Mad Marv’s Place

So I’m getting started on my taxes tonight and I’ve found this big hole in my record keeping strategy. I use Truecrypt to protect my financial data separately from all my other data. As various forms arrive in the mail throughout the year, I scan them to PDFs and save them in the Truecrypt volume. Now as I’m searching through the documents some of the PDFs are corrupted. Not sure how that happened, or how to fix it because the Repair Filesystem feature couldn’t find anything wrong with the Truecrypt volume. Luckily, the corrupted forms don’t seem to be critical, but it could’ve been otherwise.

So now I’m backing up the unencrypted data with EMC Retrospect. The Retrospect backup has its own AES encryption system built in.

But, the question I’m grappling with is how far to trust encryption systems with critical data. I could (and probably will for the forseeable future) replicate data between two independant file encryption systems just so that if one fails I still have a hopefully intact backup.

Has anyone else run into this kind of a problem?

Tags: Technology by madmarv
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One of my favorite authors is drumming up publicity for his upcoming book by giving away the book…again. Yeah, I know how that sounds, but it worked for Cory Doctorow, so it not totally off base. Scott Sigler has podcasted Ancestor as a podiobook to over 30,000 fans and has now released a free PDF of the entire book again. If you like action oriented sci-fi with “Lots and lots of violence”, this is just the thing for you.

Dowload the Ancestor PDF here

Subscribe to the podiobook for free

Order the print copy on April 1st through Amazon and help send Scott to the top of the charts

Tags: Uncategorized by madmarv
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Tried my Treo from the office where I have a four or five bars of signal. The results are not spectacularly different, but encouraging. There’s one metric that is not displayed in the graphic below. The latency between my computer and the test host was over 500 ms when I ran the test from home and now it has dropped to < 200 ms. It’s still doesn’t compare to a landline connection via cable modem or DSL. But now, web browsing doesn’t seem to drag on forever.

Tags: Technology by madmarv
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I’ve been testing my Treo 700p bandwidth and it is not all that impressive. I’m currently testing it from home, which has one or two bars of reception. I’ll try again at work and see if it improves.

Tags: Technology by madmarv
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financials-webqueries-v2.xls

Click Here to Download

Financial data is downloaded from free sources such as Morningstar and Yahoo! Finance via web queries. Data is extracted from the web queries and input into my financial analysis spreadsheet and ratios are calculated automatically.

Disclaimer:
These spreadsheets are offered “as is” without any warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. Under no circumstances will I be liable for any damage, loss of data or financial injury resulting from the downloading or use of this spreadsheet. Possible damages include, but are not limited to, direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages or other losses arising out of the use of or inability to use any of my spreadsheets.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

NOTES:

1. The spreadsheet contains a macro that will download stock market data when you click the “Update Data” button on the Summary sheet. Make sure your security settings are set to Medium or lower level. By default, Excel’s macro security level should be set to Medium. If you cannot set the security to Medium, you can manually click the refresh “Refresh All” button on the External Data toolbar.
2. Downloading the data takes less than a minute from the time you click the “Update Data” button, depending on the speed of your internet connection.
3. Currently, this spreadsheet cannot analyze financial institutions like banks, insurance companies or brokerages. If you try to download data for a bank or another financial institution, the formatting of the downloaded data will be incorrectly parsed by the spreadsheet and gibberish will appear on the Summary sheet. This may permanently corrupt the spreadsheet and you will then need to download another copy of the spreadsheet.
4. Morningstar only provides annual data for download, quarterly data is not calculated by this spreadsheet. However, the last column will show the most current Trailing Twelve Month data.
5. This spreadsheet includes the DCF calculator that I described in Investing Spreadsheets.

Marv

Tags: Investing by madmarv
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