This is a mini site about taxes. If you're not familiar with taxes, there's some basic information here. The articles at the top are essays, and the articles toward the bottom are a glossary of sorts. For the most part, this site is for residents of California.

I'm not a tax professional or an accountant, or even a bookkeeper. I just like to do my own taxes.

(It's ok to click the links. These are not affiliate links.)

Turbo Tax maker Intuit, again, is mired in political turmoil: Intuit was upset that John Chiang, our State Controller, had been making electronic tax filing software free to people. Intuit wanted the State to use a different system that worked with Intuit's commercial software.

If you don't have Windows around anymore, and you need to flash your BIOS, you need to figure out a way to make a bootable floppy.

If you don't have a floppy, you can make a bootable CD.

The sysadmins took down the http://embeddedart.com site that belonged to Joe Stack. That was his company's website, and on it was a list of his past projects. The guy had talent.

According to the text left at the website, the site takedown was at the request of LE, who suspected it might contain sensitive information. The assumption is that the note contained the information, but, perhaps other pages also contained info.

In the conspiracy theory web, people are speculating that Stack didn't fly into the IRS building - that he was killed and then somehow, a plane crashed into the building, or his dead body was piloted into the building via remote control. Anyway, the idea is that the attack was performed to discredit the Tea Party movement. Their theory seems far-fetched to me, but maybe they're on to something about the "he knew something" part. I just think the big problem with the teabaggers is that they're starting from the assumption that this was a "false flag attack" and then searching for evidence to prove this thesis.

Here's a cached copy of that page:

1. The argument's been made so often, it needs a macro.

2. See http://laeastside.com/

3. The real Eastside is east of the LA river. It's had this name for around 50 years. The area around Silver Lake is not the Eastside.

This was posted to Wise Bread, and reposted here:

HPHP Initial Comment
HipHop what you need to know

HPHP appears to be a significant product: a PHP compiler that compiles down to native binaries, saving time and CPU. It produces a monolithic, multithreaded binary.

A nice side effect could be that sites using HPHP would be a harder to hack. For one, you could never upload and execute a PHP script, because PHP is not running on the server.

HipHop leverages a simple fact of PHP-life: most of your code doesn't change. Even in a project with ongoing bugfixes, only a small number of changes are deployed. So, once the app's done and ready to be run full-time, it should really become a compiled application. HipHop is the compiler.

How to Backup is a free online mini-book explaining basic ideas about how to backup your network, backup technologies, and backup strategies to keep your systems online, and your data available.

This is a short list of links to groups that organize or try to organize programmer labor unions and other computer-based worker unions, as well as lobby organizations.

Bathroom tissue is expensive, and everyone needs to pinch their pennies when they pinch off a loaf. Cell phone calculators don't have enough precision to calculate the per-unit cost of toilet paper. They also lack parentheses to do some necessary grouping to calculate:

PRICE / ( SHEETS PER ROLL * ROLLS )

Solution is below the fold.

This is weird. The authors turn OpenOffice.org into a spreadsheet server -- and then create a front end in Dojo with Javascript, and tunnel events from the front end to the OOo spreadsheet via a Tomcat servlet.

Amazon was totally sleeping on the iPad, which many predicted. So they announced and the Kindle Development Kit.

These are links to my various online selling locations:

Craigslist
Amazon
Ebay
Kijiji
Backpages

How many times has this wheel been reinvented? According to Google searches, not enough - because I couldn't find a good one. Over the years, I've definitely build this wheel a few times, so, here goes again. This is a lot better than the stock nl2br() function.

The attached code and test files show it off, and only a description follows.