Felix Crux

Technology & Miscellanea

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I’ve finally, belatedly, put together the text transcript, slides, and video recording of my PyCon 2016 talk “What You Need To Know About Free & Open Source Software Licensing” and uploaded them. You can view everything here.

Thank you to the conference organizers for inviting me and providing the video recording; thank you to everyone who attended; and thank you to all the folks who provided feedback on it, whether in person or online.

The talk has been available on YouTube for some time, but there you don't have the slides or transcript.


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One of the big differences between how most people start out with accounting, and how professionals and big companies do it, lies in the distinction between cash basis and accrual basis accounting. Cash basis accounting is the simple, obvious, kind: we record transactions as they happen, and our ledger account balances reflect how much money is really present (or owed) right now in various accounts.

It might seem at first like this is the only possible or sensible way of tracking things, but accrual basis methods also have an intuitive appeal of their own, despite being rather different.

Consider, for example, a scenario where you complete some contract work but haven’t been paid yet; or are at a job a week before your latest pay-cheque is due. Naturally, you’d consider that you’re owed your wages, even if you don’t have anything written down in your cash basis accounting ledger. Or, to flip it around, if you receive a bill for this past month’s utilities, you know you owe that money even if it too isn’t in your ledger yet. Accrual basis accounting just means writing down these obligations at the time they’re incurred, rather than at the time they’re paid.

(This post is part of a series describing how I use the Ledger accounting system. For an introduction to ledger and this series, or to see all the entries, have a look at the first post).


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The rexiv2 library crate (available on crates.io) for Rust provides read and write access to media file (mainly photo) metadata in the Exif, XMP, and IPTC formats. Many file formats are supported, including of course JPEG, PNG, TIFF, XMP sidecar, some camera raw formats, and various others.

You can view the documentation here, get the source code, and report bugs or contribute code.


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Sometimes you have to pay for something for which you will be reimbursed later, whether it’s a business travel expense or just spotting a friend some cash. Ledger makes it easy to not just track these expenses, but to know whether they’ve been paid back yet or not.

(This post is part of a series describing how I use the Ledger accounting system. For an introduction to ledger and this series, or to see all the entries, have a look at the first post).


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If you keep all your ledger transactions in one big file, it can quickly become messy and unwieldy. Fortunately, ledger has a feature that allows for easily separating different accounts into different files, without losing the ability to report on them all at once.

(This post is part of a series describing how I use the Ledger accounting system. For an introduction to ledger and this series, or to see all the entries, have a look at the first post).