Archive for March, 2010

Well, they released jQuery UI 1.8 two days ago, and now everything is broken. I understand why the changes were made, but it sure is inconvenient. Plugins and posts updated so far:

And on top of that, chili stopped working with jQuery 1.4 and I haven't fixed it yet. Andrea Ercolino was nice enough to send me an updated version, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet.

Update: got chili to work!

So much for using my spare time to learn Scheme!

I usually don't blog about medical stuff here, but Allie Brosh's comments about the Wong-Baker pain scale are perfectly on-target. The Joint Commission accredits health care organizations and comes up with intrusive, well-intended but largely pointless standards that the rest of us have to uphold. A sort of "unfounded mandate." One of these is the requirement that we document pain levels in every patient on a scale of one to ten. For pediatric patients, we have this "FACES" scale that starts from a big smile and doesn't even get to a frown until number six. I like Allie's much better.

And her comment about not eating red food when you're sick is absolutely right. Never give your kid red popsicles when they've got a stomach bug; you'll just rush into the ER worried that they're throwing up blood.

The second project Euler problem is:

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, ... Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed four million.

Continue reading ‘Learning Scheme, Euler problem 2’ »

OK, so my new mini project is to learn Scheme. It can't be too hard, right? I mean Javascript is just Lisp in C's clothing, and I'm good at Javascript. I've installed PLT-Scheme and I figure the best way to learn it is solving Project Euler problems until I get bored.

Continue reading ‘Learning Scheme’ »

I've been using Quicken for years, since Quicken 97 on Window then Quicken 5 on the Mac and then Quicken 2001 when I got my iMac. The problems is that Intuit doesn't upgrade Quicken, it replaces it each year with a version that has more frilly bells and whistles and less real utility (especially on the Mac; just look at the "Using a prior version of Quicken Mac?"). And the datafile is often different from the old file, so stuff gets lost with each "upgrade".

So I've kept my current Mac (a blue & white G3, the "Mickey Mouse" one) just to be able to run Quicken 2001 under Classic. I can't upgrade to an Intel Mac, since Classic won't work. And I want to balance my checkbook while talking to my wife, not only downstairs in my basement office. So I wanted something I could run on my dual-boot (XP and Ubuntu) laptop.

I've been looking at alternatives to Quicken for 5+ years, but with 20 years of data I was too scared. Until now. I've been using gnuCash for just a week now, but it seems to everything I need it to, including importing all my data, even from multiple investment accounts, from Quicken's exported QIF file. I haven't done any complicated investment things, so I don't know how well that side of it works.

Strong points

  • It Just Works. Does what I expect it to do, in the way I expect it to. Of course, I'm a geek who understands double-entry bookkeeping, so that may not be surprising.
  • I can control-S and save the file; I always felt out of control with Quicken since you couldn't force it to save.
  • Open source. I will probably never have the time to tinker, but it's nice knowing that I could

Weak points

  • Keyboard shortcuts. I miss being able to assign my own keystrokes; I hate going back to the trackpad to do anything. But see Open Source above; I can probably fix that.
  • I'm going to have to learn Scheme to create custom reports. Not sure if that's a bug or a feature.

The biggest advantage is the feeling of freedom of not being tied to Intuit anymore. I'll see how it works out, but I'm not going back.