Item the Firste: Powerthirst will give you uncomfortable amounts of energy. This video is a must see because it is utterly funny.

Item the Seconde: I wrote a little app using Grails. I had previously glanced askance (word power combo bonus x2) at it, but after writing an actual project I am quite taken with it. It is, perhaps, my new development environment of choice. I have always been a PHP man myself, so that is saying quite a bit. The application I wrote is a small ledger for my house. We have several people there and we need to keep track of things like rent, utilities, internet, and groceries. Some people purchase groceries together, and some don’t, so it can actually be a little bit complex to track everything, which is why I wrote the program. As a unforeseen benefit, it also nicely solves the new-old problem of “Four people are in a room. None of them have cash. Which one of them gets screwed by paying for everything on their card?”

Item the Thirde: Immediately upon releasing the ledger app to my roommates, one of them said, “When does Personal Ledger come out?” He was joking, but not really. The interesting thing is, I’ve been contemplating writing a very small, very basic self-accounting program for a while now. Off the top of my head, it would do two things: help you calculate a generic and flexible budget, and keep track of things like bills. I’ve tried to use Quicken like seven times before but it always ends up being too heavy, like killing a fly with a sledgehammer: usually you kill the fly but there’s a lot of collateral damage along the way. And anyway, it seems to me that a lot of what Quicken does has been superseded by online banking.

The purpose of this personal ledger which I’ve been contemplating has one purpose: to be useful to me in my specific situation. Obviously with only a little more work, I could tie it into the newly existent house ledger app and make it useful to me and the four other people who live with me. But what would it take to make it useful to a handful of other people? Certainly the house ledger tie in is absolutely worthless, and obviously we’re talking long tail stuff here so by handful I really do mean not many. So question: what do you use to keep track of your money right now, if anything? Is it your bank online? A general ballpark figure that you keep in your head? Is that okay with you or are you looking for something better? What would better look like? Maybe I’ll include it in my upcoming “Personal Ledger: So Small It’s Barely More Useful than Writing it Down on Some Paper and Keeping it in Your Pocket, but It Does the Math for You.”

Item the Fourthe: Grails really is Java. So that means it has to be hosted in a Java way. I had an exciting time getting Apache to talk to Tomcat through AJP this weekend (no, really, it was fun! I took like an hour). Unfortunately, DreamHost does not do JEE hosting, so that means if I wanted to put Personal Ledger Pro X Gold Ultimate Business Lite Edition out there for you to use, I would need to do something like move to Slicehost, which I am totally for since they seem awesome, but I would need to sever my contract at DH and get everything moved and blargh… in addition to doubling my hosting costs.

Acromania: Results are in, congrats to Dan for winning. Next time: EULA.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.