As you may recall, GNUCash wasn't able to print last week's invoices this weekend. This evening (the first time since then I've sat down to do accounting) GNUCash is core-ing when it tries to load the file. GDB can't pull anything useful out of the core file, as it appears to all be recursive opaque calls in an interpreter of some form (scheme?).

It looks like it will be reasonably straightforward to pull the data out of the file with an XML parser, but in the meantime I still need to get last week's invoice out and get this week's invoice started. Alternately, I could revert to the last SVN version before Saturday's edits and try using it again, but this little episode has, to some extent, soured me on using the program.

The question is whether to buy QuickBooks or give SQL Ledger a try. My Open Source side is demanding I give the larger OS package a try, but my practical business side is telling me to just give into the everything-already-figured-out commercial solution. Guess we'll see which side wins.

In other news, fixing the PVR again today. One of those updates last week apparently removed the /dev/video link which MythTV was set up to use, so since then nothing has been recorded (discovered this when I sat down to watch The Daily Show this evening). There were a few shows I wanted to record over the weekend, oh well, sigh.

[Update on the accounting software a few hours later, GNUCash is now failing to load even the old files, so it's likely just an installation error (broken library link or the like). Doing a revdep-rebuild and will then re-install the app to see if that solve the problem.]

[Second update: re-installation did nothing, but deleting the ~/.gnucash saved reports allows the application to load and read the file. It doesn't, however, calculate global totals any more.]