A while ago I began looking for a bugeting program to help us keep track of where our money is going. I went through a couple of programs before finally finding AceMoney.

It's best feature is being able to keep track of all of your accounts (bank accounts, loans, credit cards, etc.), though the free version limits you to keeping track of only one account (US$30 for full version). Since our debt is spread across a few loans, AceMoney has helped us keep track of our loans so we could see for the first time exactly how much we're in debt (it's a big number).

The program allows you to create your own spending categories (it comes with many categories already populated) and allocate a budget amounts for each. You can then keep track of every transaction from your bank account either by manually inputting them, or by importing a file generated from your bank's online banking website. It accepts a few formats for importing transactions, including Microsoft Money files, which I use to update AceMoney from my online banking website. Each transaction can then be assigned to a category. Thus, you can view reports comparing how much you budgeted for a category and how much you actually spent.

So far, it has helped us immensely.

posted by Gabe Luci at 5/13/2006 10:09:00 PM

I haven't posted here in ages because I realize no one really cares that much about what's going on in my life, and those that do talk to me personally. So I've decided to make this blog a little more technical. There is software and such that I discover on the internet every once in a while, which I will feature here if I find it interesting.

I'll begin with BMPx. I first discovered BMPx when I was looking for a decent music player for Linux, since my beloved Winamp doesn't work so well through WINE. BMPx is technically Beep Media Player (BMP) version 2, which is a complete rewrite of the first version. BMP was in turn forked from XMMS, which aimed to be Winamp on Linux. It is still under development and has a long way to go, but shows much promise. Unlike many open source media players, it has a very professional look (both the player itself and the website), and the developers really seem to know what makes a good player (and are pretty cool people too). It can handle Winamp classic skins as well.

If you'd like to keep up on the development, I'd suggest idling in their IRC channel: #bmp on Freenode. There you can read the discussions between the developers as they happen. Instructions on compiling the latest development version is on their website. If I knew more about Linux programming, and had time to spare, I'd love to get involved in development myself. But as it happens, I can but observe.

posted by Gabe Luci at 5/13/2006 09:31:00 PM

Last night we busted a few punks. We were at Jaycee Gardens (where we got married) just going for a stroll. There were three young guys snowboarding on a poor excuse for a hill. One of the guys thought it a good idea to bust down a small wooden fence in the park. He kicked it in, busting one of the planks right in half as we were coming from out of sight. He then saw us, swore and threw the half plank he was holding into a bush. We were leaving anyway, so we took down their licence plate number (at 11pm, they were the only ones left in the park), got out to the street (it's a long driveway), and called the cops. We waiting till an officer got there, told him what we saw, and went home as the officer went into the park.

I wish I could have gone back and watched :) posted by Gabe Luci at 12/15/2005 10:55:00 AM

My plugin just passed 10,000 downloads! Yay! posted by Gabe Luci at 12/06/2005 10:45:00 PM

Moving sale tomorrow morning at our place! Want couches? a stove? dryer? kitchen table? coffee table? etc.? Come to our place! posted by Gabe Luci at 9/30/2005 02:10:00 PM

I'm formatting my server and installing Gentoo. I've gotten a little frustrated with Slackware. It's not a bad distribution, but it certainly is one for hobbyists. It's Linux with a BSD aftertaste, which makes many things very different from the rest of the Linux family. Last night I spend over 6 hours trying to install a few things that just wouldn't go. I had to compile most of the packages from source from a lack of Slackware packages. Every one of the packages I was trying to install was available in Portage, Gentoo's package manager. That means doing these installs in Gentoo would have been soooo much easier.

So, I'm installing Gentoo. Installations will be easier. The only downside is that they will take longer since everything is compiled from source. posted by Gabe Luci at 9/16/2005 09:03:00 AM

School's back. The most interesting course so far has been Software Engineering. This whole term is a work up to next term, when we have no lectures, but a huge group project to do. We're talking about 7 or 8 people per team.

In preperation for that, I have been looking at version control software, or software that can keep track of every change made to a software project, who made it, and with the ability to go back to a previous version if needed. I have found Subversion, a branch from the more populat CVS. From what I have seen so far, I am very impressed with all the features. So much so that not only will I try to sell this solution to whoever ends up being on my team, but I will also use this for my own projects, including class assignments.

Another bit of news: Our house has been sold. The closing date is October 7th. posted by Gabe Luci at 9/14/2005 07:48:00 PM

I apologize about the down time over the past few days. The server this site is hosted on got messed up from a bad update and it took a few days to get it back up and running like normal. Unfortunately this also affected my luci.ca email account, so if you had emailed me anything, please send it again.
Hopefully this won't happen again, but I'm not really paying for the hosting, so I can't complain... posted by Gabe Luci at 9/06/2005 03:07:00 PM