Mind maps

Mind maps are unstructured, so if your project is unstructured, use it. It is a safe bet to acknowledge the lack of structure altogether than to invent funny names like Inception, Elaboration, Construction to the project stages that do not exist.

The lack of structure brings in a subtle problem. Someone else looking at your mind map will have a hard time reading it. First, because of the lack of the predetermined structure does not allow to grasp the content through the common knowledge of that structure. Second, because mind maps are only half-language, inadvertently using the noun phrases and dropping the predicates and prepositions, together with the grammatical relationships. You may know that the line between "flies" and "arrow" mean "time", but not necessarily your reader.

So, use Mind Maps to acquire new knowledge, but do not pass them onto others.

See Free Mind.

Gantt charts

Gantt charts are only practical to track the deadlines and to keep various participants accountable in case of a high parallelization of work. It may look to the newbie that the length of the bars in those charts represents the actual amount of effort, but this is largely false, in reality.

Remember that: Gantt charts are the tool of choice to organize the work of multiple parties at the beginning of a project.

See Projity.

There are only three films that impacted my life to the point that they are day and night living around me in speaking and dressing habits, posters, wallpapers, ring tones, logins and passwords, class names and variables. One Russian, one French and one English. One per culture I learned.

• Kin-dza-dza
• Cyrano de Bergerac
• Brazil

mkdir ~/fusesmb
fusesmb ~/fusesmb
sleep 3600 # wait until fusesmb caches the network shares
ls -1R ~/fusesmb > shared-files.lst # -1 is "minus one", not "minus l"

Create a 10G disk image:

qemu-img create -f qcow2 netbsd-4.0-i386.qcow2 10G

Avoid hangup on boot with --no-acpi and the default network card timeout by trying out a different card, e.g. -net nic,model=ne2k_pci:

kvm -hda netbsd-4.0-i386.qcow2 -cdrom i386cd-4.0.iso --no-acpi -net user -net nic,model=ne2k_pci

Walk through the installer.

Install additional packages with pkg_add:

export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/4.0/i386
pkg_add vim ctwm firefox wget

Include them in path:

echo "PATH=$PATH:/usr/pkg/bin" >>/etc/profile
. /etc/profile

Install the latest stable pkgsrc:

wget ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2008Q1/pkgsrc-2008Q1.tar.gz
tar xzf pkgsrc-2008Q1.tar.gz -C /usr

Make sure that pkgsrc fetches binary packages for dependencies, when possible:

echo ".ifdef BSD_PKG_MK
BINPKG_SITES=ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/4.0/i386
BINPKG_SITES+=/usr/pkgsrc/packages/All
.endif" > /etc/mk.conf

Configure pkg_online to be able to search for packages

cd /usr/pkgsrc
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@pkgsrc-wip.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pkgsrc-wip login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@pkgsrc-wip.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/pkgsrc-wip checkout -P wip
cd /usr/pkgsrc/wip/pkg_online
unset PKG_PATH
make package DEPENDS_TARGET=bin-install

Search for additonal packages

pkg_online_find :s:pptp

P.S. Thanks to Aleksey Cheusov <vle@gmx.net> for implementing and making available pkg_online.

I am probably missing some background knowledge, but the salary calculation process in Belgium looks like it has been subverted by Ministry of Finance officials.

This is better seen by example

The so-called key formula for the tax prepayment calculation (précompte professionnel) for the year 2008 (income year 2007) states that the first 5220 EUR are exempt from taxes.

Now, let us work by example. We will do the calculation for someone called Jacques who earned 10000 EUR in 2007. We proceed by subtracting 5220 EUR from his earning and we pay taxes on the rest, that is, the 4780 EUR.

This amount falls entirely within the lowest tax range, that has the tax rate of 26,75 %.

4780*0.2675 = 1278.65

So Jacques supposedly has to pay 1278.65 in taxes. Right? Wrong!

The calculation procedure is defined by the Ministry of Finance as follows

First, Jacques calculates his taxes on the total of his earnings. 10000 EUR are split in two ranges. The first 7550 EUR is taxed at the rate of 26,75%. Everything over 7550 EUR up to 10250 EUR of earnings is taxed at the rate of 32,1%.

7550*0.2675 + 2450*0.3210 = 2806.08

Second, Jacques subtracts from the result the amount that he would have paid if the first 5220 EUR were taxable at the lowest tax rate, that is

2806.08 - (5220*0.2675) = 1409.73

The difference between both calculations is