Einstein's brain

Having been using Quicken since 2004, I am now contemplating to drop the license. Currently running Quicken Personal 2008 which is boght in retail box with supposed to be "perpetual license". However, as some of you probably know already, Quicken products are quite limited in terms of licensing. Everytime you moved the license to another computer, you will have to call Quicken support to get a new key. Adding to this, their sunset policy is one of the more aggresive ones around, pretty much ceasing any support after a few years.

Since I now have to move my Quicken into another laptop, I thought it maybe a good time to reassess if I want to stick with Quicken or look to move it to a more open alternative. There seems to be a myriad of new online personal finance website around nowadays. Maybe people are starting to trust more of their data to be available online, but I decided to stick with offline personal finance software options.

GnuCash, AceMoney and MoneyDance are such offline options, but main issues are they are not Australian oriented, so may not be as integrated with Australian banks and share platforms, not that I use those functions anyway.

What I really want to share though is the experience in trying to get my data exported out of Quicken Personal 2008 which by no means is easy. I tried many ways for 2 days and finally succeeded after preservering. The "Australan" Quicken Personal 2008 does NOT allow exporting data into QIF format, while the US versioni does, so I go and hunt for any Quicken 2008 US version. And I found a trial link, download and install the Quicken Deluxe 2008 on the new laptop. I then try opening my existing QDF file in this trial version and to my dismay, it crashed while converting. Took me a while to realise that it crashed and burnt because of Norton 360, so I rebooted and disable Norton 360 for 15 minutes while converting and it succeeded opening and converting the "older" QDF file. I suspect the Australian version may be about one year behind or have a completely separate year version numbering.

So, yay! I use the US Quicken to export the data out in a QIF format which is the most accepted format and it's text file format too! So I tested importing this file into the 3 software above. Only GnuCash and MoneyDance is able to import multi account QIF file, so AceMoney is almost out unless I can bear exporting and importing the account in separate files.

Second issue is this learning curve with double entry accounting with GnuCash. So it seems right now MoneyDance is top on my list of choices if I drop Quicken. Any thoughts?

Software

In the last few months, I have been playing some Facebook games, namely:

• MafiaWars
• CafeWorld
• CastleAge
• TreasureIsle
• KingdomofCamelot
• EredanITCG
• CityVille

However, with the growing list of Facebook member who I befriended just to get ahead in the games, it started to get out of control. So I have now decided that it is time to call a quit on all of them.

Instead I will be redirecting my leisure time to focus on creating similar game without the Facebook dependency of course. Stay tuned.

As mentioned before, this blog is now upgraded to BlogEngine.NET 1.6.1 which has better spam control. Every comment now needs to be validated with Recaptcha engine.

General, Software

As you would notice now, I have just deleted all the comments (or should I say, spam) from my blog.

I am putting a stop to comments spamming in this blog. Will also do an update to BlogEngine 1.6.1 shortly.

Bye bye spam!

General, Software

I have been getting more comments nowadays compared to when I first started 4 years ago. Assuming that these comments are real, not just spams, I believe there is some housekeeping needed so that the same question does not need to be asked again and again.

1. I don't need any guest poster on my PERSONAL blog.
2. I don't write enough to be considered as a guest poster.
3. Link, ping, traceback all you need or want to my blog.
4. There is a newsletter function which will send email everytime I write to my blog. It's on the bottom of the right column/panel of this blog.

Infact, if you are reading this blog not directly from the website, you need to go to the correct URL: www.channiaga.com to get most functions of BlogEngine.NET.

Thank you all for reading this.

General

Early 2009 I moved to a suburb 12kms away from the CBD. I did check that the suburb telephone exchange could support ADSL2+, however I can't tell how long the actual distance of phone cable is. Turned out that I could only get around 5Mbps ADSL2+ speed.

This was dissapointing and I decided to get a cable engineer to install ADSL2+ central splitter to see if I can squeeze more speed into the line. Again, turned out that it hasn't helped. The new splitter probably gained me less than 200Kbps if any at all.

I got a friend living in the same street, only about 100 metres away. His ADSL2+ managed to stay around 7-8Mbps. So I am thinking that I must have got a bad phone cable between the exchange to the house. Not sure what can be done, currently I am just putting up with the speed until I move again or can find time to argue with Optus/Telstra to get me switched to a different cable.

Internet

Hehe yes, sometime in 2009 I got back into playing GEWar for one round I think. I didn't make too much achivement this time, it's just felt different and there wasn't enough friends to make this time around. Anyway, I stopped playing it for another online war strategy game called Evony. This game is very similar to Civilization, a game I used to like very much.

Evony runs multiple servers and I tried playing on 3 (three) of these servers. After around 2 months of playing, in 2 (two) servers I pretty much run out of luck and lost everything to other alliances. So, for now I just play casually on the last server where I at least still have some luck!

Games

Around the end of 2008, I assembled a new Media Centre PC because the old one starting to crank up on noise. So I told myself, the new Media Centre PC has to be quiet. The centre piece of this new PC is the case of course, an Antec Fusion Black which looks stunning compared to the old Media Centre running on Antec Overture II. Other than this, the motherboard (Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H) was also specifically built for HTPC with onboard video card that outputs upto 1080p HD through HDMI.

This Media Centre PC was excellent in every sense. Almost everyone who looks at it thought its a home theatre or receiver system, instead of a Media Centre PC. Only problem I have with it now is its inability to be connected to my wireless-n network, but that's due to the some yet unknown issue with signal reliability between the router and the PC. I will talk about the wireless in another time.

Hardware, Media, Wireless

Most people who uses or have used Windows would have heard or known about Windows 7. Microsoft makes sure you know about their latest OS too considering their advertisement seems to be more on your face compared to Windows Vista. Furthermore, most people probably have tried or knew that Windows 7 is ACTUALLY faster and better than Windows Vista.

So the question is whether Windows 7 really worth it to buy. Well, I would say yes definitely, especially if you are in one of the countries where Microsoft is selling the Family Pack (allows 3 upgrades to Windows 7 Home Premium). I bite the bullet already and had purchased one.

First upgrade was done on my older media centre PC to test it out. And it's really good, all the eye candies!!! Most important change is the fact that the Australian TV Guide is now working without any hack required. I was told that apparently they now transfer the guide data through the TV cable. Wow, thanks!

However, one of the old problem came back, the channel switching is slower compared to when it was running Windows Vista. Not sure why yet, could be because the driver is not yet optimised or just the fact that Windows 7 requires more grunt/performance out of the hardware.

Media, Software

Being a computer enthusiast, it's probably not uncommon that I hoard quite a number of computers at home. In total, I have bought and still owned a total of 7 computers:

• A very old Pentium II 333MHz desktop PC which runs Linux but is currently inactive.
• A quite old Pentium IV desktop PC which runs Windows XP. This used to be my server but has been inactive for a year now since I moved house early last year.
• An older media centre PC which I blogged about having issue with power supply. This is now running Windows 7 Home Premium.
• A newer media centre PC which I built in 2008 to replace the older media centre PC. This is running Windows Vista Home Premium, but has been inactive for almost a year because I couldn't connect it to the router.
• An old Sony Vaio laptop PC which is not used as much now as it gets hot very quickly. This is running Windows XP.
• An ASUS laptop PC which is used by my significant other for her work and leisure and running Windows Vista Home Premium.
• The newest BenQ laptop PC which I used for work and leisure, as well as typing this blog! This is running Windows Vista Business.

There you go, so how many computer(s) have you got and still owned?

Software, Hardware