D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

Re: [LUG] readability check

 

On Fri, Dec 30, 2005 at 06:16:58PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> On Friday 30 December 2005 5:06 pm, Henry Bremridge wrote:
> > I read this section as allowing me to link my palm contacts, expense and
> > appointment records for manipulation on a desktop.
> 
> Correct.
> 
> > Question
> >
> > -   If I select Attendees in the expense record, will this also populate
> >     the invoice-city or invoice-vendor fields?
> 
> Attendees isn't fully supported by pilot-link because it's not a standard 
> field in all Palms. It isn't always accessible via proprietary programs 
> either. Remember, Palm OS is still proprietary - they aren't on Linux yet - 
> which is why I'm also looking at iPAQ's and Familiar/GPE/emDebian. It's the 
> same story with dates of birth.
> 
> AFAICT, none of the proprietary programs can put Palm data from disparate 
> databases into a single, open, plain text format - like XML. (CSV is a pita 
> and doesn't count!)
> 
> (I'll make a note in the manpage on attendees, Thanks.)
> 
> By using categories or the calendar description, yes, you can correlate 
> appointments with expenses and specific clients. That is the express purpose 
> of --invoice-city and --invoice-vendor. Most people will use --invoice-city.
> 
> e.g. Say I worked for a client from 9am to 1pm and from 2pm to 6pm on 
> Wednesday 2nd November, 2005. I incur a bridge toll, mileage and a daily 
> parking charge. By putting the name of the job (in this case the location of 
> the workplace) in the Description of the appointment and as the Location of 
> the expense, I can query my Palm for that day and get 6 entities returned
> (this is one of my test cases, so it does work):
> 
> $ pilot-qof -a -t 2005-11-2 --invoice-city
> 
> 3 Expense events - toll, mileage and parking.
> 2 Calendar events - the 4 hrs in the morning and 4 in the afternoon.
> 1 Contact record - the full contact details for that job.
> 
> Hey presto, with a little XSL or Perl or PHP, you can generate your own 
> invoice in HTML or whatever you fancy. Your own graphics, your own logos, 
> fonts, styles, layout . . . Best thing is, of course, that the XML structure 
> stays the same - only the data changes for each subsequent query. So the same 
> stylesheet or script can always process all your queries with no changes. 
> Create as many stylesheets or scripts as you need, they'll just keep on 
> working.
> 
> Data Freedom. That's the name of the game.
> 
> Next stage is to sort out the glitches to allow me to import that XML directly 
> into GnuCash as an invoice for the client using that location as the Job ID. 
> Create a new Job and a new client, if necessary, too.
> 
> > -   Would this program allow me to extract a list of all appointments with
> > a particular person / company with the date of each appointment?
> 
> The way to do this is to specify some "tag" in the Description field, or use a 
> particular Category. So yes, if you are logical and *consistent* about how 
> you enter your Palm data, a host of data mining opportunities become 
> available. Just like any other record system, the more consistent you are in 
> data entry, the better the results you'll get out.
> 
> The date range can be extended to a whole month or an entire year using the 
> shorthand options.
> 
Nice. I need to start thinking about how to make use of this program.
When is it being released?

> Using the longer SQL-type queries, you can have completely arbitrary queries 
> that go from a Sunday to a Friday or even split days etc. It just takes a 
> little care in the SQL.
> 
> In addition, the same query would be able to list all expenses incurred during 
> your appointments with that client / person.
> 
> The rest of the program options can then do a range of other things like:
> 1. Separate your appointments into files, one per category - allowing a script 
> to calculate the number of days you've worked and how many you've had as 
> holiday - including totting up the number of hours if necessary.
> 2. Organise your expenses by payment type, expense type, or amount.
> 3. Separate out your mileage records within a certain time frame to produce a 
> reliable measure of business mileage during any time period. Compare that 
> with your odometer for the same time period and you've got your 
> business:private usage ratio for your tax return.
> 4. Correlate your ToDo lists with your calendar to see when you got the most 
> things done.
> 
> Plus, you can select records from one Palm device and upload just those to 
> another device. There's more to be done in this area but it's coming along.
> 
> > -   In the invoice section: para 1
> >
> >     If both are supplied, I presume this means if both invoice-city and
> >     invoice-vendor are selected then the search is only on invoice-city
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Logically, the vendor of an expense should have little to do with the client 
> being charged for the item purchased. However, in practice, I find the Vendor 
> field next to useless and what I need is a Client field - so I use Vendor as 
> if it was Client. Hence the allowance to use vendor in this way.
> 
> Equally, City in terms of an expense is just as easily termed 'Location' which 
> is far more flexible as it allows differentiation between expenses incurred 
> during work for multiple clients in the same city.
>

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Digital signature