Number Crunching #162

Quicken Cash Flow = -353.27
STEF Total = 6.15

November Budget Meeting

Reconciling Quicken with bank statements: Done.
Reconciling last month’s budget: I didn’t make a budget the month before. I got $385.00 in bank charges. But small good news along with all the bad, I got a raise at my paying job.

Starting a new format, in which the same Number Crunching post is updated for the entire month on a weekly basis. I’m crossing my fingers that this will keep me doing them and keep my eyes on my finances. Where they have not been; no big surprise. Meet stupid scared straight, otherwise known as me. My other name should probably be she who cannot be trusted with own money. Good news: I shouldn’t lose my house. Bad news: I have no idea when I’m going to have a handle on Quicken.

The fun started on November 3rd with me trying to see if Intuit had fixed the little issue of Quicken Online not importable or exportable with Quicken desktop versions. Short answer: they haven’t but there are work-arounds. Why was I interested? I have a horrible habit of letting the paperwork to enter into Quicken pile up, and then I procrastinate because I feel guilty about the damn pile, and fairly soon everything is out of whack. With an online system, my thinking was I could enter receipts at work—right after I had spent the money—then update the home system with that data since it’s the program that makes all the nifty reports.

Halfway better solution: my credit union now talks to Quicken. I set up the download the bank records on Quicken 2007 I have at home. That way I don’t have to enter, just correct. Three hours later, I have no frakkin idea WHY the download took that long, I thought I was matching up the amounts with the data I already had in Quicken, but my final total was WAY off. As in Quicken is telling me I have over a thousand dollars in my checking account off.

I couldn’t figure out where it went wonky, so I pulled out my old bank statements and went back to the beginning of these Quicken records to double check the reconciliations. As of today, November 6th, I’m still doing that. I’ve found a few errors and researched how to archive away the years I don’t need ready access to, but the final total is still wonky. I’ve made it into 2008 and I really suspect the issue is in 2009, but because everything is still attached, I can’t jump ahead.

The second biggest aggravation? Seeing just how good my income is, and having no money because I have been stupid with it. *Sigh*

Goals for next week:

• Pay Citifinancial.
• Pay house note.
• Reconcile Quicken with bank accounts
• Somehow combine the online and paper versions of the car loan account in Quicken into one register. This is done, but I don’t think it is downloading like it should.
• Archive the years I don’t need in Quicken.
• Get reports done for months I missed writing up Number Crunching entries.
• Find the details I was keeping track of in the Number Crunching entries.

Read Free!
The BookWorm

Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm leaving town tomorrow morning and will probably be offline until next Monday. Take care everybody!

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The BookWorm

Getting Error 404

I took most of the weekend off from the trying to make the development environment work problem. To be honest, nothing was going to happen by the time I got home Friday night. I ignored it on Saturday. Sunday I had company and got to see Star Trek rebooted. Now I can finally catch up on my GWC podcasts.

So Sunday night and Monday morning, I finally had a clear enough head to go back to the problem. So I Googled on "getting 404 error on my local Drupal site" and found Learn By the Drop. His answer to the first comment was to check the .htaccess file.

None of my downloaded files have that one. I think the FTP program hid it. So I went through through CPanel to find it and downloaded for Circulation Desk, FFGarret, and Alt. BM Site.

Cleaned out the cache, refreshed the local copy of Circulation Desk, tried logging in, and it still didn't work. *headdesk* Damn I was so hoping that would do it! It made sense because it is a file you get with a clean install and a file computers tend to hide for user's good.

Back to the Google links. Apparently something goes wonky with clean URLs. Found a Drupal forum post on details to make sure are in the Apache code for those to work. The issue they're talking about is turning on the Clean URLs and I can't even get to the admin pages. :p Okay, down in the comments, other people describe what I have, so I changed it. *Crosses fingers* Turning Apache on and off. Great it turned back on. That always worries me because it takes forever. Back to the browser that i think has gotten tired and doesn't want to play any more. :p End program on Firefox. So tired of it doing that. Okay, got Firefox back up and try logging in the local copy of Circulation Desk.

New error - 500 - I haven't made the changes to the virtual host file yet. Made changes. Got paranoid that Apache wasn't going to come back on again. It did. Back to Firefox. Clean cache. Refreshed local copy of Circulation Desk. Try logging in. 500 Internal Server Error.

One last trick from this thread is to check the .htaccess file to see if a wrong option has been selected. Whelp, that is there but I think it is commented out. Make no changes to this file.

Another possibility is the symbolic links problem that is the first handbook page under "Multiple Drupal Sites Under Windows." Downloaded the Junction.zip fiel, which is the program that builds symbolic links for Windows. But that page also talks about using one codebase for multiple sites. *Sigh*

Figure I would find the fresh version of Drupal and follow the instructions from "Running multiple sites on a local PC from a single codebase" tells me before trying to fool with Junction program tomorrow. I can just comment off the coding I know works in the virtual host file without losing anything. I have no idea why this step has me so damn leery of doing it. I think I'm afraid I'm going to end up having the wrong things on the wrong site, probably starting with the themes.

Short version of this morning: I'm bumbled my way through the instructions, got to the Drupal installer page, figured out how to make sure the folders storing all my files is read-write enabled, ran the update script twice, before I finally got logged in and REACHED the administrations pages. God-awful ugly administration pages with my theme no where in sight and a mile-long pink box listing all the errors my database was throwing. I had to leave for work by that point so I just rebooted the computer to give it a nice rest.

It was 2pm before I hit myself upside the head. Of course all the tables for the different modules were throwing so many damn errors, the modules ARE NOT WHERE THEY NEED TO BE IN ORDER TO RUN NOW!

At this point, I'm looking forward to throwing out all the incomplete instructional printouts I have amassed once I have typed up step-by-step instructions of what I need to do for FFGarret and Alt. BM Site's local copies to work right. :p

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The BookWorm

Apache fixed, so a new problem!

Development Environment: I finally worked out the virtual host problem. Where I screwed up was applying the instructions for setting up one virtual host to setting up multiple ones. You can put this code for one virtual host:

< VirtualHost www.example.com >

DocumentRoot /www/example1

ServerName www.example.com


# Other directives here

< /VirtualHost >

But you cannot put each URL when you have more than one Virtual Host, that causes the overlap problem. And then my computer didn't like the asterisk wildcard and I had to put in numbers for the IP. But it works. Apache doesn't shut down and the local sites now come up in Firefox. I haven't tested that in IE yet; one headache at
a time.

Now I get the front page for the Drupal sites under local, but if I try to log in or click on any links, the browser can't find the file/content/node/whatever. *headdesk* No issues for the Library and finding its html files. So chalk one up to being done correctly, albeit accidentally. :p The second weirdness about this, last night FFGarret worked and Circulation Desk didn't. This morning they both don't work. :p But that's why I think it's a Drupal end of things issue and not Apache.

I can send emails with more info on what I did if you really want it, because I do think I goofed something else up.

In other news, it's Friday and I will update the Number Crunching posts when I get home. Next week I'm having Thanksgiving in Texas. I don't know where the piles start and end on my work desk and home desk, and would really prefer curl up somewhere where I won't spend any money. :p

Read Free!
The BookWorm

Apache fun

Last night was fun. I'm leaving Alt BM Site alone for now because I need to get a current backup of the database and the files. And I might as well figure out what the hell I'm doing wrong before doing that. I got Apache 2.2.14 running and got the virtual host set up for the Circulation Desk. It worked! On a roll now, so I set up the virtual hosts for the main pages of the Library and FFGarret.

Which went straight to Circulation Desk when I tried to access them in the browser. *headdesk*

So I comb through the code again, and thought I found the mistake. I added in a trailing "/" when the code doesn't like that. Corrected and rebooted the entire computer and went to bed.

This morning Apache won't run, but at least I get an answer out of the error log, which I didn't get last night. "All the other virtual hosts are overlapping with the first one (Circulation Desk) so it's only using Circulation Desk. You may need a NameVirtualHost directive (or something like that)."

I Googled the exact phrase, but must have found four or five possible solutions. I have printouts to compare what they did to my own code. At worst, I can run each site one at a time (I haven't actually tried FFGarret and the Library by themselves that may help me figure out what is wrong with their virtual host code), but that defeats the point of setting up virtual hosts so you can run multiple sites in the development environment. So tonight I guess I'll be trying out each of the "fixes" I've found and hoping one holds.

I have Firebug, but I haven't figured out how it tells you what is wrong. Or even if it can when the issue is in a background file. It's been a few months since I tried using it, and I see they have add some other items to work with it. Maybe one of them will help.

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The BookWorm

Add ABC to the list

FOX actually was the first on the list, canceling Alien Nation the way they did. Syfy got on that list with creative scheduling of Doctor Who and BSG. Now ABC is on the list because next week's episode will be "the last episode for V for 2009."

What the FRELL? That's only four episodes, FOUR! I'm assuming that by adding the year in that they plan on showing the rest in January or February, but still...

What the FRELL?

And this is why I'd rather wait until the season is on DVD and watch it. Because I will make the time out of my busy life and watch a show I like religiously, provided that it becomes a habit. Get me out of the habit of watching it for a month, I'll forget about your show. And I like the remake of "V" so I really don't want to forget about it.

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The BookWorm

Not like Mom can make

I really wanted biscuits and red gravy this morning. I baked biscuits from scratch, but my red gravy doesn't taste like Mom's. *Sigh* So now I'll have to ask her what the difference is.

Fun with test sites continued all weekend and looks like it will probably continue all week. Issue #1) Taking a full twenty-four hours to think of the simple solution to the database transfer problem. "Why don't you export the tables after the one giving you a fit in the import and just import that half?" Worked in about thirty minutes. Issue #2) All these codes and background programs use different symbols to tell the computer "don't run this." None of the instructions I have said anything about deleting the # in an Apache file. At least, that's what I'm assuming the issue is now. I wasn't able to test the hypothesis before I had to leave for work.

Guess what I'll be doing when I get home. :)

I'm fairly certain what stopped me when I first downloaded everything the instructions told me I needed was that the direction stopped making sense. *Sigh* I've been adding notes on my printouts in the hopes that I'll understand said notes when I have to do this again. :p

Repeat after me: this will all be worth it when I can play with Drupal modules without fear of breaking the whole damn site people are using.

Yeah, primary goal for this is to see if I can build a wiki for the Library. Secondary goal will be fixing the fanart process for Alt. BM Site since the module it uses now will not be maintained going forward. :p

Goal for today: Get the bloody announcement card finished so all I will need to do is print and mail. Everything else is bonus.

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The BookWorm

M.A. Exam Part 1

I PASSED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Walking down the aisle in cap and gown is Dec. 12th. I can't remember what my date is for mailing out invitations/announcements, because I wrote that down at home. :p So if you really want one, email me a current mailing address.

*Away to squee offline.*

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The BookWorm

Colbert Nation supports US speedskating

The major sponsor of the U.S. Olympics speedskating team was unable to give the funds they had promised, so Stephen Colbert has asked that his fans step in and donate.

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The BookWorm

I need my Sunbeam timer

I killed this Sunbeam timer by getting it wet while washing dishes. After spending Sunday in the office with the much inferior Mainstays timer I bought to replace it, I'm now determined to hunt down this timer and buy all available stock of it.

The Mainstays timer is really good about shutting off to conserve power, which apparently was a problem for other users of the Sunbeam. Me, I use rechargeable batteries, so that was never an issue. What drove me over the bloody edge was the damn Mainstays timer does not pause the countdown reliably!

I depend on the timer to tell me to step away from the computer and go stretch/work on a chore/etc. otherwise, I will forget to do it and screw up my back worse than it is now. Fifteen or thirty minute chunks of time, but if I'm in the middle of typing and have to run to the bathroom, I don't want that to be counted as typing time. Some times Mainstays timer would pause. Most times it would send the countdown to zero to start over. Hulk smash time for me.

The kitchen only Mainstays timer (because you can only change it by pressing one button and that annoys me) saved the day. It may be irritating to change the time on it, but at least it pauses. So now I have a new mission the next time I go shopping. I just hope that the company didn't stop making it.

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The BookWorm