ch68.htm

linux-unix130.linux.and.unix.ebooks130 linux and unix ebookslinuxLearning Linux - Collection of 12 E

68.4.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>The main window for xpostit+.</I>

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading9<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx05.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.5.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>A simple yellow sticky note.</I>

<BR>

<BR>

Several sizes of notes are available for use with the program. The biggest size,

the 4x6 note, is a bit cumbersome to use as a sticky note.</P>

<P>Notes can be anchored, that is, placed at a known location on the screen. By selecting

the Cascading option, you can cause notes scattered on your desktop to be cascaded

around an anchored note.</P>

<P>You can set alarms for the sticky notes as well. Alarms are set for date and time

of day. The menu option Set Alarm... presents the alarm setup dialog box, shown in

Figure 68.6. Set the month, day of the month, and time for the alarm, and then click

the Accept key. When an alarm is set, a small iconic clock is displayed in the menu

of the item. You can either wait for the alarm or unset it with the Unset Alarm...

command from the menu of a note. See Figure 68.7 for a note with an alarm.

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading10<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx06.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.6.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>Setting an alarm for a note.</I>

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading11<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx07.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.7.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>A simple yellow sticky note with

an alarm. <BR>

</I><BR>

The text for all notes can be saved with the Save All Notes item from the menu in

the main item window. The information in each window is saved in a file in the <TT>.postitnotes</TT>

subdirectory in your home directory. Each note's data is stored in a file, with the

name of the title bar displayed on-screen. My notes are placed in files called <TT>note1</TT>,

<TT>note2</TT>, <TT>note3</TT>, and so on.</P>

<P>The contents of a note can be exported to other text files or even e-mailed to

someone else. Choose the Export item from the File menu, and select the file from

the list that is presented. To e-mail the contents of a note, choose <TT>e-mail</TT>

and type the address of the recipient.</P>

<P>The program is a simple one but with very powerful features. XPostit's simplicity

is what makes it so easy to use. Also, as with most Linux code, I can take the note

files on a floppy disk and use them on a Sun workstation with the same application.

I find the notes application a very useful tool indeed.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading12<FONT COLOR="#000077">CBB</FONT></H3>

<P>The CBB program is a handy utility for managing your daily checkbook. It's available

from the site <TT>ftp.me.umn.edu</TT> in the <TT>pub/finance</TT> directory. The

version number at the time of writing was 0.67, and the archive file was called <TT>cbb-0.67.tar.gz</TT>.

The program is surprisingly powerful and quite handy to use on Linux systems.</P>

<P>You can create accounts with CBB, manage several categories in these accounts,

do some tax-return calculations, and even import and export data using Intuit's QIF

format to programs such as Intuit's Quicken. Of course, CBB is not anything like

Quicken, and we cannot expect a freeware program to compete with a giant like Intuit's

primary product. (Yes, Linux has surprised a few giants already!) Using CBB keeps

me from booting into Messy Windoze just to enter a few transactions into Quicken,

so CBB has been well worth the install.</P>

<P>After you have CBB untarred and installed on your system, type <TT>make</TT> <TT>install</TT>

and answer the questions. On a Linux system, you should not have any problems. To

run the application, type <TT>cbb</TT> at the command-line prompt.</P>

<P>The first course of action is to create a new account. Choose the option from

the menu, and you are presented with the dialog box shown in Figure 68.8. Enter all

the information in the dialog box carefully, because it's not apparent where you

can go to edit the account information after you have entered it once.

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading13<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx08.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.8.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>Creating a new account. </I><BR>

<BR>

The transactions are entered in the lower part of the screen, where all the boxes

are shown on the bottom of the window. You have to be careful to size the window

appropriately, or the boxes will not be visible. The main window does not resize

itself to fit the buttons on the lower portion of the window.</P>

<P>Any transactions for that account are shown in the main window. After you have

a new account, you can enter all your transactions for that account into it by using

the entry boxes at the bottom of the screen. As you enter transactions, you are presented

with the screen shown in Figure 68.9. Categories can be marked as tax-related for

reports to be generated at tax time. See Figures 68.10 and 68.11 for the dialog boxes

you see as you add categories.

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading14<A HREF="../art/68/68fig09.gif"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.9.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>The main screen for CBB.</I>

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading15<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx10.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.10.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>Inquiry about categories.</I>

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading16<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx11.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.11.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>Creating categories. </I><BR>

<BR>

Amounts in a transaction can be split across several categories. The Alt-S key combination

on a transaction presents a menu, as shown in Figure 68.12. Categories must be typed

by name, and there is no option to search for a category name. If a typed name does

not exist, you are presented with the dialog shown in Figure 68.11.

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading17<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx12.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.12.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>Splitting amounts across categories.

</I><BR>

<BR>

At the end of the month, you would probably want to reconcile your bank statement

with what's in your database. You can elect to reconcile the bank statement with

the dialog box shown in Figure 68.13. Double-click on each transaction to toggle

its cleared status. The amounts of debits and credits are shown at the top of the

dialog box.</P>

<P>In the example shown in this chapter, we created our own transactions. Another

option is to open the demo account as provided in the <TT>demo</TT> subdirectory

for the distribution. After you are comfortable with the package, you can use it

with Quicken's QIF files. You can also use the report- and chart-generation features.

At the moment, I have limited the use of this program to only entering transactions

as they occur. For extensive reports and charts, I still use Quicken because it is

more powerful; however, the time between reboots has been reduced quite a bit since

I installed CBB.

<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading18<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx13.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.13.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>Reconciling the bank statement.

</I><BR>

<BR>

After you have amassed your fortune and tracked it in CBB, you would probably want

to invest it somewhere. This is where Xinvest comes in, providing features where

CBB falls short.

<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading19<FONT COLOR="#000077">Xinvest for an Investments

List Manager</FONT></H3>

<P>The Xinvest tool is written to manage stock portfolios on your Linux machine.

The latest version at the time of writing, version 2.1, is available as a zipped

tar file. You can get Xinvest from the <TT>ftp.x.org</TT> site in the <TT>contrib/applications</TT>

directory. This directory contains two archives: <TT>xinvest-2.1.tar.gz</TT> with

the source files and <TT>xinvest-2.1.bin.tar.gz</TT> with precompiled binaries. Use

the binary version, because the source tree did not compile cleanly even under Slackware

Linux 2.0. The binary files compiled cleanly.</P>

<P>By using Xinvest, you can keep your records in separate account files. The program

lets you calculate total and annualized returns, including the effects of dividends,

buys, and sell orders. The program also lets you compare the collective value of

several accounts in a portfolio.</P>

<P>You can set up accounts based on category and risk and view the distribution of

wealth in each account to get a clear picture of how your funds are distributed.</P>

<P>The parameters for each transaction include price of share, amount of shares brought

or sold, total value of the transaction at the price of share(s), any dividends,

moving averages, cumulative averages, and both internal and total returns. You can

even plot charts of transactions over time.</P>

<P>The initial screen looks like the one shown in Figure 68.14. The figure shows

the directories for the sample data files and directories in the package. You can

open the files in the <TT>demo</TT> directory by double-clicking on the sample icon.</P>

<P>Use the INTC stock symbol as the sample portfolio's stock section. The data is

shown in the text display as it's shown in the data file. The sample data file looks

like the one shown in Listing 68.1. This is the way you would have to store your

own data files when you collect your own data. The data shown in Listing 68.1 is

used to generate the plots and graphs shown in Figures 68.15, 68.16, and 68.17. In

each of the graphs, you can pick and choose which type of chart and information you

want.



<DL>

	<DT></DT>

</DL>



<H6></H6>

<P><A NAME="Heading20<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx14.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.14.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>The initial Xinvest program demo

screen.</I>



<DL>

	<DD>

<HR>

<A NAME="Heading21<FONT COLOR="#000077"><B>TIP: </B></FONT>The Ctrl-G key toggles

	a grid on the display, and the Ctrl-P toggles the display of points used to create

	a graph. 

<HR>



</DL>



<H3 ALIGN="CENTER"><A NAME="Heading22<FONT COLOR="#000077">Listing 68.1. The

sample data file stock.dat in Xinvest.</FONT></H3>

<PRE><FONT COLOR="#0066FF">*******************************************

Title IBM Stock

 Date        Transaction     Share   Shares

                             Price

1/10/94      Buy             59.25   100.00

2/10/94      Buy             52.875  100.00

3/10/94      Buy             57.125  100.00

4/08/94      Buy             52.625  100.00

5/10/94      Buy             58.00   100.00

6/09/94      Buy             62.00   100.00

7/08/94      Buy             56.625  100.00

8/10/94      Buy             64.25   100.00

9/09/94      Buy             67.875  100.00

10/10/94     Buy             71.50   100.00

11/08/94     Buy             73.00   100.00

12/09/94     Buy             71.375  100.00

# Kept the dividend

12/30/94     Div             73.50     2.639

12/30/94     Sell            73.50     2.639

</FONT></PRE>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0066FF"><BR>

<A NAME="Heading23</FONT><A HREF="../art/68/68lnx15.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.15.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>The sample file with rates of return.</I><BR>

<BR>

<A NAME="Heading24<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx16.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.16.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>The sample file with plots of data.</I><BR>

<BR>

<A NAME="Heading25<A HREF="../art/68/68lnx17.jpg"><FONT COLOR="#000077">FIGURE

68.17.</FONT></A><FONT COLOR="#000077"> </FONT><I>The sample file with portfolio

view. </I><BR>

<BR>

On-line help is available with the Xinvest package, with the help button in the upper-right

corner of the display. You mi



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