Category: Ramblings

When You Will Receive Your Economic Stimulus (Tax Rebate) Checks

U.S. tax payers will be receiving economic stimulus checks a.k.a. tax rebate checks starting today. You are supposed to take this money and blow it on something like cool computer gadgets. This in theory will help bolster the U.S. economy. The money will be paid out on a schedule which will be determined by the last two digits of your social security number and whether or not you filed your 2007 tax return electronically or by paper. You must have filed your 2007 tax return by April 15th otherwise you will be paid last after everyone else that filed on time. Here is the schedule of when money will be paid out (the U.S. government recently moved up the schedule 1 week from what is listed in the schedule below):

Direct deposit payment
If last 2 digits of your SS# are: Your rebate should be sent by:
00-20 May 2
21-75 May 9
76-99 May 16
Paper check
If last 2 digits of your SS# are: Your rebate should be sent by:
00-09 May 16
10-18 May 23
19-25 May 30
26-38 June 6
39-51 June 13
52-63 June 20
64-75 June 27
76-87 July 4
88-99 July 11

Official IRS notice of the tax rebate payment schedule is available here.

I Hate RTFM

I regularly search the internet for solutions to problems and one of the things that really irritates me is people who give totally unhelpful and often times rude answers to people’s requests for help. Sure sometimes you come across a thread where someone asks a really “dumb” question but that doesn’t mean you should berate or insult the person by just saying something like RTFM (Read The Fu*king Manual) or some other totally unhelpful remark which doesn’t answer their question. The RTFM responses generally appear most often in the *NIX communities from what I have seen. If you don’t have anything nice to say then don’t say anything at all… an RTFM remark helps no one.

RTFM

And in case you were wondering… Here is a link to a web page which explains how to change the IP address in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) which happens to be the same way to change the IP address in CentOS.

 

10.5 Leopard – Server Tools Rant

So far my early dealings with the Server Admin app and other server management tools in Leopard Server have not impressed me much. I was hoping for a lot of improvement over the Tiger versions of the programs but some of the same old bugs are there. In particular the Work Group Manager app has been giving me the same old negative numbered errors occasionally and as with Tiger when that happens whatever process it was doing is instantly aborted without a rollback so you are left with user/computer/group objects with partially edited states resulting in weird errors. At this point I have to roll up my sleeves and do “surgery” on the Open Directory via the “inspector” in order to manually remove the remnants of the aborted process. C’mon Apple… proper error handling with rollback of “atomic” operations is something I learned in my first year of Computer Science. Try/catch blocks with undos of what was done before the process threw an exception please! Showing the user a cryptic error message with a negative number and a reference to a line of source code is ridiculous and way below the standard that is expected of Apple’s typically user friendly software. Rant done.