SmartyPig is a great tool for savings. It’s a bank account, but different. I’ve been using it for 6 months now and it’s helped my finances quite a bit and let me buy a few toys without feeling bad about it. It works pretty simply.

You create a FDIC Insured Bank Account with SmartyPig.

You create a savings goal with a date, ex. $400 for a new iPhone in July 2010

SmartyPig determines your required monthy contribution (-2% interest you make on the account.)

SmartPig will automatically withdraw that amount from your bank account every month until your goal is met.

Then you can:

• Transfer the money to your bank account to use
• Receive a debit card for the account from smarty pig
• Receive a gift card for the Amount with a chosen vendor. Each vendor adds a percentage to the account. ex. Amazon adds 4% to the total.

If something goes wrong and you need the money:

• You can cancel any automatic payment
• You can withdraw your funds from the account

You can also share savings goals through facebook or twitter, you can have others contribute to the account. This feature doesn’t really interest me and I don’t use it, however I could see running a charity drive through it or saving for a vacation or college with family … maybe. I still don’t like the idea of being too public with your money.

In all though, I love it. It’s like a Bank meets Layaway, and it’s way more responsible than a credit card.

Damnit.

One reason Lala may not have taken off is that people do not necessarily want to entrust their music collection to the servers of a start-up whose prospects are uncertain. There would be no such uncertainty with Apple.

I actually think lala was close to popping, Jamie found it and turned me on to it, the facebook integration was cool. Also the full one time preview had me going there to explore new music rather than Amazon or Emusic.

After the stellar job Apple did with MobileMe I’d be less interested in Apple, also I’m sick of apple as a content provider. They do a great job of opening the door (ala TV and Music through the app store) but they are controlling and they lock me into their hardware. LAME.

This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.

I do find this interesting for something like the iPhone, you don’t need as much space on the device if you can stream your music collection, some of us have music collections waaay to big to fit anytime soon. Great for mobile device owners, sucks to be bandwidth providers though.

I didn’t realize that my tumblr account was still hooked to planetcosi through feedburner. On the cool side it was very easy to change through feedburner, I’d totally recommend using it to the rest of you. On the not cool side it was an interweb spam canon. From now on planetcosi will only be getting posts I’ve tagged at tech.

Coding Horror is usually a good read, sometimes it’s just way too long and I skip it, but there are a few posts that are memorable. The one from earlier this week called Parsing HTML the Cthulhu Way was spectacular.

Even Jon Skeet cannot parse HTML using regular expressions. Every time you attempt to parse HTML with regular expressions, the unholy child weeps the blood of virgins, and Russian hackers pwn your webapp. Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living. HTML and regex go together like love, marriage, and ritual infanticide. The <center> cannot hold it is too late. The force of regex and HTML together in the same conceptual space will destroy your mind like so much watery putty. If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes.

It just gets better from there. Which leads me back to my google reader inbox where Jay Huie shared a link to Parsing HTML in Python with BeautifulSoup. This reminded me of a little pet project of mine from a couple months ago. I had given up on it, due to parsing html formatted logs with regex. On monday after reading the coding horror article I dusted it off and was able to fix it up with beautiful soup within an hour.

All of this is a long way of saying don’t reinvent the wheel and if you need to work with HTML in python use BeautifulSoup.

Also all hail Cthulhu.