Saturday, April 4, 2020

Work from Home…

In these depressing times, as we all work from home, humanity and sanity slowly slips away through our soapy hands.

In these tough times, as we don’t know what to prioritize, developers loose their valuable users/customers. I don’t know how true that last sentence is but I have definitely lost the one and only user (my superpartner) of my MATLAB program ‘AcBook’. But that doesn’t stop me from releasing its next update (officially at the end of this month but the installer has been already available for quite some time now).

In this release, I have mostly focussed on replacing the old exchange rates provider by a new one. Because the older one got a bit greedy and reduced the number of data requests one could make from 1000/month to 200/month in the basic free plan! Not that I was using the full quota. Even on a busy month, I don’t think I made more than 100 requests so 200 was more than enough given that nobody else is using the program now. But what really bugged me was that the rates were now updated daily instead of hourly! So if another provider could still support 1000 requests per month for free and the data was updated hourly, then why would I not transition to it. That’s exactly what I thought and did. In the transition process, I also learned that MATLAB can handle JSON formatted web replies quite well. That has made the startup time of the program a bit shorter and less error-prone as fewer file read/write operations are needed now. Also, made the ExChanger future-proof in case some currencies are added or removed by the new provider. Overall, I’m quite proud of the achievement and to give credit where credit is due, here’s a screenshot of the program’s login screen:

AcBook v7.8

In these pandemic times, as we hurtle towards the end in one way or another, let’s keep it light by listening to Sandi Toksvig at

Vox Tox

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