Greg In The Desert

If your like me and are a Quicken fanatic and are like me a Mac user, then you have most likely been anticipating the latest version of Quicken that was due to be released summer of 2009.

I have bad news for you. An Intuit Quicken blog post says that the next version of Quicken for Mac (Quicken Financial Life For Mac, or whatever they call it) is now slated for February of 2010. It was first supposed to come out in 2008, then 2009 and now 2010.

Intuit will release a new version of Quicken for the Mac platform in February 2010.

I don’t know why I’m having a hard time believing Intuit. They must have one programmer who is new to Mac programming working on Quicken for Mac.

The one killer feature that keeps me using Quicken 2007 is the integration with financial institutions. I can write checks and schedule transactions with all of the banks and credit cards I use and have all of my information in Quicken up to date. I almost never have to visit the individual website of any of these banks and rarely write a paper check.

There are a number of better application than Quicken for the Mac but none of them have this integration with banks that is a huge time saver.

I have attempted to sign up with Intuit to be a beta tester for years and have never been selected. They have a new program called Quicken Inner Circle that might get me closer.

In early May I spotted the first scorpion of the year in the house. In the last few years I have been living here, this is the earliest I have seen on in the house. In previous years I didn’t start to see them until July.

I was sure they were coming in from the garage so I put diatomaceous earth throughout the garage and around the entrances to the house. Diatomaceous earth works good on insects because it’s very itchy to insects and it will suck the moisture out of their bodies. In the case of scorpions I’ve read that they will just avoid it.

Tonight I came home and found Saturn playing with something. The good news is Saturn found a scorpion the bad news is the scorpion made it past my defenses. That means that it either went around the diatomaceous earth or it came in another way.

I will start going around the perimeter of the house sealing up cracks. I’m not sure what else to do.

What’s good news for Albuquerque is bad news for Austin. New Mexico offered the Texas company Solar Array Ventures Inc. (SAVe)such good incentives that they are moving the whole company, headquarters and all, to New Mexico. They wont say exactly what New Mexico offered.

The City of Albuquerque website says the factory will be built on the west side on Cordero Mesa near I-40 on Paseo del Vulcan and could employ up to 1000 people in 5 years. Assuming Texas doesn’t pull a Tesla and manage to keep SAVe in Austin.

Oddly, not a single Albuquerque TV news site has an article on the company coming to Albuquerque that I can find.

Tesla finally announced their new Model S Coupe last week. This is the car that Tesla was supposed to build in Albuquerque, but moved the manufacturing to San Jose California when they got a better deal. That didn’t work out either and it’s not clear to me exactly where they plan to build the Model S.

I lived in San Jose in 2001 and it’s a crazy place compared to Albuquerque. I’m still not sure how they ever thought it would be cheaper to produce the cars there rather in Albuquerque in the long term. It could end up being a good thing for Albuquerque if they go out of business like Eclipse Aviation did. I’m certainly not wishing for Tesla to go under but the times are tough and I’ve read some possible bad news in that regard. I would still like to see them have some manufacturing in Albuquerque.

At $40,000 over 500 sedans have already been pre ordered. It’s a good looking car but I won’t be on the buyers list anytime soon. Maybe if they came out with a pickup truck I might have to get out the credit card.

In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been a few changes and other screwey things happening on this site. On 9 March 2009 I received a email from my then hosting provider MacHighway.

Unfortunately, we’ve needed to suspend your blog, greginthedesert.net. Your site is regularly using between 30 – 99% of the CPU on that server. It appears that your site is getting around 161k hits per month. The good news is that Technorati estimates that a blog getting 100k his a month is worth $75k/year. The bad news is that it’s far exceeds the fair use policy of our shared hosting environment. Your sites’ needs have outgrown what a shared hosting provider can offer.

Additionally, your site calls on a tremendous amount of resources with all of the dynamic information that the site needs to load in order just to display the front page. This is exacerbating the problem and should definitely be trimmed down.

I totally understand how this was a problem and I can see how I made it worse with some of the stuff I was using to generate my blog since I have been experimenting with plug-in’s and templates. I replied to the support ticket and said I had a number of ideas on how to reduce the CPU usage of my blog and that I wasn’t coming close to my bandwidth or disk usage quotas. They were having none of it and said move my blog elsewhere.

It also would have been nice if they could have given me some heads up about the excessive CPU usage. I guess they didn’t want me as their customer. It’s too bad since the few other issues I had with MacHighway were well taken care of.

I started to look for a non-shared hosting provider. Dedicated hosting is expensive, the cheapest I found was nearly $100 a month. Even though the MacHighway support guy suggested my blog should be worth $75,000, I make tens of dollars a year on advertising, not hundreds. There is no way I can afford dedicated hosting. Also, the 161,000 hits a month I get are only translating to about 9,000 real people a month. I also can only see where 58K hits a month are coming from including robots, image leachers, etc.

After a searching around for a few days including local services providers I ended up going with another shared hosting provider: Dream Host. In fact, there’s a number of things I like about them but that’s a blog post for another day.

MacHighway temporarily enabled my blog so I could export my data. I copied all the Wordpress directories to my hard drive, exported the database and exported a WXR file. Just in case the database dump failed to import.

After getting my domain redirected to the new servers at DreamHost and Wordpress installed, I attempted to import the database. The raw sql file is 230MB and compressed it’s 22MB, far more than the 7MB limit that the phpmyadmin allows. I had to become familiar with the command line to do the import. After contacting DreamHost support because a few things weren’t properly configured on my account I attempted to try the command line import sequence. The import failed on line two, where the sql file’s phpmyadmin version was 2.11.9.4 and DreamHost’s version is 2.11.9.3. I commented that line out and tried the import again, next fail was at line 7.

I contacted DreamHost support to see what they would say about the situation. They tried importing and found several lines which failed. The support person suggested that I continue to comment out lines which fail. I thought that was a bad idea since many of those line look like important parts of the database creation process and I didn’t know how long this editing-upload-fail-repeat process would continue.

Database import wasn’t going to work. I started working on importing the WXR file. My import file was 10.6 MB, bigger than than the 7MB limit imposed by wordpress for import files. I compressed it, which I read elsewhere could overcome the import size limitation. Even though it brought the file under 7MB, it could not get it to sucessfully import. I had two results with the importing of the WXR file, sometime the site would just hang sometime it would give me a 408 page.

I went through and removed the 14,000 plus but that didn’t change the results. I broke the WXR file into several small files and was able to have successful imports. I went through a process of having one half of the cut up file succeeded importing and the other half fail. It has become clear that there is some part at the beginning of the WXR that is corrupt or some other problem that is confusing the import process.

There are still abut 400 posts left to import, but the majority of the important ones are there and I will continue to go through the process of breaking up the remainder of the WXR file until I find the problem entry. Although I learned a lot about Wordpress and phpmyadmin and SQL databases, I’m looking forward to getting this whole ordeal behind me and return to blogging.

• @bsailer Where at? Nothing near sothern and Unser. in reply to bsailer #
• @bsailer Nevermind. One just needs to wait 20 seconds. in reply to bsailer #
• Wow, I really didn’t think we would get snow like this #
• @bsailer same here in reply to bsailer #
• and here’s the sun #
• @jcsheng505 i know you have nothing better to do. in reply to jcsheng505 #
• @fivezerofive Ive tried it, I hate to admit that I can only do one. I plan to remedy that. in reply to fivezerofive #
• As John Stewart pointed out, Czars failed. Lets stop calling everyone in charge of something a Czar. #
• @jabancroft the car sliding bit is crazy! in reply to jabancroft #
• RE: Rail Runner hitting cow. 2009 is year of the cow according to Chinese calendar. #
• I should be in bed. Instead I’m eating peanut butter. #
• @bsailer Buy it! in reply to bsailer #
• looks like facial recognition in iPhoto. Now they need to put it in Aperture. #
• macrumorslive: STEVE JOBS JUST DIED. I say BS. #
• Think MacRumorslive was hacked #
• What other live feeds are people watching? #
• I could do without the snarky comments on engadget #
• I paid for image stabilization plugins on the previous iMovie. They worked well. #
• Box set is totally cool idea. #
• was hoping for a 32GB iPhone. #
• I upgraded some of my DRMed music. Now I have a whole bunch of duplicates. Thanks iTunes! #
• Apple did a terrible job of repacing my song. Gave me “clean” version of songs I had bought as “Explicit” and didn’t give me the same album. #
• More bad news from INTC today. Not looking forward to Jan 15th. http://tinyurl.com/7mp2db #
• stupid applescript. Why does something that works 2 days ago not longer work. #
• A reboot fixed applescript issues. Hope Snow Leopard makes this kind of thing less problematic. #

Smarthome’s RemoteLinc is now available for pre order. The RemoteLinc is a RF remote for Insteon. The bad news is the RemoteLinc is not compatable with the current SignaLinc RF to Insteon bridge. They are replaced with a new product called the Access Point. The good news, Smarthome is offering a “free” upgrade to the access point if you have SignaLincs. If you buy a 2 pack of refurbished access points and send in your old signal lincs, they will refund your money and send you a free RemoteLinc.

This certainly makes it easier to speculate that SmartLabs was having technical problems with their RF protocol, causing the delays in releasing the Remote. Also see this thread on the smarthome message boards.

Update: I’m mistaken on how the return works. You don’t get a refund on the cost of the access points. You simply get a $49.99 remotelinc for each pair of signalincs you send in. Not quite as good as I had thought.

Many news sites are requiring registration to read news articles on their sites. This registration doesn’t cost anything but your personal information. Some people, like myself, don’t want to give that information away. A service called BugMeNot popped up that gives you a username and password that you can enter into the site without having to go in and enter all the information. You skip the registration but the information they have about you, the reader, is bogus.

This is bad for the news site since they use that information to target advertising to their readers. Why should I care about that, I got to read the news article?