- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Giorgio_Pioda.html">Debian Edu interview: Giorgio Pioda</a></div>
- <div class="date">17th September 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p>After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
-<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
-Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
-this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
-administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
-conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
-in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
-university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
-Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
-IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
-got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
-labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
-the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
-training is anyway very important</p>
-
-<p>I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
-<a href="http://www.spse.ch/">SPSE school</a> (secondary) is a very
-special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
-all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
-recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
-already several years ago. But since the system was still not
-Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
-use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
-next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
-hole.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
-very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
-the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
-engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
-and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
-can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
-platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
-head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
-hassle.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
-flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
-there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
-need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
-devices that have specific software packages for another specific
-distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
-Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
-and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
-mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
-combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
-<a href="http://moo.nac.uci.edu/~hjm/Perceus-Report.html">Perceus</a>
-has the same...</p>
-
-<p>For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
-only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
-something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
-statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<P>I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
-cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
-just because they are normally not open to change.</p>
-
-<p>Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
-to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
-don't.</p>
-
-<p>We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
-laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
-we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
-machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
-reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
-repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
-Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.</p>
+ <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Ledger___double_entry_accounting_using_text_based_storage_format.html">Ledger - double-entry accounting using text based storage format</a></div>
+ <div class="date">18th December 2012</div>
+ <div class="body"><p>A few days ago I came across
+<a href="http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/hledger/">a blog post from Joey
+Hess</a> describing <a href="http://ledger-cli.org/">ledger</a> and
+hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it
+interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
+accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
+the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I
+look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
+the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in
+text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
+
+are at least <a href="https://github.com/ledger/ledger/wiki/Ports">five
+different implementations</a> able to read the format. An example
+entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
+generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+2004-05-27 Book Store
+ Expenses:Books $20.00
+ Liabilities:Visa
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
+look for others using it. I found blog posts from
+<a href="http://blog.spang.cc/posts/hledger_rocks_my_world/">Christine
+Spang</a>,
+<a href="http://bugsplat.info/2010-05-23-keeping-finances-with-ledger.html">Pete
+Keen</a>,
+<a href="http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2010/11/06/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/">Andrew
+Cantino</a> and
+<a href="http://blog.iphoting.com/blog/2012/11/29/command-line-double-entry-accounting/">Ronald
+Ip</a> describing how they use it, as well as a post from
+<a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/ledger-cli/r0oWjwbQ9Bo">Bradley
+M. Kuhn</a> at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good
+recommendations fitting my need.</p>
+
+<p>The <a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/l/ledger.html">ledger</a>
+package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
+<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/h/haskell-hledger.html">hledger</a>
+package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger
+seemed the best choice to get started.</p>
+
+<p>To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/tools/lodo2ledger">web scraper</a> for
+<a href="http://www.lodo.no/">LODO</a>, the accounting system used by
+the <a href="http://www.nuug.no/">NUUG</a> association, and started to
+play with the data set. I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
+am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
+using the "<tt>ledger balance</tt>" command. But I will have to
+gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
+for the organisations I am involved in.</p>
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