More Buxfer goodies (this time, a backup script)

I just realized that I'm putting a fair amount of effort (and information) on Buxfer. Been tracking rather faithfully my expenses for a month, and I'm rather happy with the service.

But what if it someday fails, or disappears? What about the data? It seems to have a data export facility implemented, but it's for Pro accounts only. Okay, it seems like either I misread the membership plans, or they changed them. Either way, the data export is good for when you want to take a look at the statements in excel, but as far as a backup goes, it's no good for me.

A backup must be something I don't have to think about for it to work. It should do its job in the background as much as possible, and only warn me if something goes wrong. Thankfully Buxfer's API has enough functionality to cover this.

This is a small script that fetches all transactions from your Buxfer accounts (or one particular account) to disk. It has some smarts implemented to "continue" a previous backup, so you can setup a scheduled task periodically to fetch the transactions, and it should just fetch the new ones after the first run.

So far it stores the info as pure json, which was the easiest way to implement it. Should I require in the future to actually act on this, I can parse the json again and convert it to csv, or any other format I need.

The source is here, and a skeleton configuration file is here.

To use it you'll need Python (I tested it with 2.5, but I think it should work with 2.4) and simplejson.

Configuration should be self-explanatory, it needs you to fill out your username, password, and filename for backup.

To run it, you can pass the path to the configuration file (this way you can have several different configurations, one for each account, or for different users).

I guess this is it. Any questions, feedback or general chat, just leave a comment.

That's all, folks!

v1.2 of BuxferSubmit

Version 1.2 is up at the project's page.

Direct link

Changes:

• Uses jQuery for the async request.
• Stores the user's password in the user's keychain (thanks to Stan Lemon for the code and plugin)
• Minor interface tweak (pressing enter when on the tags text field submits the transaction)

That's all for now. I'd love to get some tag auto-complete, but getting a good interface for it has proven difficult.

Waiting.

on the topic of forced rest time

I actually like waiting for someone at the airport. Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that this only happens once in a while, when I do so I've got my trusty macbook with me, and that I'm not all that eternally busy that I can't spare some time to sit at a coffee shop with wireless.

Not that I do much work, or read all that much, or have a positive contribution to give the world while I'm sitting here. I actually spend most of the time just enjoying people going to and fro or milling about while waiting, like me, for someone else. The coffee shop I'm sitting in has about 32 tables, and it's directly in front of the arrival gate. There are 12 people here, all of them sitting the same way, having a dring, chatting on the phone or just waiting with a bit of a blank stare.

And I'm talking about a mildly peripheral airport like the Lisbon one, which I bet doesn't have one tenth of the cultural cross section of a Heathrow, or an LAX. On the other hand, because it's a smallish one, I can sit at the coffee shop and view most of the arrivals, and it doesn't sound hectic or too crowded. It's just a bunch of people. Waiting.

And you can play a small game, while waiting. Try to think of all these people, every single one of them, as an distinct individual, not just "people". With needs, thoughts, desires, passions, pains and hungers. All of them have a single shared purpose here, but that can be the only thing that they have in common. Imagine the diversity. The blonde lady, dressed in a white short sleeve which passes you? Is she coming or going? Where to? The couple (or so you assume, it's a man and a woman, they could be brothers, or just friends) with the large backpacks. Travelling the world, vacations or volunteer work? The black family, waiting for a relative? Perhaps a son, gone abroad to meet some friends. Of course, the suit, lugging his laptop luggage, blackberry on hand talking and looking just a bit lost, almost (just almost) looking like it's the first time he's here.

And then it starts thinning out. More people are leaving than arriving. There are less flights. And now it's my turn to go. My charge has arrived.

v1.1 of BuxferSubmit

For the impatient:

New version. Should not freeze if Buxfer is slow to respond or if you forget to plug in the cable. Also some better handling of special characters while talking to the server.

Download here.

For the curious:

Buxfer seemed to have had a bit of trouble with site slowness, which exposed my cluelessness in developing widgets that connect to web services (as in, forgot to consider timeouts of XMLHttpRequests).

I was a bit amazed to find neither much info on Apple's site nor on the web on how to best handle these problems. Ended up just setting a timeout before the request, clearing it on success and canceling the request should the timeout happen. Perhaps I should look into a javascript library such as mochikit or jquery to help with the heavy lifting.

Also, most of the code feels to me a bit fragile. The error handling is primitive, and the fact that the request is async makes me a bit queasy. I'll chalk that up to immaturity on my part in developing in javascript, but I hope to have the time to refactor it a bit.

As I said before, the code is up on google code, so feel free to browse around, all three of you who are reading this :)