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mark :: blog
So I got sent a copy of the file and it turns out only two
UK banks actually have OFX servers, Nationwide and
Woolwich. Since I'm with the Nationwide I thought I'd have
a go. Added the Nationwide entry to the fipartnr.ini file
and bingo, it all worked perfectly. Until Money decided to
check for updates and found that fipartnr.ini had changed.
Anyway as long as I ignore the "Nationwide has changed it's
online services" messages then all is okay.
Have you seen things like yodlee.com? I've been thinking
of writing a OFX server with screen scraping so that you
could connect to it and it would connect to all those other
banks I use that I can screen scrape the info out: Lloyds
TSB, Egg, Cahoot, Citibank, various pension providers.
[By messing around with URLs at the various sites and using
the mnn extraction tool I've found the Microsoft test bank
server and some other fun things!]
Updated my OFX import
utility to screen-scrape American Express cards too
So it turns out the guy who wrote
libxml and libxslt works for Red Hat too as I was in a phone
conference today with him. I've also been looking at the
Perl module that links in libxslt but it's having teething
problems with glibc 2.2.2.
Finished off my
Guide to
ApacheCon 2001 and my
ApacheCon
photos
My last week here so decided to go
up to the mountains with Bryce who for
some reason decided to take his laptop. After my recent
fun with cars and Durham Police I let Phil do all the
driving, which I don't think he appreciated. I found a new xsl parser, libxslt and libxml, part
of the gnome project, seems to be quicker than Xalan and
has the advantage of being in C and not C++ (I'm so used to
release engineering for 30 platforms where even a working C
compiler is sometimes a stretch). Spent a good 6 hours on
Saturday failing to get it working right with Perl the way
I want it to, seems to be a strange memory problem that
goes away everytime I turn on debugging. I was going to buy a Earthmate GPS receiver for my laptop
until I read that it doesn't output standard NMEA format
data so it won't work with Autoroute. I'm still looking
for a GPS solution so the next time I'm coming back from
Scotland and get stuck for 4 hours on the M6 without a map
I can find an alternative route.
Finally committed the raw XML
for the apache.org in the news page. I've been meaning
to get that all updated for months, but never had the time.
Random other fun I can't talk about yet.
Worked out my schedule for the next weeks, I fly to England
next week for 4 days, then to Raleigh for 4 days, then
Reston Virginia for 4, then Raleigh for 3, then Santa Clara
for ApacheCon for 5, then Raleigh for a week, then back to
the UK. All economy too :-(
Finally got a spare few hours so finished updating the XML
database
of news stories about Apache. Used it to update the
apache.org
in the
news page.
FInished "The Longest Journey". Best interactive fiction
I've ever played.
My DELL laptop wasn't suspending to disk, found out it was
because the suspend partition had to be in the first 8Gb of
the drive. Took that time to re-install Linux (it had never
been installed right) and decided to use the latest Red Hat
rawhide. I was pretty amazed when it detected and worked
with my Wavelan card and random PCMCIA modem without having
to download a thing. These Red Hat guys are great *grin*
Back from the UK armed with fizzy sweets (US translation:
sour candy) which seem to be popular in the office. When
we got bought by Red Hat last year I gave a short
presentation on Stronghold to all the developers. There
was a large collective groan when they found out bits of it
were Perl based and that all our developers knew Perl and
that we didn't like Python. Actually, I shouldn't have
said I didn't like Python until I'd actually read about it
because after spending the flight learning it I think I'd
prefer it for most of my scripting needs. So I'm back in
the North Carolina snow for a little while, although I
don't think Tracy back in Glasgow is too pleased at that
thought.
Meanwhile I converted my photo album scripts to output XML
(index.xml)
with stylesheets
(index.xsl) as the old system wasn't very flexible
Popped down to "Best Buy" at the weekend and came away with
a new adventure game "Longest Journey"
and a pair of
speakers so I can finally listen to music in the
appartment. Spent the rest of the weekend playing the
game (it's the best adventure I've played in a long time),
writing reports, and thinking of fun things to do
with XML-RPC and Python.
My screen-scraping script to convert EGG credit card
statements into OFX for Microsoft Money broke and attempts
to get EGG to actually output their information in a format
other than HTML has failed. I'll switch my credit card to
the first provider that offers a SSL enabled XML-RPC
interface for interacting with my account and downloading
statements and transaction lists. Was thinking of cool
things I could have done to the Bradford Robotic
Telescope using XML-RPC or SOAP; it could replace all
those proprietary communication protocols and systems I
wrote and allow others to embed the functionality of the
telescope into their own applications. But it looks like
the project has died, they've not noticed my Y2K bug for example.
I can't believe I wrote the first issue
of Apache Week five years ago today. Happy Birthday! It's
interesting looking through the past issues to see when we
expected a 2.0 beta release; one year ago we were expecting
it "inside a month". We're currently expecting it "inside
a month".
Another online credit card that gives you a statement but no way of
downloading it. How difficult is it to add that function? Anyway until
they do here is a program to convert the Cahoot HTML pages into either
QIF or OFX format
To use the script:
Another online credit card that gives you a statement but no way of
downloading it. If you have a card in the USA you can use
Microsoft Money to interactively download your statement. If you live
in the UK you can't. Anyway until
they do here is a program to convert their HTML pages into either
QIF or OFX format for import into Money
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Hi! I'm Mark Cox. This blog gives my
thoughts and opinions on my security
work, open source, fedora, home automation,
and other topics.
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