Tagged "code"

I’ve written previously on importing transactions to hledger/ledger from KBC bank in JavaScript and PTSB bank in Python. I took different approaches to each:

• For KBC, you needed to log in and run Javascript which scrape the transaction table and download it formatted as CSV
• For PTSB, the script automatted logging in, get the transaction table and save locally as CSV

Both approaches are valid - but suffer from the same issues: any change the bank makes to it website needs to be updated in the code. The KBC/JavaScript approach was a bit more robust in that it would just search for rows on a website and download as CSV.

In a previous post, I mentioned importing transactions using ledger/hledger and plain text accounting. As my former bank PTSB recently raised their fees, I decided to move to KBC. I was excited to see, as part of the open payments directive, they have a nice developer portal. I reached out to KBC’s dev team, but alas they are only accepting registered companies, who meet stringent criteria. They told me they hope to open it up soon to end users, I live in hope!

In Python, BytesIO is the way to store binary data in memory. Most examples you’ll see using zip files in memory is to store string data and indeed the most common example you’ll find online from the zipfile module is zipfile.writestr(file_name, "Text Data"). But what if you want to store binary data of a PDF or Excel Spreadsheet that’s also in memory? You could use zipfile.write() (designed to take binary data) but then you can’t specify a filename (since our in-memory file was never written to a location on disk). The reason for this is simple: for a web request or for a test case, you shouldn’t need to store any files on disk.

As part of my previous posts, I talked about ledger and plain text accounting. The only part missing is that you need a method to import transactions from your bank. For this I have been doing this by hand, bi-weekly. I would have to do the following:

1. Log in to online banking
2. Go to the transactions page
3. Select the date range for transactions I needed (double check last date of transaction in ledger at this point)
4. Download the Microsoft Excel format file that wasn’t in the proper format
5. Convert this Excel file into a CSV file that matched my import format (watch the dates, is it YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YYYY?)
6. Finally import the CSV file into ledger
7. Check the balance matches between my online banking and ledger

Sounds like a lot of work right?

In a previous post, I mentioned how I get notified of the restaurant menu via a Ruby script. Recently I’ve moved to a totally different product area and the main communication channel we use is Slack. Naturally enough, I ported the Ruby code I wrote, and it now posts the menu every day to our Slack channel.

This also got me thinking of what other information would be handy to have. I scouted around for ideas and came up with an obvious one: reminder of the bus times to and from the office. So here’s my bus times notification slack bot:

If you haven’t tried Google Apps Script, I found a really nifty use for it: smart filtering for email. Wait, shouldn’t I just use Gmails’ built-in filters? As it turns out you can’t - my filter needs to act on email that matched that filter in the past. So in other words: a filter can only act on email it actually “filters”, which kinda makes sense! I’m a big fan of automation (and email is ripe for automation), as you can see from my post on meetings in Outlook.

Continuing the theme of automation, one of the most repetitive tasks if you work for a big company is timesheets. So I set out to rectify this by scripting it!

Start with you configuration, I named mine hours.ini:

[DEFAULT]
url = FILL_ME_IN
username = FILL_ME_IN
password = FILL_ME_IN

then we need the magic of Selenium to do the heavy lifting, so we install it:

$ pip3 install selenium

I called this script, unsurprisingly hours.py:

I love trying to automate the world, it just feels like magic some of the time! I also really enjoy information coming to me, instead of having to seek it. As we are still only in 2016, we have no world killing Artificial Intelligence (yet). So we have to start small, ease the first world problems! So I decided to make my workplaces’ restaurant menu come to me!

I decided to write it in Ruby and use push notifications, rather than email or SMS. It uses a web automation framework called Selenium, which is available in many languages, including Javascript, Python, Java and obviously Ruby!

You can follow the Microsoft TechNet guide to add VisualBasic code in Outlook rules.

You can just replace the code they give with this:

Sub AutoDeclineMeetings(oRequest As MeetingItem)

' If its not a meeting, we don't process
If oRequest.MessageClass <> "IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request" Then
    Exit Sub
End If

' Get the appointment in the meeting
Dim oAppt As AppointmentItem
Set oAppt = oRequest.GetAssociatedAppointment(True)

' Send a decline response
Dim oResponse
    Set oResponse = oAppt.Respond(olMeetingDeclined, True)
    oResponse.Send

' Lastly, delete the message
oRequest.Delete
End Sub

Sub AutoAcceptMeetings(oRequest As MeetingItem)

' If its not a meeting, we don't process
If oRequest.MessageClass <> "IPM.Schedule.Meeting.Request" Then
    Exit Sub
End If

' Get the appointment in the meeting
Dim oAppt As AppointmentItem
Set oAppt = oRequest.GetAssociatedAppointment(True)

' Send an accept response
Dim oResponse
    Set oResponse = oAppt.Respond(olMeetingAccepted, True)
    oResponse.Send

' Lastly, (optionally) delete the message
'oRequest.Delete
End Sub

For anything else you may want to do with the meeting, check the Outlook Visual Basic Developer Docs.

Below is code for the start of a Twitter bot I am going to build in Java. It’s the most basic way of getting Oauth working (with any account, not just your developer account) and it shows your timeline and can update your status - that’s it for now. The neat thing is it uses Java’s awesome serialisation, so you only should have to authorise your twitter account once!

What you will need:

• Twitter4j Libraries
• Oauth Consumer and Secret Key off twitter
• That is it!

What the code does:

1. Once only:

I wrote this script recently for a friend in a job who needed to output a certain percentage of a log file, but no more and no less. This was in Linux using bash, so I had a go at writing a solution, which you see below. Posting this up in case it’s useful to anyone else!

 # !/bin/sh # Public Domain, by Neil Grogan 2010 # Script
to output last 30% of file by lines

    OLDFILE="oldlog.txt"
    NEWFILE="newlog.txt"
    PERCENT=0.7

    #Use wc to count lines
    LINES=$(wc -l $OLDFILE | awk '{ print $1}')

    #Linespercent = 2 decimal places, lines by percent, round to whole
    LINESPERCENT=$(echo "scale=2; $LINES*$PERCENT" | bc | xargs printf "%1.0f" )

    # Use tail to get last 30% and output, can use tail -s with sleep time to have it run on sched.
    tail -n $LINESPERCENT $OLDFILE >> $NEWFILE