2012... Happy New Year! Guet's Neus! Καλή χρονιά!

Happy New Year to everybody! This is my traditional combined New Year's and Blog-Anniversary post. I've had this weblog running for seven years now. While the weblog has settled on a slow pace in the last few years, by the end of this year it picked up a little bit, if not in actual posts, then at least in spirit. Yes, I feel much more like posting stuff on here. I'm no way back to my old rhythm (of about one post per day), but sometimes there are two or days in a row when I post something, yay!

Bloody Xmas Reading

There were few family obligations this christmas, so I was able to do, what the holidays are actually there for: Slack and read and stuff myself with chocolates. In fact, I started the program early. On the 22nd I had bought tome II and III of Stieg Larsson's "Millenium Trilogy" ("The Girl Who Played with Fire" and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest"), having read the first one some while back ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"). So for a few days and excluding a season's invitation, I was glued to a soft seat, reading on. Now these books are what George Orwell termed "good bad books"...

Lachs und Homemade Food Photographie

Vor ein paar Tagen bin ich auf dem Nachhauseweg noch schnell beim Supermarkt vorbei, mit der klassischen Frage: "Was könnte ich denn so auf die schnelle zu essen machen?" Eine scheibe Lachs fiel mir dann auf, mehr oder weniger frisch, wie das halt im Supermarkt so kommt.

Subway Line 1 Back in Full Service

Actually I didn't record when the big project of a total overhaul of Line 1 started (the "Ilektrikos" or "Treno" as the Athenians call it, "green line" as the foreigners seem to call it). In July 2009 I posted an image of the Petralona subway station under works, probably because until then, the project hadn't really interfered with my moving about. Now, lots of time and some delays later, the project is finished. Again I'm late in reporting, it was last week on Monday that trains started to roll normally through Omonia station again.

Part of the delay was due to the archeological findings that were expected to be found - and indeed found - near Thision station. There was part of a temple of the 12 gods under the lines. Make that right under the lines, while the train was in part operation it was possible to see the findings quite clearly. A smallish court battle later and the findings were covered and the track again laid over them.

As everybody will tell you, subway line 1 is the oldest line in Athens, 100 or so years old, and for a very long time it was the only line there was. As my flat is very near one of its stations, I can tell you that it's really convenient. Sure it's slower than the new lines (maybe with the rework not that much slower any more), but it sure beats taking the bus.

Socken für bergsteigende Apple-Geeks

Was trägt der bergsteigende Apple-Geek bevorzugt als Socken? Natürlich "X-Code" Socken, die sind schön warm und da schreibt sich dann wohl der Objective-C Code mit den Füssen. (Erklärung für Nicht-Programmierer: Die von Apple zum Mac OS X mitgelieferte Programmierumgebung hört auf den gleichen Namen.) Passend dazu empfehlen wir die griechische "Apple-Unterwäsche" auf www.apple.gr (die als Witz schon uralt ist, aber hoffentlich immer wieder gern gesehen).

Die Socken habe ich im übrigen auf dem letzten Ausflug getestet. Sie sind schön weich und warm. Obwohl es neblig, feucht und kühl war, mit viel, viel Wind, war mir an den Füssen nie kalt. Die Schuhe dürfen allerdings nicht zu gross sein, da habe ich die leichte Tendenz gespürt, dass die Füsse in den Socken hin- und herrutschen.

Going Back to Zope 2.7

When I wrote my Notes on Zope 2 migration some while back, reinstalling an old Zope version was a side topic only. Last Thusday on #zope, there was an enquiry that led to a reinstallation of a Zope 2.7 install. Which is really old stuff, but it turns out, it was needed to get an unfortunate admin up and running again. The story commences with "eriolssi" asking for help, because as I understood it, he (I assume "he", though apparently there exists a female game character by that name) accidentally deleted a Zope install...

A short hike at Grammeni Oxia

The weekend I was out of town with the Krystallis moutain club. We were at the Grammeni Oxia (Γραμμένη Οξυά) hut in central Greece. We arrived Saturday, with the last bit of light. The road and hut were in fog, we were inside the clouds. Not much chance for photography. I had pondered long to take the Arca with me, but in the end I didn't and it was a good choice. In that weather, there wouldn't have been much to do for it.

The hut keeper had started to warm up the hut and we were warming us up in front of the fireplace. After some time (which we used to eat a "snack"), the rest of the group arrived, we were now 11. Once they were firmly installed in front of the fireplace too, the eating started in earnest. After having had a good dinner and nice evening, I grabbed my sleeping bag and bivouac bag and went outside the hut. I had decided I'd leave the heat of the sleeping quarters behind and test out my old bivouac bag. I slept warm and cozy in the fog. Not a trace of being wet and cold, even in drizzling fog.

On Sunday morning we ventured out to go for the "summit" of Grammeni Oxia. The weather wasn't in our favour at all. There was a thick fog, with lots of winds. Basically we were in the clouds, which were pushed around by a strong wind. Personally I was dressed very appropriately, I wasn't cold at all. After about an hour though, it was clear that going on wasn't any use. Part of our group wasn't very experienced nor well trained and we didn't want to risk any detours due to the fog nor any exhausted people due to the cold. So insted we turned around. In lower areas, the fog had lifted (which is where I took that picture).

We hiked a bit along the rough road leading to the hut, in order to appreciate the forest. I took a few pictures with the Firstflex, on Tri-X black+white film. Then we went back to Athens, having a good lunch all together in a taverna on the way.

Doing my own accounting

Now that I am running my own business, there arises the question of accounting. Actually that question had been posed way before the business was there and I've thought a lot about it. There are three strategies:

1. Do your own bookkeeping
2. Do your own bookkeeping, get help from an accountant for closing the books and doing the tax papers
3. Give it all to an accountant

So far I've chosen strategy 1, with an option to switch to strategy 2. I've had to learn a lot, despite having done double entry accounting in the past and despite having coded lots of business software in my life (hey, if you need anything like that, we're here to help!) But having to learn so much is exactly why I consider strategy 1 to be a major win for me. You see, the stuff that I'm learning about, often means that there are decisions made. You can do stuff one way or another. Or it means that you have to beware of things you might be doing "in real business life", which have an outcome on what happens in your books (and therefore in your taxes).

So if I go with option 1, it means that I have to learn a lot about stuff that I have to know anyway. If I give my receipts and all that to an accountant, then I have to have a lot of trust in that person. What's more, I need a very good communication with that person, because I will have to consult her on a lot of my business decisions. I might readily switch to option 2, because doing it all alone has risks too, but then I will be already on a base of knowledge that lets me work around some pitfalls. Even when my company gets so big (and I'll get so philthy rich) that doing my accounting is no longer an option, the knowledge will serve me well.

As for the software for accounting... you can spend a lot on that. Depending on where you (or your business) is located, you will have to spend a lot, because in some countries they allow only certain "certified" accounting programs. In my companie's case (Switzerland), any reliable software will do. Being a true geek, I found ledger and hledger, which are command line accounting programs. "ledger" (also called "ledger-cli" sometimes) is the original version, coded in C++ (so it's also called "c++ ledger" sometimes). I had some trouble getting it installed, but finally got version 2.6.3 up and running using "homebrew" on Mac OS X. As for "hledger", the "h" is an indication that it's writtin in Haskell. There is a (slightly older) binary on the site, which was enough to get me up and running fast. I've since managed to compile my own hledger too.

These CLI ledger programs basically work by entering "entries" into a "journal" file in a simple format. This approach was very welcome for me, since it allowed me to play around until I had reactived my memory about how double entry accounting works. While I was reading up I could try things out and check with various reports how it all worked together. For a while I had one category of entries "the wrong way around" and it was easy to correct once I figured it out. Even from the most flexible GUI accounting programs, I remember this kind of thing to be much more complicated.

These two programs share a (more or less) common file format, so with a little care it's possible to use both of them in parallel. Which I do now, because there are some features that hledger doesn't have yet, while it feels more comfortable in other respects. The features I miss most (and for which I turn to "c++ ledger") are the --wide and --related options for showing a "register" of an account. Gotta really learn Haskell now, so I can contribute that stuff myself! :-)

Hiking Flambouritsa

Yesterday I was out with the "Krystallis" mountain club, hiking the Flambouritsa glen (in the Zyria area, near Trikala. We were 14 people, which is a nice group size. The hike was simple, without any difficult terrain really, but with a some stretches where the path was covered with loose stones. All that was easily forgotten, because of the great weather we had. Sunshine and a clear blue sky, cool air without any wind, just enough haze in the air to make photography interesting.

We basically made a round trip, passing alongside the glen on top of the edge at first, then on the upper end, descending down and returning next to the stream (which didn't have any water) to our starting point. At the point where we came down, there was kind of a wide valley housing what were said to be wild horses. I don't know if they are really so wild, but you can see them as little specs in the picture above. We were having our lunch break in viewing distance of them.

Along with me I had my trusty old Firstflex, with some Fuji 400H (color negative) and Kodak Tri-X (black+white). Those pictures obviously aren't developed yet, the picture above was taken with a Lumix FT-3, which has replaced my broken Pentax W60. The Lumix is good for image quality and ruggedness, but the software is nothing to write home about. Basically all you get is "push that button and hope for the best".

We were out and about for roughly seven hours. After the hike everybody stormed a local taverna. Lots of food was eaten, lots of old and new stories were told and the sore feed could relax a bit. Then everybody drove home to Athens. Judging from myself, this was followed by some good and deep sleep.

Installing psycopg2 on Mac OS X 10.6 with a 64bit Python

While installing a Django application that uses Postgres on my MacBook with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), I ran into some problems that were all over the net. The symptom was that when I tried to pip install the app's requirements, I got a traceback with something like this for psycopg2:

ImportError: 
dlopen([...]/psycopg2/_psycopg.so, 2): Symbol not found: _PQbackendPID
...
Expected in: flat namespace

Searching the web for this found lots of things, but they didn't seem to work for me... because of some dead bodies in my Mac's basement. Basically this errors happens due to a mismatch of 32 or 64 bitness of Python, psycopg2, and Postgres. I had installed Postgres from the official installer (9.1.1), Python 2.7 was standard from the system (which is 64bit). First attempt to fix the mess, following a tipp from Anna Vester, I tried to recompile psycopg2:

pip uninstall psycopg2
...
env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" pip install psycopg2

I'm not using sudo, because I'm in a virtualenv and also I didn't dual install for i386 as suggested in the blog post. There were a lot of posts out there telling me simply to reinstall psycopg2, which didn't get me anywhere.

But... even with this it didn't work for me. I found some other hints out there that got me looking in the right direction. The second problem was that I had an old version of Postgres around, from when my MacBook was running 10.4. The pg_config from that old version didn't like the psycopg2, even in 64bit. Pointing my path to the new postgres bin directory instead of the old one solved that too.