone. Google Plus Instant Upload pushed it up to Picasa for me. This seems to have triggered an email notification.

Not the warning: “Content has been removed for a violation of terms of service”. This concerns me – I don’t think anything I’ve uploaded should violate the terms of service. There doesn’t seem to be any way to discover what content was removed, or from where, or what terms of service it violated – just a “Give Feedback” link.

That link takes me to https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/gmail-labs-help-media-previews – which tells me right at the top that this isn’t where I want to be.

Good job, Google!

Vic Gundotra (still using a pseudonym, still insisting that you can’t do the same) has announced that more than 90 million “people” have joined Google+; that 60% of those people sign in daily, and 80% weekly.

I recently deleted one of my Google+ accounts (I forget how many I had – it was at least two, possibly 3). I’m not going to suggest that I’m normal and that the real figure is more like 40 million people, but I do think it’s disingenuous to talk about “people” when you really mean “accounts”.

Before I deleted the account, I signed in at least once a week – to deal with the annoying notification that infected my gmail to let me know that some random I didn’t care about had circled me.

I ended up deleting my account for reasons I outlined in my last post. I’m now using one of my other accounts to follow a select few people who are doing interesting things with Hangouts – so few people that Google wastes around 220 pixels of vertical space on a message nagging me to follow more people.

I hope these numbers, although meaningless, will at least trigger large bonuses for all my friends still working at Google. That would be nice, right?

Also – how to make it self-destruct in <10 invalid passcode attempts.

Shtep One: Download the iPhone Configuration Utility from Apple

Shtep Two: Futz with the Stuffz

Not shown: there’s an option at the bottom where you can stipulate self-wipe after as little as 5 incorrect passphrase attempts.

Shtep 3: Upload config as per instructions in the “Installing Configuration Profiles” section of the Deployment Guide.

Phdone.

Same view, 1920.

View Larger Map

That’s the Powerhouse Museum, located between Pyrmont and Ultimo. If you could hover above it in a helicopter, the view would look something like this:

Imagine if you could magically click a link and jump back in time, and see the same view from sometime between 1900 and 1939…

If you’re lost: in the older picture, look beyond the chimneystack, and just to the left. Immediately beyond the chimney is a vacant block of land; at the top end of this is a short road, which has on the right a not-quite-right-angle corner. The road then continues up the picture – but it’s not quite straight, it bends a little to the right. If you look at the modern picture, you can see the same not-quite-right-angle corner and the same not-quite-straight road – although now the Western Distributor flys across the not-quite-straight road.

See the large building inside the block bounded by the not-quite-straight road? That building is Global Switch Sydney – built in the last days of “Build it and they will come”. It’s only in the last few years that it’s starting to reach full capacity.

The railway line visible in the earlier picture was the Darling Harbour Goods line, which formed the first part of the Metropolitan Goods Railway Line. It’s now used as the Metro Light Rail line.