A story that’s too good to ignore

Companies often complain that tax legislation is too complicated to understand, let alone implement.

The CAG published their yearly report detailing shortcomings in how public money has been spent. This quote comes from a report on RTE:

It noted the Revenue Commissioners made an undisclosed voluntary settlement with the Inspector of Taxes in November 2007. The settlement related to a liability of almost €1.7m in unpaid Benefit in Kind (BIK) by Revenue’s own staff.

The CAG observed the Revenue, in its capacity as employer, did not adequately consider the potential impact of the BIK legislation on its own operations.

Smile! It’s euroCHAPS

I’m not a currency speculator, but I do have a need to bulk-buy currency.

I’m in a slightly uncommon situation in that I get paid in GBP (£/Sterling) but I live in the eurozone. So…each month I have to transfer my wages (+ some other expenses) from the UK to Ireland. Hitherto, I have been using a specialist foreign exchange company. I won’t say specifically who they are, but they’re along the lines of http://www.moneycorp.com/, http://www.interchangefx.co.uk/. They give a much better exchange rate than you would get from the High St (Thomas Cook, The Post Office, etc.) and charge £10-20 for performing the transaction.

Recently, with currency rates bouncing around like jumping beans, I thought I’d double-check what rate my bank could offer. I will name them, as they’re the heroes of the story: Smile http://www.smile.co.uk/. They offer a service called “euroCHAPS”. My “foreign exchange specialist” offered me a (EUR/£) rate of 1.2220 (plus £20 fee). Smile offered 1.2370 (plus £25 fee).

I think the interbank rate was about 1.2450 at the time.

These numbers might not seem too different but trust me: half a cent this way of that way can cost me £50 or more per month.

I lose money every month, but…less with Smile.

(I’m hoping that this service is different to the one described in this article – otherwise…someone clearly hasn’t told Smile!)

use screen; ^A-n use screen; ^A-c use screen;

Offical GNU screen site

My advice: use screen. It makes your ssh (or telnet) sessions immune to network problems. If your connection drops, you can simply log back in again, and carry on whatever you were doing.

I find it incredibly useful. In fact, indispensible. I’ve edited my .bash_profile file to include the folllowing line:

screen -U -D -RR

The options mean:

-U: My terminal understands unicode.

-D -RR: If there’s at least one current detached screen, attach one of them (the first one?) to this session. Otherwise, if there’s at least one attached screen, then detach one of them (the first one?), and attach it to this session. Otherwise, create a new screen.

What it means, in (slightly plainer) English is: Attach me to an existing screen (if one exists). Otherwise, create a new screen.

10 day rule

France loves its rogue trader

French President, Nicolas Sarkozy: “Our financial system is walking on its head,” he said. “And it is losing sight of its goal, which is to lend money for economic activities that will ultimately generate profit . . . not to go and speculate on different activities which make massive fluctuations.”

The stock exchanges’ function in the world is (acclaimedly) to accurately place a value on stocks, shares, and other financial products. However, stock exchanges are all too often used by speculators to make short-term gains based on nothing other than differing levels of information-transfer (e.g. news reaching different shareholders at different speeds [dubiously legal]) or insider knowledge (definitely illegal).

Banks/institutions buy financial instruments that are a ridiculous number of steps away from the actual wealth generation, the actual companies, the actual workers who are “adding value”. People/institutions buy and sell these products, often with zero knowledge of the underlying products. A great example is the structured products that banks have been selling each other over the last few years, based on mortgages – aka CDO’s (Collateralized debt obligations). Recent news suggests that their “chickens might be coming home to roost”.

Anyway…my suggestion: What about making it illegal to sell a stock/bond/share/derivative/etc. within 10 days of purchasing it. Surely it would be better in the long run if shareholders/investors acted more like custodians – if shareholders bought shares because they believed they had actual value, rather than because they knew they could “make a quick buck”. It’ll never happen because…stock brokers make their money on short term differences on share prices. No government wants to upset their financial institutions as they’re a huge source of taxation.

Imagine what good could have been done with the billions that Jérôme Kerviel lost on Société Générale’s behalf. It’s sitting in someone’s pocket right now. A currency speculator, or a spread-better, or a stock-broker.

Not someone who has added any value to anything.

Supermarkets are not “markets”

They’re effectively monopolies.

Often, those mourning the loss of the local butchers etc. seem to overlook the fact that having “everything under one roof” (supermarket-style) is hugely convenient.

What about actually having an out-of-town real market. i.e. lots of food retailers under one roof; a one-stop shop with real competition.

(Supermarkets should be forced to remove the word “market” from their names)

Eircom ipv6, linux, slow Firefox & Thunderbird

Have just installed Linux on another laptop (Fedora 9 on Lenovo Thinkpad T61).

It’s 10 times easier than it was to do a similar thing 4 years ago. Wireless card works, windows partitions are recognized, “yum” can pretty much install everything I need (even flash plugin for firefox).

One thing that – again – I had forgotten, having discovered it three years ago, is that – out of the box – Firefox and Thunderbird have ipv6 support switched on. Some might argue this is a good thing. I don’t know enough to comment. What I do know, though, is that for some reason, this causes an annoying delay of a few seconds when connecting to (respectively) websites and pop servers.

I don’t know enough to know whether this is a problem with Mozilla, Fedora, Eircom (our home ISP in Dublin), or my ADSL router. However, the solution is to disable ipv6 in both of these products.

In Firefox, navigate to “about:config”, and find the following property:

network.dns.disableIPv6

and set it to “true”.

In Thunderbird, go to “config editor” and amend the same property similarly.

Thunderbird: Moving email accounts out of “Local Folders”

I’ve just installed Thunderbird on a new laptop, and started configuring up my email accounts.

However, one email account, I mistakenly set to use the Global inbox in “Local Folders”.

This isn’t what I want – I want each email account to have its own Inbox/Sent/Draft/etc.

However, I can’t find a way to undo this in the Account Settings windows (or any where else in the user interface, for that matter).

STOP PRESS! Actually…I’ve found how you’re supposed to do it. It’s me who is stupid, not Thunderbird!

If you go to “Account Settings” and then click on “Server Settings” for the account in question, you can click on “Advanced”, which allows you to specify whether new mail should go into this account’s Inbox, a Global Inbox, or an Inbox for a different account.

Something I saw today

Today, in a town in Sussex, I saw a lady with a pram. In the pram was a dog. The lady was feeding fish and chips to the dog. Both seemed pretty happy with this arrangement.

jcifs – use cifs/smbfs without installing linux kernel modules

I was recently doing some work on a Linux server that required access to a remote samba server, however it turns out that in order to attach a filesystem using the CIFS or SMBFS drivers, you need support compiled in to the kernel. This wasn’t an option for me at the time, I was working on a production machine. Recompiling the kernel and rebooting just wasn’t possible.

I was stuck until I discovered JCIFS, a Java implementation of CIFS. I wrote myself a quick java class for copying local files to a remote Samba server. JCIFS is so simple to use, and (as my experience goes) reliable and bug-free that it took me about 1/2 hr. Will post the simplified source here soon.

Helped me out of a BIG hole!

Show me the money and I’ll give you the keys

If I were to detail all of my gripes with the amount of power that rests in the hands of landlords and letting agencies (e.g. arbitary retention of deposits, little or no maintenance during tenancy, etc.) I would be here all day. One particular thought that I had today: Is it really fair that when you sign a tenancy agreement, you’re generally obliged to provide a deposit and first month’s rent either as cash or a bankers draft before being handed the keys? At the end of the tenancy period, you generally have to vacate the property, hand over the keys and then wait for some arbitrary period until your deposit is returned.

It would be much “fairer” if tenants were able to demand their deposit back before vacating the property.

“Give me the money (my money, in fact) and I’ll give you the keys.”