A site that has a lot of embedded videos of material which are in the public domain happens to have the first episode of Root of All Evil?. (Thouch, since it is recent, I do wonder the copyright status of this.)
Quite a few people end up making a living doing something not directly related to their major. Some who get post-graduate degrees get them in something different than what they got a B.S. or B.A. in & then start a career which is yet again different. So, your options are open. Common choices other than academia are investment banking or some other field of applied mathematics.
If you eventually want a Ph.D., why not get it now? You're used to a low standard of living & may be paid a meager wage to get your degree & you won't be interrupting your career path.
If you don't really want a Ph.D., figure out what it is you like to do day-in and day-out & do that.
Gnucash can support OFX import, which might be better for you.
It is true that QIF is geared for single-entry systems and that one file corresponds to one account. You export each account as a QIF from Quicken/Money and import them, one-by-one. There is an import druid to handle the mapping of "categories" into "accounts."
I like GnuCash & have been using it for several years. There's been steady improvement, but I don't know of any really radical changes in the past years--this conversion to gtk2 is one of the biggest changes. It still might not be "right for you." (It is right for me & still worth a try, though).
I did my conversion years ago. There might be a "better way" now. But QIF is good enough for personal finance information--Money writes QIF which is "good enough" & GnuCash's importer is quite good. (At least older versions of) Quicken does QIF natively, so you'd be set there too. People do switch back-and-forth between Money and Quicken. In the earlier versions I used, the conversion between those two left a lot to be desired. So, I really don't see why converting "legacy data" would pose a barrier for GnuCash adoption.
I can no longer find the links to the places that had offered to do a conversion for payment. Perhaps it is so easy that they don't exist any more? I know Gnumatic offered this when they were still around & know of a lot of businesses which will support GnuCash. I do not know if conversion is still part of support, but I assume it is.
I have gone from apps that no longer exist to Quicken to MS Money and finally to GnuCash. GnuCash and the other F/OSS apps do an adequate job converting (my Quicken->Money conversion was more harrowing than my Money->GnuCash conversion, despite using QIF as an intermediate format for both).
Additionally, there are services to convert your data for you. They cost some money, but usually less than you'd spend on the commercial apps.
I enter things manually--you should too!
on
GnuCash 2.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If you enter your statement in manually, you can then reconcile the downloaded statements. Most of the commercial apps encourage this behavior in their documentation, even if no one actually does it. This way, you can catch bank errors. It does happen. Not very frequently, but it does happen. GnuCash (and presumably the commercial apps) have completion based on past entries, so manual entries don't need to be that slow.
I maintain a FAQ on a financial forum about open source financial applications. It is mostly geared towards personal users, but there are links and information to business-focused applications as well. There are non-profits & small businesses who do use F/OSS!
There isn't an open source QuickBooks clone. But many F/OSS applications do have features which QuickBooks lack (and vice versa, of course). Rather than looking for a "clone," one should clearly define their requirements & look for the app or apps that may fit those needs. If some are "close," money and/or labor can be spent refining the F/OSS applications. If all are far from your requirements (such as a requirement like "I need software which does exactly what QuickBooks does & has the exact same interface"), then suck it up & purchase QuickBooks. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg! If you find your organization doing this a lot, then re-evaluate your software selection practices--alternative software usually doesn't mean cloned software (whether F/OSS or proprietary) & you will never be able to benefit from very good software which is monetarily cheaper, uses open formats, and is functional.
These programs are quite nice in that they can easily batch-process a lot of documents & then you can go grepping through them for interesting tidbits.
(On the GUI front, evince deserves a plug. It uses the same poppler backend as xpdf and kpdf. I used to use tiny & fast xpdf for most of my pdf viewing, but evince has a few nice features which xpdf lacks & has become my personal favorite pdf viewer.)
You're obviously not into Docbook, because that would be the obvious choice for freaks who want to do their editing in VI/Emacs/Nedit/Jedit.
Elsewhere, I plugged DocBookWiki & there are many other fine programs for working with DocBook without getting your hands _TOO_ dirty. However, I thought I'd also mention that OO.o has passable filters to import and export DocBook. They aren't perfect, but they beat the MS Word HTML filters.
I am a dev on projects that use wikis for documentation. They are great for collaboration, but rather proor at providing a polished website and, as you say, horrendous at printed documentation. They don't tend to be well organized.
I personally compose most of my documentation in LaTeX. But then, I makes use of equations & leverage "legacy" documentation. Most newer projects which don't have math would be well-advised to choose an XML-based format. DocBook and other projects tend to use pdfTeX as a backend for PDF generation, so has many of the same benefits you get from using LaTeX directly. The processors for writing (x)html seem to be more evolved than the equivalents for LaTeX: They're faster, easier, and look better.
XML formats aren't very friendly to code or edit in, either
You're doing it wrong. There are a number of excellent XML or general text editors that do the job. There are even online collaboration tools, such as DocBookWiki. Most importantly, it is easy to get programmatically-generated documentation in XML & also easy to reformat XML into your destination formats.
I make modest donations to many F/OSS projects. While many of the sourceforge hosted projects have obvious donation links, some others don't. So, I've made a list of donation URLs for projects I have supported.
ODF files are just zip files which contain the content in an XML file with supporting text and binary files. The text files are auto-generated & so may have "weird diffs" particularly when multiple people/programs/platforms work on them. I have an ical server backed by subversion's webdav & the diffs are always very amusing, as each program changes whitespace & other such nonsense.
The diffs might still be more usable than those for a 100% binary (zipped) file, particularly for single-user situations.
Has anyone played with compressing/decompressing ODFs for use with version control software? Any pointers?
I use subversion + LaTeX when I can. I use vim with latexsuite & usually use subversion in another term (although I have the subversion plugin for vim). Each individual product has already been suggested above, and they are powerful in combination.
That being said, it is not usable if you're dealing with end users who don't understand the tools. Your FAs sound like such users. The front ends for LaTeX have scared end users and/or write pretty bad LaTeX (which causes those who hack it in vim to scream). Few are well integrated with version control tools. TortoiseSVN is fairly friendly, but most people aren't used to working with version control systems & it might be better to use something integrated.
In short, you need to figure out your documentation needs (What will the final product of this documentation process be? What markup is needed? What do you hope past revisions of documents will gain for you?) with end user ability (Can your users be trained cheaply to use specialized tools?).
In contrast to my personal use of subversion + LaTeX, I have found I have to have distributed collaboration with others on "throw away" documents and web pages. MediaWiki has come to the rescue. There is a plugin to allow knowledgable users to input TeX. There is a patch which allows page restriction or you can jail a whole installation to specific users. There are many other wikis and other apps that may also work for you. In particular, for specs, you might look at bugzilla or other issue trackers. Just figure out what you need, choose a few likely candidates, and hold hallway testing.
most of the trick to succeeding in IT is knowing when the tools you use aren't applicable anymore and how to figure out what are.
I agree entirely with this statement.
The open source backup stuff doesn't suck, for small to medium sized sites. It's not enterprise class....Amanda certainly doesn't suck, but it's not NBU.
In what way have you found that Amanda does not scale? How have you found the proprietary software to be better?
NBU can't RAIT, but it can stream across multiple tapes, and can write duplicate tapes if you want redundancy. And you can extract the files off tape with tar if you have to.
I agree that NetBackup is good. It does have features that Amanda lacks (though Amanda has all of those that you list). But Amanda has features which NetBackup lacks too (such as RAIT).
I'm not saying NetBackup isn't worth money. I'm just asking you to give concrete criticism, rather than to dismiss alternatives as "half-assed" or "toys."
While it is true that AMANDA can do client or server side data encryption and/or transport encryption, I'd not suggest using it for win32 servers (as the grand parent asks). If you're able to put in a cheap *nix backup server, running AMANDA under cygwin certainly works. But I don't know if client-side encryption works (client-side compression hasn't worked for cygwin clients) & don't know how well using AMANDA with kerb/ssh on cygwin works.
AMANDA and others have been deployed in large institutions for years too.
I've seen attempts to build large enterprise backup environments with "simple open" software. They melt down somewhat short of the size that the original questioner is asking about, typically.
I've certainly seen a lot of "home-rolled" scripts with tar & what not abused this way. I haven't seen an AMANDA installation that failed to scale. Have you seen problems with "not-so-simple" open source software?
I've been at places which were big enough to use 40, 60, 180, multi-hundred, 5000 tape changers.
One nice feature in AMANDA is support for RAIT. Commercial software can handle multiple tape changers just as easily as AMANDA, but a lot of it certainly doesn't take much advantage of the fact by providing RAIT (which gives you higher capacity and throughput, and lower failure rate).
This is important, and half-assed solutions shouldn't apply.
Just because you can see the source code doesn't mean it is "half-assed."
AMANDA is really great software. In my past job, we used Retrospect (then from Dantz). That was a nightmare--it used some proprietary archiving format & we weren't able to retrieve some things. AMANDA uses standard dump or tar files (well, as standard as 'dump' is, I guess), so I'm confident that that'll never happen. It also has a first-class scheduling system. Every night, we fill almost exactly one full tape. There are very few disks which don't get a nightly incremental & we have it configures so we are virtually guaranteed a full backup of every host at least once a week.
We use it with Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, OS X, and Windows (through Cygwin). The only "ugly" part is that we backup at night & laptops are therefore not part of the regular cycle. For those, we use rsync over SSH to backup to a central file server which does get backed up at night.
First off: the windows administrator account isn't EXACTLY root. The "System" account is the most privileged account. Of course, it is fairly easy to escalate Administrator privileges to do anything that System can (you just have to jump through a few hoops).
I've run my own machine (when I ran windows) and machines which I have had to support as non-admin. It is completely doable if the workstations have to run only a few programs and/or there are IT people backing up the attempt. Many programs will be need to be modified to be run as a non-admin & many of those must run some things with escalated privileges. Some of those have holes in them.
It isn't something I'd suggest to mom -- her support is me & I don't have time to make sure she can do everything she needs to as non-admin. Non IT people would have to jump through too many hoops to do basic things.
It is feasible to do MANY things as a non-admin & switch to an admin account when you absolutely must. Superior SU is handy for this. I'd suggest setting the admin's desktop to an obnoxious red color so you can tell the difference. PrivBar is also useful to see your rights.
There are a handful of LUA sites to help you find other tricks in general or to get specific programs to run as non-admin (some of which are below). Usually, this involves installing as admin & granting read & execute privs to dlls and executables. Sometimes you need to grant write access to what SHOULD be protected directories.
A lot of elitists loved the IBM ThinkPad T-series (particularly those with a "p" after the model name). Even with Lenovo's recent purchase of them, the laptops have remained solid hardware for Linux. I have run both Ubuntu and Gentoo on them. See ThinkWiki for some good information on running Linux on the whole ThinkPad line.
There are other good notebooks which can often be just as good. Just figure out what hardware you want to run and how much you're willing to pay for it. If you are tech-savy, install it yourself (sadly, you'll probably have to pay the Windows tax (though you may find some bare notebooks, sales on a win32 laptop will often be cheaper than a notebook with no software)). If not, get it from LinuxCertified.
If you don't get something mainstream, be sure to try a LiveCD in it first & dig up as much dirt on it as possible.
There are a few things Excel does better than other methods, and they all involve ease of use.
I will agree that Excel is O.K. for "quick-and-dirty" plots & is certainly easier/faster than the other spreadsheet options out there.
If I have a lab report due, it's just plain easier and less of a hassle to open up my CSV in Excel and click the graph button, especially if the most involved thing you're doing is adding a trendline.
The problem is the "dirty" part of quick-and-dirty. You don't need to use a math/science-focused programming environment like Matlab (or Octave) or R or Python. You can use an application made for plotting. There are PLENTY of such that are just as quick (if not quicker) than Excel that produce better output. They can be particularly valuable when literally all you need to do is plot & fit -- some will even let you drop your CSV files in a directory & batch process them all.
If you think students should start using Matlab or R for all their graphs, well, you'll have to start with getting the professors to require it.
Some actually do. Or, at the very least, they set the bar higher than is easily achievable in Excel. You, yourself, acknowledged that it is generally not acceptable for theses, papers, or significant reports. Why not use the same program for ALL of this? Unless your University never required you to do anything "serious," it appears to me that you'd become more proficient in the "serious" programs for when you needed them & would also be able to use them faster when you just needed something quick.
First, you need not generate a chart in any popular spreadsheet program to generate fits and errors. You may, of course, want to see your trendlines visually, though. This IS possible in OO.o.
Make a chart, click on it & select Insert->statistics. Choose the trendline you want & any statistical information you want to use.
For most power users, it is more difficult to work around the deficiencies in plotting in any spreadsheet softwre & they'd be better off with a stand-alone program to do it. I personally like grace, though others use Origin, Kaleidagraph, etc. Many of these also do statistics and fits better than the spreadsheet programs.
If you have to report errors in your fits, be aware that MS Excel has historically had a deficiency in the calculation of error from datasets that had error bars. I don't know if this has ever been fixed. If you start doing research, your colleagues will probably try to ween you from Excel to something which does the jobs that academic scientists and engineers need to do better than the "do-it-all, but not as well" solution.
OO.o does have great plans to improve the reference management system. Refer to commentary and design by Bruce D'Arcus. In the interim, I think that the ability of OOo to use a database for reference management is pretty good. I use refbase as my web-based bibliographic database & am able to pull references directly from it in OO.o.
Also: MS Office + Endnote really isn't that great! Different versions of Endnote do have major compatibility programs & it is often hard to collaborate on a document which has Endnote markup. One colleague of mine even uses LaTeX & bibtex & LaTeX2RTF for any document that will have references, as his tolerance for Endnote is so low. Endnote's data model is dated & is still stuck in the dark ages of poor character encoding. They've tried to improve it over the years & it is the best commercial product available, but it isn't (and shouldn't be) the end goal for ANY ONE developing a solution from scratch.
Slashdot Mirror
A site that has a lot of embedded videos of material which are in the public domain happens to have the first episode of Root of All Evil? . (Thouch, since it is recent, I do wonder the copyright status of this.)
Quite a few people end up making a living doing something not directly related to their major. Some who get post-graduate degrees get them in something different than what they got a B.S. or B.A. in & then start a career which is yet again different. So, your options are open. Common choices other than academia are investment banking or some other field of applied mathematics.
If you eventually want a Ph.D., why not get it now? You're used to a low standard of living & may be paid a meager wage to get your degree & you won't be interrupting your career path.
If you don't really want a Ph.D., figure out what it is you like to do day-in and day-out & do that.
Gnucash can support OFX import, which might be better for you.
It is true that QIF is geared for single-entry systems and that one file corresponds to one account. You export each account as a QIF from Quicken/Money and import them, one-by-one. There is an import druid to handle the mapping of "categories" into "accounts."
I like GnuCash & have been using it for several years. There's been steady improvement, but I don't know of any really radical changes in the past years--this conversion to gtk2 is one of the biggest changes. It still might not be "right for you." (It is right for me & still worth a try, though).
I did my conversion years ago. There might be a "better way" now. But QIF is good enough for personal finance information--Money writes QIF which is "good enough" & GnuCash's importer is quite good. (At least older versions of) Quicken does QIF natively, so you'd be set there too. People do switch back-and-forth between Money and Quicken. In the earlier versions I used, the conversion between those two left a lot to be desired. So, I really don't see why converting "legacy data" would pose a barrier for GnuCash adoption.
I can no longer find the links to the places that had offered to do a conversion for payment. Perhaps it is so easy that they don't exist any more? I know Gnumatic offered this when they were still around & know of a lot of businesses which will support GnuCash. I do not know if conversion is still part of support, but I assume it is.
I have gone from apps that no longer exist to Quicken to MS Money and finally to GnuCash. GnuCash and the other F/OSS apps do an adequate job converting (my Quicken->Money conversion was more harrowing than my Money->GnuCash conversion, despite using QIF as an intermediate format for both).
Additionally, there are services to convert your data for you. They cost some money, but usually less than you'd spend on the commercial apps.
If you enter your statement in manually, you can then reconcile the downloaded statements. Most of the commercial apps encourage this behavior in their documentation, even if no one actually does it. This way, you can catch bank errors. It does happen. Not very frequently, but it does happen. GnuCash (and presumably the commercial apps) have completion based on past entries, so manual entries don't need to be that slow.
I maintain a FAQ on a financial forum about open source financial applications. It is mostly geared towards personal users, but there are links and information to business-focused applications as well. There are non-profits & small businesses who do use F/OSS!
There isn't an open source QuickBooks clone. But many F/OSS applications do have features which QuickBooks lack (and vice versa, of course). Rather than looking for a "clone," one should clearly define their requirements & look for the app or apps that may fit those needs. If some are "close," money and/or labor can be spent refining the F/OSS applications. If all are far from your requirements (such as a requirement like "I need software which does exactly what QuickBooks does & has the exact same interface"), then suck it up & purchase QuickBooks. It doesn't cost an arm and a leg! If you find your organization doing this a lot, then re-evaluate your software selection practices--alternative software usually doesn't mean cloned software (whether F/OSS or proprietary) & you will never be able to benefit from very good software which is monetarily cheaper, uses open formats, and is functional.
CLI programs are REALLY useful to look at "hidden" content.
'pdftotext' comes with xpdf & is even available natively on windows.
Similarly, for MS Word documents, you may use 'antiword', 'catdoc', and 'wv'.
These programs are quite nice in that they can easily batch-process a lot of documents & then you can go grepping through them for interesting tidbits.
(On the GUI front, evince deserves a plug. It uses the same poppler backend as xpdf and kpdf. I used to use tiny & fast xpdf for most of my pdf viewing, but evince has a few nice features which xpdf lacks & has become my personal favorite pdf viewer.)
As before:I think XML is the best-fit for most projects & LaTeX is appropriate for those projects which already have legacy documentation or share documentation with papers submitted to journals. However, I neglected to give a shout out to ConTeXt. ConTeXt also uses the TeX backend to produce beautiful results, but is a bit easier to program in.
I am a dev on projects that use wikis for documentation. They are great for collaboration, but rather proor at providing a polished website and, as you say, horrendous at printed documentation. They don't tend to be well organized.
I personally compose most of my documentation in LaTeX. But then, I makes use of equations & leverage "legacy" documentation. Most newer projects which don't have math would be well-advised to choose an XML-based format. DocBook and other projects tend to use pdfTeX as a backend for PDF generation, so has many of the same benefits you get from using LaTeX directly. The processors for writing (x)html seem to be more evolved than the equivalents for LaTeX: They're faster, easier, and look better.
I make modest donations to many F/OSS projects. While many of the sourceforge hosted projects have obvious donation links, some others don't. So, I've made a list of donation URLs for projects I have supported.
ODF files are just zip files which contain the content in an XML file with supporting text and binary files. The text files are auto-generated & so may have "weird diffs" particularly when multiple people/programs/platforms work on them. I have an ical server backed by subversion's webdav & the diffs are always very amusing, as each program changes whitespace & other such nonsense.
The diffs might still be more usable than those for a 100% binary (zipped) file, particularly for single-user situations.
Has anyone played with compressing/decompressing ODFs for use with version control software? Any pointers?
I use subversion + LaTeX when I can. I use vim with latexsuite & usually use subversion in another term (although I have the subversion plugin for vim). Each individual product has already been suggested above, and they are powerful in combination.
That being said, it is not usable if you're dealing with end users who don't understand the tools. Your FAs sound like such users. The front ends for LaTeX have scared end users and/or write pretty bad LaTeX (which causes those who hack it in vim to scream). Few are well integrated with version control tools. TortoiseSVN is fairly friendly, but most people aren't used to working with version control systems & it might be better to use something integrated.
In short, you need to figure out your documentation needs (What will the final product of this documentation process be? What markup is needed? What do you hope past revisions of documents will gain for you?) with end user ability (Can your users be trained cheaply to use specialized tools?).
In contrast to my personal use of subversion + LaTeX, I have found I have to have distributed collaboration with others on "throw away" documents and web pages. MediaWiki has come to the rescue. There is a plugin to allow knowledgable users to input TeX. There is a patch which allows page restriction or you can jail a whole installation to specific users. There are many other wikis and other apps that may also work for you. In particular, for specs, you might look at bugzilla or other issue trackers. Just figure out what you need, choose a few likely candidates, and hold hallway testing.
I've had both a T42 (IBM) and T43 (Lenovo). Both are solidly built.and both are excellent Linux machines.
I'm not saying NetBackup isn't worth money. I'm just asking you to give concrete criticism, rather than to dismiss alternatives as "half-assed" or "toys."
While it is true that AMANDA can do client or server side data encryption and/or transport encryption, I'd not suggest using it for win32 servers (as the grand parent asks). If you're able to put in a cheap *nix backup server, running AMANDA under cygwin certainly works. But I don't know if client-side encryption works (client-side compression hasn't worked for cygwin clients) & don't know how well using AMANDA with kerb/ssh on cygwin works.
AMANDA is really great software. In my past job, we used Retrospect (then from Dantz). That was a nightmare--it used some proprietary archiving format & we weren't able to retrieve some things. AMANDA uses standard dump or tar files (well, as standard as 'dump' is, I guess), so I'm confident that that'll never happen. It also has a first-class scheduling system. Every night, we fill almost exactly one full tape. There are very few disks which don't get a nightly incremental & we have it configures so we are virtually guaranteed a full backup of every host at least once a week.
We use it with Linux, FreeBSD, AIX, OS X, and Windows (through Cygwin). The only "ugly" part is that we backup at night & laptops are therefore not part of the regular cycle. For those, we use rsync over SSH to backup to a central file server which does get backed up at night.
I've run my own machine (when I ran windows) and machines which I have had to support as non-admin. It is completely doable if the workstations have to run only a few programs and/or there are IT people backing up the attempt. Many programs will be need to be modified to be run as a non-admin & many of those must run some things with escalated privileges. Some of those have holes in them.
It isn't something I'd suggest to mom -- her support is me & I don't have time to make sure she can do everything she needs to as non-admin. Non IT people would have to jump through too many hoops to do basic things.
It is feasible to do MANY things as a non-admin & switch to an admin account when you absolutely must. Superior SU is handy for this. I'd suggest setting the admin's desktop to an obnoxious red color so you can tell the difference. PrivBar is also useful to see your rights.
There are a handful of LUA sites to help you find other tricks in general or to get specific programs to run as non-admin (some of which are below). Usually, this involves installing as admin & granting read & execute privs to dlls and executables. Sometimes you need to grant write access to what SHOULD be protected directories.
Some sites:
A lot of elitists loved the IBM ThinkPad T-series (particularly those with a "p" after the model name). Even with Lenovo's recent purchase of them, the laptops have remained solid hardware for Linux. I have run both Ubuntu and Gentoo on them. See ThinkWiki for some good information on running Linux on the whole ThinkPad line.
There are other good notebooks which can often be just as good. Just figure out what hardware you want to run and how much you're willing to pay for it. If you are tech-savy, install it yourself (sadly, you'll probably have to pay the Windows tax (though you may find some bare notebooks, sales on a win32 laptop will often be cheaper than a notebook with no software)). If not, get it from LinuxCertified.
If you don't get something mainstream, be sure to try a LiveCD in it first & dig up as much dirt on it as possible.
First, you need not generate a chart in any popular spreadsheet program to generate fits and errors. You may, of course, want to see your trendlines visually, though. This IS possible in OO.o.
Make a chart, click on it & select Insert->statistics. Choose the trendline you want & any statistical information you want to use.
For most power users, it is more difficult to work around the deficiencies in plotting in any spreadsheet softwre & they'd be better off with a stand-alone program to do it. I personally like grace, though others use Origin, Kaleidagraph, etc. Many of these also do statistics and fits better than the spreadsheet programs.
If you have to report errors in your fits, be aware that MS Excel has historically had a deficiency in the calculation of error from datasets that had error bars. I don't know if this has ever been fixed. If you start doing research, your colleagues will probably try to ween you from Excel to something which does the jobs that academic scientists and engineers need to do better than the "do-it-all, but not as well" solution.
OO.o does have great plans to improve the reference management system. Refer to commentary and design by Bruce D'Arcus. In the interim, I think that the ability of OOo to use a database for reference management is pretty good. I use refbase as my web-based bibliographic database & am able to pull references directly from it in OO.o.
Also: MS Office + Endnote really isn't that great! Different versions of Endnote do have major compatibility programs & it is often hard to collaborate on a document which has Endnote markup. One colleague of mine even uses LaTeX & bibtex & LaTeX2RTF for any document that will have references, as his tolerance for Endnote is so low. Endnote's data model is dated & is still stuck in the dark ages of poor character encoding. They've tried to improve it over the years & it is the best commercial product available, but it isn't (and shouldn't be) the end goal for ANY ONE developing a solution from scratch.