A simple personal accounting system that I wrote over the holidays. It’s user-friendly, web-based, fast (AJAX), and free to download. Here’s how it works…
First you browse to the homepage and upload your bank account’s transaction CSV… Subaccounting will try to figure out the CSV columns itself
Then you browse into the bank account…
And here you make subaccounts and subtransactions within that account. A subaccount is a way of breaking up a bank account into areas for your savings, food, clothes, rent, etc. Each subaccount has it’s own balance so you can see whether you’ve spent too much on food.
Here’s how you add a new subaccount…
Type the name…
And then you add what’s called a subtransaction. A subtransaction is simply moving money between subaccounts (Eg, from savings to health).
So basically you describe your bank transactions by using subtransactions. In the following screenshot a purchase at Sweet Momma’s Kitchen comes out of the food subaccount, so we make a subtransaction for that amount.
Notice how in the following screenshot the red ‘equals’ sign went away because we resolved this transaction.
You can then browse to the food subaccount and see how you’re doing… not good it seems.
Important bits
It supports backups and restorations via an XML export. Back up your data regularly.
It only officially handles Kiwibank transactions although other banks will probably work. Use the CSV export and Subaccounting will try and determine the columns itself.
It has no built-in security so be sure to secure the webserver directory yourself
For immediate release The Creative Freedom Foundation welcome Minister Simon Power’s release of the replacement for Section 92A of the Copyright Act. CFF Director, Bronwyn Holloway-Smith states ”Earlier this year we came dangerously close to a Guilt Upon Accusation-style law but this new proposal steers well clear of that approach, respecting due process and the principle of being innocent until proven guilty by experts. While there are issues like internet termination and liability for malicious allegations we are optimistic that the government is on the right track to creating a great solution for NZ that supports both public and artistic rights.”
The previous law was called “draconian” by Prime Minister John Key before being scrapped in March this year pending a rewrite which has resulted in yesterdays’ proposal by Minister Simon Power.
Holloway-Smith further says “the internet is nothing more than the most efficient copying machine the world has ever known, surpassing earlier industrial copying machines which produced wax cylinders, paper piano rolls, vinyl records, and plastic compact discs. Our society has moved forward from regulating an industrial manufacturing process to trying to regulate what people do in the privacy of their own homes on personal computers. The public relations aspect to modern copyright law and maintaining public respect for artistic rights is crucial to encouraging the arts, and this proposal goes a long way toward that.”
“The proposal empowers the Copyright Tribunal to resolve disputes and issue financial penalties, with the harsh punishment of internet termination being reserved for a court process.“
“There are still issues to resolve but we look forward to the Select Committee process.”
The Creative Freedom Foundation is a not-for-profit trust representing 20,000 New Zealanders, including 10,000 artists (musicians, film makers, visual artists, designers, writers, & performers). The trust founded in 2008 in response to changes in copyright law and the effect these changes are having on creativity, the economy, and public rights. Through education and advocacy, the CFF seek to encourage, and promote New Zealand artist’s views on issues that have the potential to influence their collective creativity.
MEDIA ENQUIRIES
For more information please contact:
Bronwyn Holloway-Smith
Director, Creative Freedom Foundation cff@holloway.co.nz
(+ 64) 021 107 5747
Right holders will be able to request that internet service providers (ISPs) give alleged infringers notice to stop infringing activity.
The first notice will inform the account holder that infringing has occurred and is illegal. Two further notices may be sent.
If infringing continues after three notices, the right holder may seek a penalty of up to $15,000 at the Copyright Tribunal. The amount will be based on the damage to the copyright owner.
Where serious and continued breaches occur, right holders will be able to go to court to seek a range of remedies, including the suspension of accounts for up to six months.
Account holders will be able to issue counter notices, and can request a hearing if they feel they should not be penalised.
The wording in the press release is a bit odd in that it mixes up alleged infringement with actual copyright infringement. We assume this is just a poor choice of language.
Further analysis to come but these are the main points.
People are innocent until proven guilty either by the Copyright Tribunal or the courts.
Termination can only be ordered by the courts, not the Copyright Tribunal
No special sanctions on right holders for false or malicious allegations.
Penalties of up to $15,000 may be awarded by the Copyright Tribunal. This is in keeping with the maximum of the Disputes Tribunal
The courts have existing maximum fines that are already established under the Copyright Act.
New definition for ISP that is less broad and excludes organisations such as businesses and universities. Too early to tell what this means for shared connections such as internet cafes, open WiFi, etc.
It says “right holders will pay a fee per notice” although as regulations not set might be premature to read too much into that. This is as opposed to a process that allowed many notices on a flat-rate for rights-holders.
No resolution to the overlap with s92C disputes. As outlined in our submission s92C lacks a counternotice procedure and due process. Further due to technology changes there may be no functional difference between an s92C or s92A dispute.
Susy Frankel teaches and researches copyright at Massey University and in other roles she’s also current head of the Copyright Tribunal (she was appointed by Tizard). Earlier this year in her inaugural lecture at Massey she talked about the role of copyright in our culture,
We’ve transcribed part of the speech here:
“Because of the pervasiveness of intellectual property in our culture the right way to discuss the limits of intellectual property is to understand and try to articulate the relationship between intellectual property and culture. We know it’s there, but what does this relationship really tell us, and how can we use the understanding of the relationship in a practical way? One of the phenomenons that we see is that there have been certain products and brands that have become boom industries. The question I’m interested in is not whether cultural and creative industries are goodies or baddies, whether Barbie has less or more artistic merit than Renet, but whether if the law overprotects these kinds of cultural products do we do damage to culture itself?
The law is too protective if it becomes too constricting on the types of artistic, literary and musical works that can be made. It becomes too restricting if people will not make these works because they’re not sure if they can, if they can’t, if they can’t find out the [licensing?] information and so on.
The problem with the incentive and reward approach to intellectual property is that it loses sight of the public interest in the structure of the law as a whole. The public interest is almost taken for granted; that the reward and incentive formula will capture that interest. In essence the rights of individuals appear to have trumped whatever that collective interest in intellectual property law is. Those collective interests include its effect on culture. This includes what we might call expressive values, free speech values, but it’s not just those values at play — society as a whole of course has a vested interest in supporting individual rights. The appropriate balance between collective and individual rights is not an easy balance to achieve.”
RadioNZ points out that today Minister Simon Power will take the revised Section 92A proposal to Cabinet. Robert Smith has a timely piece in the NBR about downloads, “Despite widespread bleating about the rise of piracy, there are still plenty of people who don’t bother downloading. If there is one glimmer of hope out of those ubiquitous warnings, it’s that cinema admissions are holding strong in the face of piracy. Sky City Entertainment recently revealed admissions to its New Zealand cinemas for the first quarter of the year were up by 17% and the industry is looking to 3D films for further growth [...] If, for some odd reason, somebody in New Zealand needed to see Guy Ritchie’s movie Revolver, the only way is to import it from overseas [..] It is possible to purchase a copy of the movie through an international web retailer, or the Ritchie fan could wait until it showed up on television at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, or they could just download it in less than an hour. If it’s that easy and simple to do it illegally, why is it so difficult to do legitimately?“
For as long as I can remember I haven’t heard a good reason to think that there was a supernatural aspect to our natural world. We live in a natural world where the machinery of nature is indifferent to humans and our narcissistic desires for special meaning and purpose. Don’t like the way the universe works? Go find another one.
When I was very young I had religious friends who would talk to me about –what I thought of at the time as– their invisible friends. They were gods, faeries, spirits, ghosts, and so on. I was particularly curious how they chose their religion and what they thought of other competing religions. Were they decoys made by a devil, simple human delusion, or did they perhaps have a new-age belief in a unified god beneath any and all religions?
Well to my young mind it seemed that religion was rather provincial. People aren’t born believing but instead they get it from their family, or surrounding community. Immigrants came with their own religion. My friends were generally quite honest about how they were born as undecided but then later chose to believe in a particular supernatural idea because of being taught by grown-ups. They were all thankful to have been taught the correct religion. All said their religion made them feel good, and I didn’t doubt their sincerity for a second. Most of them reconciled the variety of religions by saying that other people were delusional and ignorant while citing obvious examples of manufactured religions like Cargo Cults or Scientology. Surprisingly they very rarely invoked tricks from the devil as a reason. I thought that devil decoys would have been far more popular; a supernatural war with human souls as the currency was a rather spectacular and appealing idea.
According to my friends anyone who worshiped the wrong gods was delusional or ignorant of religious evidence, but what I wanted to know was how they were so sure they weren’t delusional themselves. They answered by way of talking about their feelings and how they just felt a connection to something special and supernatural. So did the follower of every other religion. I’d ask them whether people can fool themselves into feeling false gods? They’d always agree, but they wouldn’t apply it to themselves. They demanded a special place in the universe.
For a long time I was unconvinced by the supernatural and so I called myself an Agnostic, a fence-sitter. It took many years to realise that I was giving religion a privileged position by not also sitting on the fence when it came to the issue of unicorn existence, homeopathy, psychic powers, or whether water dowsing works. There is no good evidence for any of those supernatural phenomena but I wouldn’t waste time by saying that I’m agnostic about unicorns.
Or, in other words…
The typical understanding of the term Atheist is that it’s someone who says there is no god, but I don’t make that claim. Being that sure about what I couldn’t possibly know makes no sense, and no Atheist I know claims to have that kind of certainty. Instead Atheism is not a rejection but rather an absence of gods until it’s proven otherwise. Fundamentalist it is not.
Unfortunately the term Atheist has a stigma about it in some parts of the population, and this means that non-believers worry about the reaction of making their views public. There is a feeling that atheists need to ‘come out of the closet’ (so to speak) and that’s why I’m glad to see that the Humanist Society of NZ has launched their atheist bus campaign.
“There’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life”
In the 1901 Census approximately 1 in 30 people did not give a religious affiliation. One hundred years later 4 out of 10 people did not specify a religious affiliation (source). These 40% subsidise churches through taxes and these churches often have large adverts proselytising their ideas, so rather than just proclaiming a world-view (as claimed by some) I see this bus campaign as speaking up for a part of society that is underrepresented.
Kiwiblog comments on ACTA saying “I was pleased the Government suspended the introduction of the “guilt upon accusation” S92A. I was also pleased with their proposed policy replacement, that came out on 7 August. Didn’t agree with everything in it, but it was a lot better than the law passed by Judith Tizard. So far so good. Submissions closed on that document on 7 August – that is four months ago. Most of the submissions were supportive. So why I wonder has the Government not released its final proposed policy?” Read more at Kiwiblog
LibraryTechNZ summarises the state of cultural heritage collections and the copyright challenges posed to them, “There are many fine institutions collecting New Zealand’s culture and heritage; to keep it safe and then make it available so others can create new knowledge and experiences. Often this is made possible through the generous donations of material from members of the public. These institutions know it is important to share the treasures in these collections, but there is a fear some users may not treat the material with the respect it is due [...] firstly a quick (though lengthy) round up on what all the different kinds of rights are, and then next a look at a suggestion for how the Creative Commons licences could be extended so they meet the needs of cultural heritage institutions.” One minor comment about the article however,
The article says,
When authors/creators can’t earn a living by selling their work (because anyone can get a copy for free) then they are forced to stop creating new works (to earn a living some other way), and this loss is detrimental to society
I think this is perhaps too simplistic. Selling copies is but one business model, and there are many other business models that don’t depend on scarcity of information (advertising in general, open source companies, musicians that earn more from touring, authors that release their book free online but sell paper copies, etc.).
The internet is simply the world’s most powerful copying machine, and it has reduced the costs of copying to practically nothing. Selling copies is one model, but it woudl be fair to say that the internet has facilitated new business models that benefit from mass and unregulated distribution.
