e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

GnuCash price updates

I've used GnuCash for a long time to track my finances. As I have a few shares and other investments, I previously used a cron job on my main Linux desktop machine to pull in pricing data about these each day. As the Australian Stock Exchange finishes trading at 4pm, and I'd usually be working on my computer until 5pm, this wasn't an issue. The machine would be powered on, and the cron job would execute in the background.

Things changed when I retired.

[16-Jan-2024]
DCX X01-02:   In eons past (in 1988), I wrote a program in MACRO-32 to call the DCX$ procedures to compress and expand... (82 words)

[23-Nov-2023]
Some more changes to the examples:   As I mentioned in the previous post, I used to own an AlphaServer 800 as my workhorse VMS machine at... (290 words)

[09-Aug-2023]
Examples updated:   My venerable Alpha 800 was retired long ago, and I've been relying on resources at work to answer the regular... (259 words)

And fixed:   The examples are working again. This is what happens to you trying to maintain a hosted web site for multiple... (94 words)

[08-Aug-2023]
Yes, I know the examples are broken...:   I'm working on getting my dev->website pipeline going and I've broken something. I'll figure out what it is tomorrow. Apologies... (23 words)

[25-Jul-2023]
I'm officially retired:   After what seems an eternity, the company I've worked for for nearly 15 years back here in Australia has finally... (241 words)

[06-Nov-2021]
My goodness, long time between posts:  

It's been over two years since I've posted anything here! The life of a VMS manager when the system they're managing is in maintenance mode and is being decommissioned is rather mundane, however I haven't forgotten VMS, and have updated the links to VSI's new documentation set in my examples.

[29-Jun-2018]
Bit tests in COBOL:  

It's been a long while since I've had anything interesting to post here. Mostly, my day to day occupation for the last couple of years has been maintaining the infrastructure, operating system, and ensuring business as usual continues for the company's primary application.

However, I got an interesting query from an old friend today, asking if there is a way to do bitwise tests in COBOL. This was an interesting challenge that made me think outside the box!

[14-Jan-2016]
Are we getting closer to the bug?:   In my previous post which was terrifyingly over six months ago, I again touched on the issue that I described way back in June 2014 about directory renames sometimes producing catastrophically incorrect results. I thought I'd bring you up-to-date with what's happening... (624 words)