<ARCHIVE> Wilmer's stuff

Like many people, I was also losing track of my finance. Having bank accounts in use in both NL and IE probably didn't help. :-) As any proper FOSS geek, I learned to like the monster called GnuCash. (Psst! Guys! It's pretty amazing that a product more than ten years old still doesn't let you do operations (like delete) on multiple entries at once, dont you think?)

And there's this thing about Irish Banks. They have bigger issues to worry about than how well their Internet banking service works. What keeps you away from looking at my bank account? You (hopefully) not knowing my six-digit user ID, date of birth (top secret information! Have I mentioned that my birthday is next Saturday? ;-P) and another six-digit number, this time my PIN number. No one-time passwords, no challenge-response system, nothing else.

My only hope is that this lets you transfer money only to accounts to which I've transferred money before. IOW all you can do is give my landlady a little present. Pfew!

Also, going back to the original topic, there's no way to export info from their web interface. So I wrote one myself. One advantage of a pretty simple website is that I could easily write a scraper for it. Run it with the right arguments, and it'll spit out a CSV bank statement, ready to be fed to your favourite accounting software.

What else have I been doing? Been working on Giggity. Android development's fun. I spent the weekend scraping the Dance Valley timetable page, Google, Last.FM, Wikipedia and more to automatically generate a Giggity schedule file for it. Love it! :-)