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Converting QuickBooks to SAGE

It seems that accounting packages are better at importing data than they are at exporting data in a generally usable form. Which is unfortunate since I use QuickBooks and my accountant uses SAGE.

To make life easier for my accountant when doing my annual return, I wrote some Perl scripts to convert the little that QuickBooks exports as files plus, via Excel, the data from a non-standard transaction report into what SAGE imports. The account balances on the two packages now all match (though at one point yesterday, account balances in one were -2 times the balances in the other).

I am expecting that the accountant will find few enough things to correct that I won’t have to automate conversion in the other direction.

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Juxy

Juxy (http://juxy.tigris.org/), by Pavel Sher, is a library for unit testing XSLT stylesheets from Java. After a long time spent threatening to do so, I finally contributed an XML format for Juxy tests.

I’ve been riding my hobby horse for a while about the usefulness, nay necessity, of using more than XSLT when testing XSLT (and I’ll be back in that saddle again at XML Prague). Juxy fits that bill, since it’s in Java, but it always seems to me that writing tests in Java is more than many XSLT practitioners would want to do. So I wrote a stylesheet to generate Java from XML descriptions of the tests. Continue reading “Juxy”

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Netizen of the world

I must be a netizen of the world: I receive emails in Russian that I can’t read, offers of earthmoving equipment in Singapore, discounts for Tim Hortons in Canada, and security warnings for accounts that I never knew I had at nearly every major bank in the English-speaking world.

Maybe it’s this innate netizen-of-the-worldliness that prompts many kind people to offer to share their inheritances with me. Though I do worry about my health, since there must be a reason why I also receive offers for so many different pharmaceuticals.

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1.5 @ Prague

I will have the pleasure of speaking twice at XML Prague 2009, once on my own and once as a co-presenter:

  • Testing XSLT — An update and expansion of my previous talk on testing XSLT presented in less time. How can that be? Simple, really: put more in the conference paper, direct attendees to the paper, and spend more of the presentation doing demonstrations.
  • Imagining, building and using an XSLT virtual machine — The why and what of the open source Xcruciate XML-based server. Or the why, what, and Howe of Xcruciate, since I’m the second presenter with Mark Howe of Cyberporte, who provides the ideas behind Xcruciate and its related projects.