What Nationwide don’t seem to realise is that it costs them nothing to quietly leave OFX support enabled for use by the hundreds of other programs out there that are not Microsoft Money. If customer service calls were costing too much then they should end the customer support rather than the technical support. Why punish all of us who were happily using the Nationwide OFX service and putting no burden on their support staff?

If someone can recommend a decent UK bank that supports the OFX protocol to access transaction data, I would seriously consider moving my money away from Nationwide. They may believe they are saving money by disabling OFX support but from the comments I’ve been receiving, I’d wager they’ll lose even more if all of us Wesabe, Moneydance and Money users were to go elsewhere.

Knowing how much we spend on what is a problem everybody faces and people have come up with many different solutions based on their needs. Personally, I’ve found I’m too lazy to maintain an Excel spreadsheet and I don’t trust myself with having no system at all.

I first started looking at money management software when I first heard of mint.com. It looks like a great service but unfortunately doesn’t support UK banks yet. Next I looked into desktop software that might offer a similar set of features. There are plenty out there such as MS Money, Moneydance, Quicken, GNU Cash etc. Unfortunately all of these lacked some essential feature (such as auto-categorisation), were too difficult to use or too expensive.

So I started looking into writing my own application with the features I wanted. This would have a line chart showing my overall balance over time, a pie chart showing the breakdown of my expenses into categorisation. And of course transactions would be loaded and automatically cateogrised with the minimum level of fuss. On this point I wrote an application that automatically logs into my online bank account and downloads my statement in csv format. While I eventually got this working (not a trivial task) I realised it was too clunky and fragile as it’s likely that my bank will change their online interface at some point in the future.

Next I looked into downloading transactions from my bank via the OFX protocol. This is the protocol that lots of banks use to allow software the ability to download transaction information and also potentially execute transfers. It was not easy to find the information I needed to connect to my bank (Nationwide) via OFX as the bank’s details are not officially published. Microsoft use these details when connecting to Nationwide with MS Money. I had to do quite a bit of digging until I found a link on a newsgroup to a file hosted by Microsoft containing the necessary details for connecting to Nationwide’s OFX server. Armed with this I posted the details to a thread on the Moneydance forums. That was 7 months ago and Moneydance have still done nothing about using my information to add support for Nationwide despite a lot of requests from other forum users.

I moved on from the downloading transactions part of my application to the application itself. I figured it would still be useful even if I had to occasionally download transactions manually. Here’s what I came up with:

I even came up with a decent categoriser dialog:

With the application itself shaping up I went back to the transaction download problem. This time I found a nice snippet of Python code for connecting to a server via OFX. I translated this to a Java application that could download a list of my accounts from Nationwide, then download a list of transactions within a certain date period from a given account. This program is available for download here.

Now that I had the ability to download OFX statements from my bank, I looked into the other management services I initially dismissed because I could only import data via OFX. Wesabe was one of these so I tried creating a new account but lo and behold, they now suddenly support Nationwide for automatic uploads. This means they do the whole OFX download themselves automatically. This was great as now I don’t need any manual process at all to see my transactions nicely split into categories. The funny thing was, support was added the same day that I finished making the OFX downloader and this was thanks to my initial investigative work into the Nationwide OFX server details. Someone had picked up on my post in the Moneydance thread, given the details to Wesabe, who within just 9 days integrated support for Nationwide into their application. So great work guys, you well exceeded my expectations and I’m glad I could help other fellow Nationwide users.

Now that little saga is over, onto the real issue of the software itself. The great thing about Wesabe is that I can view and manage my transactions from anywhere. This means I can log on while at work and enter what I spent in cash for lunch. The bad thing about Wesabe is that it doesn’t give a breakdown your expenses as a pie chart and it doesn’t present your overall balance as a line chart.

To rectify this I’ve chosen to abandon my Money Monitor program and try to go in a slightly different direction. I’ve always wanted to learn .NET programming so my next project will be to create a ASP.NET application that connects to Wesabe via the Wesabe API. Downloads transaction data and displays it all in nice pretty graphs. Stay tuned for updates!

I said the iPhone 2.0 would:

be released 1.5 years after the first – Well that seemed about right.

have 3G – Ok I predicted this would be in the European version. Obviously Apple had more trouble than most phone makers in getting us this feature.

be smaller – Ok so the 3G is actually slightly thicker but without the metal back manages to be 2g lighter. It would still be nice if it could fit in your pocket though.

have all the same features – A slight underestimation here. This was based on my reasoning that Apple would be quickly bringing out a version that fixes all the problems with the old one rather than spending money on new features. Of course the price was the big thing that Apple admitted put a lot of people off – especially outside the US. I also reasoned that they’d want to leave some features for the next generation of their phone rather than do they very best they possibly could right away.

have longer battery life – One thing Apple came through on. Somehow they managed to squeeze more life out of it despite the addition of 3G which is a known battery killer. I suspect that extra width went mostly into a bigger battery.

have more memory – Well we didn’t have to wait for the 3G version for this. They doubled the initial max capacity from 8GB to 16GB back in February this year.

a slightly better camera (maybe with an led flash) – Clearly I underestimated the importance to most people of a decent camera on their phone. It would be nice to have but clearly people are not planning to use it replace their digital point and shoots.

have more custom iPhone internet applications – This was a big focus during the annoucement of the 3G. The SDK is looking very interesting and I’m looking forward to seeing what people will come up with with the new hardware.

have reasonable prices for unlimited mobile internet access – I still haven’t seen as much response from phone networks about this point as I’d expected. The unlimited data plans are still pretty dear (about £7.50 / month if I’m not mistaken). Still we’re moving in the right direction.

get an overall price reduction – Apple claims to have made big improvements here by dropping the cost of the initial phone but are actually increasing the overall cost by increasing the data plan costs.

And the biggest improvement that I didn’t expect at all (and I don’t think anyone else did either) is of course A-GPS. I told myself I’d get the phone as soon as they added GPS and now that they have, well, I’m still not going to get one. The monthly plan prices are still way too much (3 times what I’m currently paying). The good thing about these announcements is that a lot more people I know will be getting one now which will give me a chance to play around with it and see what I think. Roll on July 11th!

Asking these kinds of questions is a good way to learn about new technologies or techniques you have have not been familiar with and can give you a lot of insight into other parts of the software development world. You can apply some of these pieces of knowledge to broader parts of your job. For example, learning that perhaps using a Singleton pattern was not such a great idea you may decide to review the other parts of your application where you chose a common design pattern over a possible simpler design.

But there is a downside to learning about these new technologies and techniques and that is realising that even if you have a better solution, you may well not have the power to implement it. If you have a well developed web application based on JSF, it’s probably too late to consider using something like Ruby on Rails when you realise it’s better suited to that technology. An established database application based on SQLJ technology is going to be practically impossible to migrate to a much better technology such as Hibernate.

But this is a well known problem in software. You make your choice of technologies at the start of the project. If you need to switch half way through that’s too bad because you’ll just have to pay some high paid consultants to walk you through the process.

Another well known problem is that of technical debt. You write some quick hack to implement a feature or fix a bug as quickly as you can knowing that it could be done better if you just had more time. When you have that time, you tell yourself, you will come back to that problem and implement it correctly. Only that time doesn’t come. And even if it does, well your hacked together solution has been working fine on production for a few weeks now and it hasn’t caused any problems so why bother changing it and risk breaking the same part of the system again?

There are many proposed solutions to prevent the build up of technical debt such as unit testing, code reviews, proper architecture and design meetings, scheduled code maintenance time etc. The problem is there are not many solutions for how to pay off technical debt once you’ve incurred it. In the financial analogy it’s not so hard because you know how often and how much you need to pay back. With technical debt it’s very difficult to measure and it’s even more difficult to pay back.

We come across bad code all the time. “Why didn’t they create a list of objects instead of using a big array” we ask. We could change this code ourselves but it’s too late. The array is used throughout almost all parts of the application. Any change to it now would introduce a big risk or breaking something, or even worse subtly change the behaviour such that it goes unnoticed until it goes live. There are many factors that can make paying back technical debt very difficult. Maybe if we examined them in detail we might find ways to start tackling the task. The worst thing however, is coming up with a great solution to a problem in an application and simply not being able to implement it due to the risk of breaking the entire system.

But bit-torrent is not ideal. The problem lies in the fact that 90% of us have asymmetric connections as for some reason most ISPs think they can get away with giving us 1:16 upload/download ratios. If this is the average ratio within a swarm it means that for a client to receive a file at their maximum possible download speed they need at least 16 people to download 16 different parts of the file from. Or, in other words, for each file you download, you need to spend 16 times the time it took to download uploading it back into the swarm.

The problem with bit-torrent is that it doesn’t reach anywhere near its maximum potential because people are not willing to spend that much time with their PCs running if they can get away with just leeching a file. Private torrent trackers are a good way of solving this problem because everyone has a ratio that they have to maintain. The tracker enforces that you upload at least 70% of what you download. This means you can get some awesome speeds with some popular files. The problem is that the system is centralised and there are only so many users and torrents that it can keep track of and so rare or unpopular files do not get the same benefits.

Tribler appear to be making a lot of effort to defeat the problems of public and private torrents. They are trying to decentralise the user score system. A user will be given points by other users depending on how much they upload. The problem they need to solve however is how many points people give for very popular files and for very rare ones. More points for popular files will mean more and more of the very few people with gigabit connections will be able to max out their download speed. More points for rare files will mean faster transfers for rare files but slower transfers for those with high-speed connections.

The goal Tribler have at the moment is to develop a fast and efficient file transfer process but geared specifically towards streaming video. The reason for this of course is that they can then sell the technology for millions to TV companies or video distribution services such as YouTube. But TV and video on demand is quite a specific use case. Files must be transfered head first rather than in random chunks; most files are unlikely to remain popular after a few weeks and most of the time people will be wanting the same relatively small set of video files. Tribler will have to tailor their system to be most efficient for this particular kind of usage.

Ideally we’d have a completely universal file transfer system which would work equally well with streaming video as with distributing rare random files. Perhaps it might even be possible for each user to tailor how they want their bandwidth to be used based on what services they desire. That way people with similar interests would automatically form their own mini swarm of files. In any case I can see a very interesting future in the field of file sharing. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with our increasingly speedy broadband connections.

This got me thinking to an area where information is very thin on the ground: salaries. Why don’t people tell each other how much they earn? Why is it such a taboo subject? According to the theory if everyone knew how much their colleagues earned they’d be in a much better position to know what kind of salary they should be getting. Employers wouldn’t be able to offer unreasonably low salaries to people just because they don’t know how much they should be getting. Salaries should work on a system of supply and demand like every other market. If C# developers were paid twice as much as Java developers then people would train to fit the job that best suited their abilities and desired salary. At the same time the competition for jobs would drive down over-inflated salaries. Eventually the outcome – as with all free markets – would be that everyone was paid just enough to to be happy but not too much that someone else would offer to do the same job at a lower price.

Without knowing how much your colleagues are earning it is impossible to know how valuable the work you are doing is to the company. If a company wants people to work at their best they could offer benefits such as a performance related bonus. A lot of companies seem to have implemented bonus schemes without realising that unless employees know how much bonus they are getting or how much of the bonus is based on performance the bonus has no real effect at all. Also unless we know how large a bonus our colleagues are getting we have no method of relating performance to renumeration. The same reasoning explains why communism doesn’t work. If extra effort can only be seen as a benefit to others, no one will have a reason to try to perform any better than anyone else.

Perhaps a completely transparent salary might then encourage too much competition. People would threaten leave if they felt they were treated unfairly. In a work place it’s very difficult for anyone to have an objective opinion of their own or other people’s value as an employee. Perhaps a completely free market of workers would reduce the overall quality of work due to poor workers demanding the same salary as their coworkers or good workers continually switching from one company to another. Either way, all I know is that I’m not getting enough…

I’m also slowly beginning to fulfill my goal of developing a proper C++ application. At the moment I’ve successfully set up the MS Visual C++ 2005 IDE and compiler as well as the wxWidgets GUI library. Hopefully I’ll even be able to make cross platform applications now that I have the tools set up. The first task I will attempt will be the Project Euler compendium. I already have the design set out in my head and could probably code it up in Java within a day. In C++ though I’d expect it to take a few weeks for me to get the basics hammered out.

• Add bonus timer
• Add loading screen
• Add special effects for bonuses
• Add instructions
• Add desktop shortcuts option
• Alter highscore table to use a database

That’s all I can think of right now. I will probably have a couple more things to add as I progress. Right, now back to work…

Website

• Create a new front page of the site and move the blog to the sub page. done
• Add more projects and content to the site. done
• Integrate my photo gallery to the site and upload all my digital photos. in progress
• Add a personal section including a CV.

Projects

• Finish Shyguy’s Cave of Death. done
• Finish the Word Dissociation Game.
• Start on a new Slick based project (maybe a multi-player rpg of some kind).
• Learn C++ by creating a Project Euler solution compendium. in progress

Other

• Sort out my finances.
• Save enough money to buy a PC.
• Tidy my room.

I’m sure there are more but I think that’s more than enough to get me started.

Modafinil and other drugs in its class are sold to help sufferers of Narcolepsy or ADHD but are widely used by people with no such conditions as a way of simply enhancing their general brain functions. Millions of us could benefit from holding better concentration while at work or at school. Or remembering things such as timetables or doing mental arithmetic.

There are few other non-medicinal self enhancement drugs that offer so much potential benefit to such a wide range of people. Caffeine seems to be the nation’s current brain fuel of choice but most people who take it regularly end up simply using it to abate the withdrawal symptoms of the caffeine taken the day before. The question therefore becomes, should people take drugs simply to better themselves? Should people be allowed to use them while taking or revising for exams? Should people be allowed to use them to gain advantages over colleagues at work? Why shouldn’t people be able to function at a higher level than they would naturally? After realising how much better they can be, why would anyone want to live a drug free life?

Personally I find it very difficult to concentrate throughout the day unless I’ve had at least 8 hours’ sleep. My job requires a high level of concentration and logical processing for which I need the highest level of alertness I can get. I would love to try a Modafinil some day just to see how much more code I can churn out in a day. What I’m not so sure about is do I want to need to take the drug every day in order to maintain the same productivity at work? Even if there’s no danger of physical or psychological dependence would I develop a functional dependence such that the drug effectively becomes a medicine rather than a self enhancement?

My theory is that if Modafinil came in a hot drink form, it would so conveniently replace coffee and tea that people would reject any attempts to limit its use by the government. Also it would probably need to be bitter in taste enough to discourage children from becoming dependent on it. Hmm I guess this is how consumption of caffeine and alcohol has worked for centuries. Isn’t it convenient to have traditional beverages to mask our widespread drug taking customs?