I have an old Dell C400 Latitude at home and use it primarily as a music server.  It doesn’t have any built in drives such as floppy or CD and I don’t own an external Dell CD drive.  It won’t boot from an external USB device so my options for installing a new OS are very limited.

A few years ago I borrowed an external Dell CD drive and installed Slackware on the laptop.  After that I installed Ubuntu 7.04 and since then it has been running on that.  I now need to do a fresh install but can’t borrow the external drive any more. So what can I do?

The answer is to install Ubuntu from the internet using the information provided at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/NetbootInstallFromInternet.   This is pretty straightforward and suprisingly quick.  I had my newer server up and running in just under 25 minutes.

On my old site I had a couple of tracks that I have mashed up in the past and one track created with fruityloops.  Since the blog has gone in these tracks have disappeared.  Time to put em back.

1. Stan – Eminem (Paradise Remix) – stan.mp3

2. Queen gets Tipsy –  J-kwon vs Queen – queen-gets-tipsy.mp3

3. Revolution (v0.1 mix) – Euperia – revolution.mp3

Due to the so called ‘Credit Crunch’ the British government had decided to change the VAT rate for one year between December 2008 and Jan 2010.  Many developers in the UK had made the mistake of hardcoding the VAT rate in their code which caused issues.

After discussions with colleagues it became clear that each developer has different approaches to calculating the VAT on a nett price and deducting VAT from a gross price.

According to http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/VAT/forms-rates/rates/calculating.htm the correct ways to calculate VAT are as follows:

/*
 * Add VAT to a nett price
 * Using 17.5% VAT
 */
$nett = 1.00;
$gross = $nett * 1.175;
echo number_format($gross, 2);
// gives  1.18 due to rounding

/*
 * Deduct VAT from a gross price
 * Using 17.5% VAT and decimal fraction
 */
$gross = 1.00;
$nett = $gross/1.175;
echo number_format($nett,2);
// gives 0.85 due to rounding

/*
 * Deduct VAT from a gross price
 * Using 17.5% VAT and the 7/47 rule
 */
$gross = 1.00;
$nett = $gross - (($gross*7)/47);
echo number_format($nett,2);
// gives 0.85 due to rounding