Quickening – Not Just for Immortals

As I mentioned yesterday, I had looked around for a new small business accounting package and had finally settled on Quicken. But the hunt didn’t stop there 🙂

Now that I had settled on Quicken, I needed a way to transfer my years of accumulated data in MS Money over to Quicken. Money exports transactions in QIF format but Quicken doesn’t support QIF for transferring data in to all accounts anymore – it only supports QIF for certain types of accounts. Additionally, when I tried to bring Money data in via QIF, I discovered that Quicken displayed the dates incorrectly 🙁

That was when I came across this page, which details how to use the Quicken Data Converter to transfer your Money data over to Quicken. I thought my troubles were over then, for sure. But that was not the case either :p

The Quicken Data Converter did transfer over everything almost flawlessly – there were a few extra transactions in one account but that I believe was the extent of the errors. However, there was one issue which made the whole transfer useless for me – the data transfer utility did not understand multi-currency! It simply took all the transactions to be in US dollars and this created a huge mess since some of my accounts were in Rupees and the final balances were way off.

There was no way to fix the data conversion either since it would automatically create a new company file when transferring in the data and I could not create a set of accounts (with the appropriate currency set up initially) to receive the transferred data. And once an account is created, you can’t change the currency for it in Quicken either.

So what I ended up doing was resort to a rather convoluted procedure. I created a new set of accounts with the right currencies and then exported the transferred in data as QIF files and then imported them back into the right currency accounts. (I later realized that I could probably have dispensed with the exporting and importing and simply copied the transactions over to the new account internally but hey, it did the same job either way …) This did get the transactions into the right currencies but inter-account transfers still had to be manually corrected to account for exchange rate fluctuations. However, that was rather minor given that I did manage to get all my data from Money into Quicken finally 🙂

Good Accounting is Hard to Find …

Is it just me and my picky ways or are there really no good choices for small business accounting software?

I’ve been using Microsoft Money for around ten years to track my spending and my bank and credit card balances. However, I recently discovered that Money, at least the standard version of Money, wasn’t enough for my needs. I also wanted to track invoices to customers for the consulting work I do and to be able to track payments from customers. So, since I had years of transactions in Money, I thought I’d move up to Money Plus Home & Business since it had basic accounts receivable features.

Not a good idea 🙂 Turns out that the business features in Money are more of an afterthought and not really well thought out. Money normally supports multiple currencies but the business stuff doesn’t. So while I really bill my customers in US dollars, there is no way for me to track those transactions in Money because the program insists on doing invoices in my home/base currency, which is Rupees.

So I thought I’d look around for any other accounting software which had the option to use multi-currency and handled accounts receivables the way I wanted. I started out small with the free BS1 Accounting package. It had multi-currency and it had accounts receivables but it couldn’t (or at least didn’t seem to) handle over payments. Plus, I don’t think it could import my existing Money data since I wanted to have all my finance info in one application.

I then went bigger (since there didn’t appear to be too many smaller accounting applications around) and looked at some of the industry leaders. QuickBooks does not support multi-currency in its current version and while it is supposed to support multi-currency at the premium levels in older versions, none of the trials I tried had this feature. And I tell you, those trial downloads are huge! Some are like 600-700MB and I was getting pretty tired of trying out accounting software after a while.

Peachtree was again supposed to have multi-currency but I couldn’t find it anywhere, not even in the help files. In the case of Microsoft Office Accounting 2008 Pro, I could find all manner of information about setting up multi-currency in the help file, but those settings were nowhere to be found in the program! Either they don’t have the options in the trial version, in which case they should mention this somewhere, or the help file is not consistent with the program.

SimplyAccounting was the only application where I could get the features working the way I wanted wit the trial. The multi-currency finally worked but the account set up was a bit clunky. It appeared to want you to set everything up manually and accounts receivables couldn’t directly handle an over-payment like other applications seemed to do, you had to match the original invoice amount against part of the payment and then enter the rest as a deposit. However, it did work but the cost was a bit too much for me since I had to shell out about $250 for the Premium version if I wanted unlimited multiple currencies, which I did. My other option was the Basic version which cost $150 and supported two currencies.

I had avoided Quicken till now because I had tried it in the past and had found it to be very similar to Money and I didn’t expect anything much to have changed. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Quicken‘s small business edition supported multi-currency and that I could invoice and receive payments in several different currencies. Additionally, it had a dashboard for different categories (personal finance, business finance etc.) that was pretty useful and informative. The only issues I have with Quicken are that it feels old, as if it’s really a Windows 3.1 program with some newer interface elements slapped on (this is very evident especially when you print stuff) and the fact that the invoice designer is very basic. SimplyAccounting had a beautiful invoice designer and Money, while it had something very similar to Quicken, still made it look and function a bit better.

My last issue was with importing in Money data and that’s a tale in itself. So I will reserve it for another post 🙂 But for the moment, I’m not really satisfied with the accounting software choices available out there. And no, don’t suggest an online solution because I prefer to have my data on my own machine :p But if you do know of another small business accounting package which does everything I’ve mentioned and is cheap, then I’d certainly be interested …

Ruby, Ruby, Ruby

I formatted my OS partition and re-installed Vista a month or so ago. At the same time, I did a complete overhaul of my old applications partition and removed a lot of folders/apps that I had had installed that I hadn’t used in a long time. Ruby was one of those folders to go since I don’t do much Ruby development. However, I wanted to re-install Ruby yesterday because I wanted to test out the latest crop of Ruby IDEs. But would you believe that there appear to be no instructions anywhere on how to install Ruby on Windows manually?

Most other languages/compilers at least have a text file which describes how to set it up under most of the major platforms. But Ruby simply says something along the lines of "if you don’t know how to set Ruby up manually, then you shouldn’t be trying to do so. Instead, use the one-click installer." Wherever I looked for help on installing Ruby manually under Windows, all I saw were references to the one-click installer. No info on how to do the deed yourself if you wanted a svelte and compact installation that had just the bits you wanted.

So I decided to try it myself 🙂 And here are the steps in case somebody else is looking to find out how to install Ruby manually under Windows.

1. Download the Ruby binary ZIP file from the Ruby site’s download page. At the moment, the latest stable appears to be 1.8.7 and the development version is 1.9.0. But this will of course change.
2. Extract the ZIP file (keeping the folder structure intact) to the folder where you want Ruby installed. In my case, I extracted everything to D:\Ruby.
3. Add the Ruby bin folder (in my case, D:\Ruby\bin) to your system path.
4. Download zlib for Windows from the site and copy the zlib1.dll (from the bin folder inside the ZIP file) as zlib.dll (the renaming is important) to either your Ruby bin folder or to your Windows system folder. (I believe it just needs to be in your system path somewhere).
5. Download iconv from the Sourceforge site and add the iconv.dll file (from the bin folder inside the ZIP file) again to your Ruby bin folder or to your Windows system folder.
6. Now download RubyGems to add gems support to your installation of Ruby. You can either download the ZIP file or get the .gem file but my instructions are for working with the ZIP file since there is no .gem support in the installation of Ruby we’ve done 🙂
7. Extract the RubyGems ZIP file to a temporary folder.
8. Open a command prompt, change the folder to the temporary folder from step #7 above and run the following command:
   ruby setup.rb
9. Once the gems installation completes successfully, you can remove the temporary folder and your Ruby installation should be ready 🙂

Loafing Around

Some time back, I wrote about my search for a good time tracking application and how I couldn’t find anything which really met my needs. As I mentioned in that post, I coded my own app, named Loafer, since I wanted specific features from a time tracking application. At that point in time, I wasn’t sure if I was going to release Loafer as freeware or not.

However, I realized that I liked releasing applications that I found useful, as freeware. It seems wrong to charge money for an application just because I can code it and somebody else can’t. Besides, if I were to charge money for the app, I would have to handle all the support issues that come along with a paid app 😀

Anyway, even after I had decided to release Loafer as freeware, I never got around to doing it since the app wasn’t totally complete. It was able to track time without any trouble but I wanted reports, I wanted billing management and I even wanted some way to do invoicing. At last, I’ve got most of that in place (minus the invoicing) and so I’m ready to release the first version of Loafer to the public. Go get it from my downloads page …

It does what I want from a time tracking app but you might want a lot more. If you do, do drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do about adding the extra functionality in 🙂

In, Designing with InDesign

I spent most of yesterday in, doing layout work on C3, the magazine I edit. Not that I go out most other days, but that’s a different story 🙂 And yes, if I edit the mag, what was I doing working with the layout?

Basically, the layout is done by another person who’s supposed to have years of exeprience with InDesign, which is what we use to layout the magazine. Unfortunately, we tend to get into cycles where I’d send a change back, they’d fix it and send it back and I’d find something else has gone wrong. So we’d go back and forth like ten times to get things finally sorted out. We just didn’t have time for that this time.

The magazine should have been out already and I was getting slightly annoyed at the delays. So I asked if I could have the InDesign file myself so that I could do all the necessary changes at my end, fix all the things which annoyed me and so on and get things ready to go.

I got the file and it turned out that the other person likes to do things the hard way 🙁 InDesign provides a heck of a lot of tools which make repetitive stuff like templates, page numbers a breeze. You simply have to set up a master properly and you can modify the master to propagate your changes across your whole document. But the person doing the layout didn’t seem to understand all the nuances of doing a master such as layers and overriding master elements. So they were doing separate masters for almost every new page and editing/embedding some of the text in the master itself. It was a bit of a mess.

I spent most of the day sorting things out, fixing issue details which would otherwise have gone to print with incorrect information, and even re-arranging some images in the layout so that there wouldn’t be so much unused space.

I do have to wonder, how much of a given application do most "normal" users actually use? Do they know all the features that are there? Or do they simply try to "bruteforce" their way through the task instead of using the tools available to them?

The Norton Conundrum

Sacrilegious as some might find the statement to be, I have switched over to Norton Internet Security 2008 again 🙂 Yes, I went through all of the other security suites around (in fact, I went through some several times over) before I came back to Norton after trying it the first time. On my machine running Vista with 2GB of RAM, NIS 2008 works beautifully. Of course, I must mention that NIS 2008 was really sluggish and slowed down the system a lot on my wife’s XP SP2 machine with 512MB of RAM. But since I’m really interested only in protecting my own machine, NIS 2008 fits the bill beautifully :p

But all that’s beside the fact. I switched over to NIS 2008 for the second time yesterday and since my machine was performing well, I decided to tax it a bit more by installing the Norton Add-on Pack which adds anti-spam capability to the NIS suite. And that’s where the trouble started 🙂 The Add-on Pack installed fine but I couldn’t access any of the configuration screens because each screen would throw up several Internet Explorer Script errors about not being able to "instantiate object".

I contacted Symantec Tech Support since I was a registered user. The first tech I got was the usual "uninstall and re-install again" variety which didn’t seem to even know about the issue. I simply told him that I had already tried the uninstall-re-install routine and that it had gotten me nowhere and that this sounded like an ActiveX issue and asked him if he knew which DLLs needed to be registered in order for the ActiveX objects to be correctly created. He immediately said that he was transferring me to his supervisor 🙂

The supervisor (or colleague, I wasn’t sure which) turned out to be not so prone to work from a set script. He listened to what I had to say and suggested a few things that I had tried before. When I asked him about what DLL to register, he suggested MsouPlug.dll which can be found in \Program Files\Common Files\Symantec Shared\AntiSpam and I tried that and got an error saying that the DLL registration failed with an error code of 0x80070005. Now I’d gotten this far on my own the last time I ran into this issue – which was when I had had NIS 2008 installed the first time a few weeks back. So I told the tech guy the issue and he suggested a few other things.

While I was trying his stuff, I was also doing some Google searches on my own and my latest combination of search terms turned up a site that I had not found before. Now all this time, my biggest question had been whether the DLL registration error was normal or if there was something really wrong. I finally had a resource which suggested a way to check on this. The site in question mentions RegMon but I actually used ProcMon instead but you should be able to use either one depending on the OS supported by each utility.

Basically, you try to register the DLL in question by using the regsvr32.exe command and watch the regsvr32.exe process via one of the above apps to see if there are any ACCESS DENIED results on a registry key open request. I did that and found a registry key which had the problem. So I fired up trusty old regedit.exe and changed the permissions on the key in question to give the Administrators group on my machine full access to the key. I then tried the DLL registration again, it failed again. I checked and noticed that the keys I had fixed earlier now had sub-keys and they were inaccessible. So I changed the permissions on those and the DLL registration worked.

At this point, I told the Symantec tech that I should be able to resolve the issue on my own and terminated the chat. But it wasn’t to be that simple. Registering the MsouPlug.dll didn’t seem to do anything with regards to the issue I had with accessing the Anti-Spam configuration options. So I took a look at the error message again. It was pointing to the error message as originating from the Options folder inside Symantec Shared from a file called whitelist.htm inside optRsHtm.loc – I checked the Options folder and there was an optRsHtm.loc file but no whitelist.htm file. It looked as if the whitelist.htm file was inside the optRsHtm.loc file and I needed a way to get at it.

So I downloaded PE Explorer which allows you to explore the resources inside executables, DLLs and other files. When I opened up optRsHtm.loc using PE Explorer, I was able to access the whitelist.htm file in question as well as all the other files referenced by optRsHtm.loc and going through the JavaScript source, I was able to trace the object instantiation error to the following line:
g_pSymDisp = new ActiveXObject("Symantec.Options.SymDispatchWrap");

So, I went rooting in the registry for the HKCR\Symantec.Options.SymDispatchWrap key and what do you know? That key was inaccessible as well! So I fixed the permissions for the key and it still wouldn’t work. I checked to see what that key referenced and found a DLL named UIHelper.dll that wouldn’t register. So it was back to ProcMon to trace which registry keys were at fault and then change the permissions on those and so on. After some further back and forth and changing permissions on a few other registry keys and registering a few other DLL files, I was finally able to access the configuration screens for Anti-Spam with no issues whatsoever 🙂

I wrote this entry so that anybody running into similar issues can find the solution since the Symantec knowledgebase does not appear to have any reference to this issue. But if you are unable to figure out the problem on your own, drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do to help 🙂

TreeDBNotes – time for alternatives?

I have talked of TreeDBNotes before. I like using a treeview based information manager and TreeDBNotes has been my software of choice for a few years now. One of the reasons I opted to register TreeDBNotes in the first place was because they had advertised free updates for life at the time I was considering using the app.

Fast forward a few years (or months) and here we are at TreeDBNotes 3.0 and suddenly, I notice on their forums a notice saying that old keys would not work and a new upgrade policy would be made available soon. I’m like "Huh? What do you mean new upgrade policy?" So I go to take a look at the original page which said free upgrades for life but I discover that the whole site has been revamped and there’s a new page which says that registration gets you free upgrades to all 3.xx releases – basically that free upgrades are only for minor releases. I’m like, "Did I dream it all?" So I go hunting on Wayback Machine and discover this page. According to the page (and I quote), "Registration benefits: lifetime technical support including support via e-mail, FREE upgrade to all new versions, and product notification by e-mail." (the bold text is not mine – it’s theirs)

I was confused. So I went over to the TreeDBNotes forums and posted a query about this discrepancy. The developer of the software appeared to disregard the query entirely and didn’t respond in the two threads I posted – except to say that wasn’t the place to post my question. (I did learn later however that he had posted a separate thread explaining that new upgrades would not be free even for existing users.) However, a moderator of the forum came forward to say he didn’t believe in binding a company or person to old terms. That that was politics and that no other company offered free lifetime upgrades and it was ridiculous to expect TreeDBNotes to do so.

I responded to him and said that if companies (and individuals) did not find agreements binding, then nobody could do business. I also pointed out a specific application that I had used (Now You’re Cooking) and their registration terms, which mentioned that they provided lifetime upgrades. He dismissed this by saying that I provided only one application and that didn’t prove anything and that I was bluffing. He also removed all my posts which showed that his statements weren’t true saying that the forum rules state that I couldn’t publicly contradict an admin or a moderator and that I was breaking the rules of the forum. Conveniently, it left his post saying that asking that the developer stick to the terms of the original agreement is ridiculous intact while removing all posts which showed that his arguments were specious.

All these shenanigans aside, the developer says that he has to charge for an upgrade because he rewrote 80% of the code and because he had to buy new components to use in the application. I don’t see how this absolves him from honouring the terms of a contract which was already in place. I fully accept that developers need to be paid and that he has every right to revise the terms of the contract for new users. But he cannot retroactively change terms for existing users.

In the midst of all of this, I was urged over and over again to talk to the developer privately and try to resolve this instead of talking about this publicly. I see this being pretty similar to the tactics here in Sri Lanka where people who speak out are hushed up in private by offering them something. Perhaps I will be offered a free upgraded. But that’s not the point. The point is that they are defrauding registered users and going back on their word. And that’s just unprincipled and unethical. But then again, this seems to be the pattern almost everywhere I look …

Best of Times

I’ve been doing a lot of project work lately and so have come back to something I’ve needed in the past – a good project time tracker 🙂 Now in the past, I’ve tried various software offerings. Of course, there are also online options such as SlimTimer or Toggl. But the thing is, I don’t like relying on online systems much, especially when I would have to be online to use the functionality when I needed it. Internet connectivity out here can sometimes go down suddenly and not come back for a while (sometimes weeks in one infamous incident :p). So, I’d rather have my tools on my desktop where I can access them quickly and always.

With the online stuff eliminated (or not even considered :p), I turned my attention to the desktop apps. And I tell you, there sure are a lot 🙂 But the thing is, all of them fell short in one respect or another. My personal favourites were TimeStamp, Easy Time Tracking Pro, Activity Time Tracker and AllNetic Working Time Tracker. Each of them had their own strengths and weaknesses.

TimeStamp is freeware and the source is included. So if need be, I could modify it to work the way I wanted it to. However, the interface was clunky (probably because the author was using freeware components so that he could keep the source open) and it didn’t have support for multiple tasks for a project. Or rather, it did have support for multiple tasks, but I didn’t like the way it did timings since you couldn’t get individual time blocks for each task. Plus, it had this whole thing about "slack time" that I didn’t really like :p

There is a free version of Easy Time Tracking (ETT) but what I downloaded was the pro version but I believe either would have suited my purposes. ETT is a solid application and it appears to have everything you might need. It allows you to manage multiple customers, projects and tasks for projects. You can set rates at the customer, project and task level. However, each time you start a timer, you have to specify which customer, project and task the timer is for – it will not take the current selection into account. However, you can pause the current timer at any point and restart and it will add multiple timing records for each time chunk. But the interface to do all this was clunky as you had to right-click on the system tray icon, get a menu and select your option from there. The other issue with ETT was the fact that it does not support multiple files/databases – all your project and customer information has to go into one pre-set database. So I didn’t like it overall :p

While ETT looked big, complicated and all-encompassing, Activity Time Tracker (ATT) went in the opposite direction 🙂 It’s compact, looks colourful and presented all the relevant information in one screen. But at the same time, it had client management and projects but not tasks. However, you could attach a description to each timing block and so link together multiple time blocks as one task. ATT did remember the currently selected project (and allowed you to switch projects via the tray menu) but starting/stopping the timer was cumbersome since you had to do it via the tray menu. There was no rate information at the customer level but you could enter different rates at the project level but it was all for the default system currency – you could not specify different currencies. ATT had some detailed reporting and a time sheet wizard to generate your time sheets for you but it too suffered from the same issue as ETT – there was only one single database and there was no way to change that.

AllNetic Working Time Tracker (AWTT) was probably my favourite out of the lot. Their website might not look very professional and be a little chaotic but the application was great and very simple 🙂 It provided support for individual project files (you could save as many as you wanted), projects and tasks within each project. There was no client management but since you could have multiple files, I assumed they were looking at somebody maintaining one file for each customer/client. There was a rudimentary billing system which kept track of whether specific tasks/projects had been settled or not and it keeps track of the currently selected project/task for timing purposes. However, AWTT has nary a sign of rates anywhere! You can’t specify rates and you certainly don’t see a sign of rates or currency in any of the various reports it can generate. What I did like about AWTT though was the fact that you could assign hotkeys to start/stop the timer and the nifty little hint window it popped up when you hovered over its icon in the system tray. Unlike normal tooltips which show only the app name or other little bits of information, AWTT actually pops up a tiny window where you could see all the project time totals for today, yesterday, the week and the month at the overall, project and task levels. You could also start and stop the timer from there as well. Overall, I loved the features and interface of AWTT but the fact that there was no option to enter rates (or currency) was a deal breaker.

Given that I didn’t like any of the programs I looked at, I decided to write my own. I had actually begun work on this app sometime ago and had called it Loafer. (If you notice most of the time tracking apps had really long names – I wanted something short and easy :p) I’d done about a day or two of work on Loafer and had then stopped but started again a couple of days ago. After several days of work, I have a usable app which allows multiple files (for separation of projects by client), projects, tasks, billing rates at both the project and task level and multiple currencies 🙂 I’ve integrated most of the features that I really wanted and I’m quite happy with it. It’s still a bit rough around the edges and I do need to do some more work on it and to add in reporting but once I get it all together, I believe it would be a pretty neat app. If anybody wants a copy of it for evaluation purposes, I can send you a time-limited version but I’m not sure I’m going to give this one away 🙂

Putting the zing back in sting …

Recently, I’ve been running across a supposedly new compression format over and over again. The format? WinZix or rather, .ZIX files. The name and the extension seems to indicate that they are trying to capitalize on WinZip’s popularity and market share. Their website claims that they have the "ultimate compression". The truth? Now that’s a bit more tricky :p

When I first heard about WinZix, being the software junkie that I am, I was tempted to download it and try it out. However, the name and the way it was branded made me hesitate. I decided to check it out first. There wasn’t much online about WinZix though. There were people claiming that it contained trojans and that it messed up their systems. There were others claiming that it didn’t compress any files at all and in fact, it increased the size of a file that was compressed with it. However, these were all claims made on the Net and you know how that goes :p

So, I downloaded a .ZIX file myself – not the program but a file supposedly compressed with WinZix. I then opened the file in a hex editor and noticed that it had a file header which identified it as a WinZix file. But what was more interesting was to see a ZIP file header a few bytes further in from the WinZix file header 🙂

Now, most files contain a file header (or a signature) which identifies the file type and allows the corresponding program to determine whether it’s a file format that the program works with. I knew the ZIP signature since I’d worked with ZIP files before. Being paranoid by nature, a thought flashed into my mind at this point – what if the WinZix folks weren’t actually compressing files but taking standard Zip files and wrapping it with a new header so that WinZip (or any other program working with Zip files) will not see it as a Zip file?

I decided to test out this theory. I deleted the first six or seven bytes from the WinZix file, removing the WinZix header but leaving the ZIP header/signature intact. I then tried to open the file in WinRAR (which supports ZIP format) and it opened up fine and I was able to extract the contents of the ZIP file.

So there you have it 🙂 WinZix is really a phoney. It doesn’t actually compress any files and certainly might have trojans or backdoor programs or viruses embedded in. Or it might simply be a way to cash in on people’s gullibility and make some cash since apparently they do say that they include adware in their EULA. Whatever else it might be, a compression program it is not :p

To .NET or not .NET

I come from a coding background where we always tried to keep application sizes down and memory utilization low. So, if I can create an application which results in a 1-2MB download, I’m really happy. Even my biggest application is probably under 5MB. Sure, I realize that in today’s world of multi-gigabyte game and application downloads, that is an anachronism but I still like keeping my application sizes small 🙂

Because of this obsessive-compulsive desire (or rather, need) to keep application sizes small, I have not looked at .NET as a possible development platform for my personal projects. Sure, I’ve done .NET development when I worked for different companies. Since internal deployment was via the network, the 20MB or so download for the core framework wasn’t that big a deal. However, when you distribute software (and freeware at that) over the Internet, I really feel bad when I have to ask somebody to download a hefty runtime before they can run my app.

So what has changed? In a sense, nothing? .NET 3.0 is out and the framework now stand at around 50MB and the basic situation is the same. If you don’t have the .NET 3.0 framework installed, you still have to go through a 50MB download. But what’s new is what the framework offers. The possibilities are (while not endless) quite interesting 🙂 I love what the framework promises with the 3.0 iteration and the ease with which much of it can be done. Being a software junkie, I’m allured by the new UI elements and what they can do for my own application. In fact, I’m definitely considering shifting to .NET 3.0 at least for some of my applications.

Of course, there are issues. The aforementioned hefty download being but one issue. The other is deployment of web apps. Sure, .NET 3.0 offers beguiling promises for web applications – the possibility to have a really nice web interface for your applications. But as far as I understand, in order to develop and run web applications using .NET 3.0, you still need a Windows server running IIS. And how stable are Windows servers? Personally, I haven’t had much luck with Windows as a web server and I really wouldn’t want all of my critical sites on a Windows server. So that makes .NET 3.0 web apps, (at least for me) something nice to play with but not something I’d want to use on a production basis. But that is just based on my own personal requirements and situation. Your mileage will certainly vary 🙂