First things first: I have noticed quite a bit of traffic to my website because of a typo on my Compound Interest Calculator page. The page has been updated, but I still embrace my imperfect past. Its main title will remain the same, though struck-through and corrected

What Is It, Why Should I Care?

The Wikipedia article on compound interest is really in depth, and a worthwhile read. Its basic definition: "Compound interest is the concept of adding accumulated interest back to the principal, so that interest is earned on interest from that moment on."

For example, you put $100 in the bank. After a month, the bank pays you 1% interest on your money — 1% of $100 is $1. Now you have $101.

After another month, the bank pays you another 1% interest on your money. This time, they are paying you 1% of $101 — this works out to be $1.01 — now you have $102.01 in the bank.

This is compound interest, compounded monthly. Easy… and powerful. Earning interest on previous interest means that you have an ever-growing pool of money on which interest can be earned. Your money increases at an exponential rate instead of a linear rate. (Hint: exponential means faster, bigger, more.)

What Is a "Compound Interest with Monthly Contributions" Calculation?

I needed a quick way to calculate what would happen to a deposit account based on an initial balance, a given annual yield (interest rate), and a hypothetical monthly contribution. We’ll assume that the interest on the account is paid at the end of each month and that you deposit your contribution at the beginning of each month.

For example, let’s say an account has $100 in it. Its current interest rate is 3% per year (referred to as the annual yield). If I contribute $10 per month into the account once per month, how much will I have at the end of the year?

This is the question that my compound interest with monthly contributions calculator answers.

So How Does Your Calculator Work?

In order to calculate compound interest based on an initial balance and a monthly contribution, you combine two compound interest formulas:

• Capital Accumulation Formula: FV = ( (1 + i)ⁿ ) * PV
• Future Value of a Series Formula: FV = PMT * ( ( (1 + i)ⁿ - 1) / i )

Where:

• FV = Future Value
• PV = Present Value
• PMT = Periodic Payment Amount
• i = interest rate per period
• n = number of periods

So, the calculator takes takes the Future Value of a Series and adds it to the Capital Accumulation Formula, based on the input your provide. What’s the answer to our hypothetical situation then? Let’s plug in the numbers and see out it works out…

• FV = ?
• PV = $100
• PMT = $10
• i = 3%
• n = 12

Total = [ Capital Accumulation Formula ] + [ Future Value of a Series ]
Total = [ ( (1 + i)ⁿ ) * PV ] + [ PMT * ( ( (1 + i)ⁿ - 1) / i ) ]
Total = [ ( (1 + 0.0025)¹² ) * 100 ] + [ 10 * ( ( (1 + 0.0025)¹² - 1) / 0.0025 ) ]
Total = [ 1.0304159 * 100 ] + [ 10 * ( 0.0304159 / 0.0025) ]
Total = 103.04159 + 121.6636
Total = $224.71

Note that the the 3% has been translated into 0.0025. This is a simple calculation: 3 / 100 / 12 = 0.0025. We first divide by 100 to make this a decimal percentage, and then we divide by 12 to see the interest rate that is paid to our account each month.

Happy compounding!

I thought it was quite a charming film, highlighting mom and pop, independently-owned businesses along a circuitous West to East Coast journey by the filmmaker and his camera operator(s). The central idea of the documentary is to go "from Los Angeles to the Atlantic Ocean never spending a cent at a chain restaurant, chain hotel or chain gas station". A tall-order for sure with so many franchises and corporations and other such entities that the doc dubs "The Man".

Gorman is great to watch on screen. He’s real, he’s funny, and along every leg of the trip I found myself excited to hear his take. And there are some really touching stories to boot.

About 15 minutes into the film, I realized that I was wearing a Hanes hoodie, branded with a small but noticeable IBM logo. Both are NYSE traded companies. IBM is a huge, global enterprise. Decidedly not mom and pop. Even though this was my standard work-day-at-IBM uniform, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of irony.

But I’m not sure that the film necessarily had an ulterior, anti "The Man" motive. At the beginning of his journey, Gorman presents his mission as more of a personal challenge than anything else. Yes, it was his goal not to give any money to big business for the duration. But he does not seem to be out to harm them — he’s out to highlight, to praise the little guy.

In seeking the local, independent businesses, he sticks mostly to small-town America. This alone creates a vastly different experience for him compared against what he could/would have experienced in the big city.

I love independent business. While I’m not sure I could be as extreme as the filmmaker, I seek them out whenever I can. But big business plays a huge part everyone’s day to day lives. For example, in the film, Gorman seeks out only independently-owned gas stations. Great. But where do those gas stations buy their gas from? The couple that owns a service station in America’s heartland isn’t out there drilling for oil. This takes enormous resources, something arguably better left to the big guys. (Granted, good arguments can be made for not using gas in the first place, something to which, I would imagine, Gorman could sink his teeth into.)

It is interesting to think about the extent to which The Man plays a part in your life. Take for example this blog. I have Google-sponsored advertising alongside the posts. Steve Pavlina has an interesting (and lengthy) take about blogging for money. One of the things he says is that "worrying that you’re doing something wrong by deciding to get paid for your work" is dangerous if you’ve decided to monetize your website/blog. I agree — I try my best to create useful, interesting content. The information is free, and I don’t think the ads are intrusive. Or at least that’s the idea.

Regardless, I guess my blog supports The Man. But I think it also helps the little guy — more or less anyone can sign up for an AdWords account and begin advertising. The web is full of stories about the little guy succeeding. I wonder what Gorman would think…? Even he is doing a bit of Internet entrepreneurship over at his namesake website.

Anyway, I highly recommend checking the film out. You can get it from Amazon or maybe even try to find an independently-owned theater near you to put on a screening.

On December 23^rd, 2007, my wife and I were headed to my parents’ house for Christmas. During our trip I was wrongly issued a speeding citation. I pleaded not guilty but ended up settling out of court. Here’s an account of what happened and what I would recommend you do if you find yourself in a similar situation.

The Details

The citation-issuing officer instructed me to call the Guadalupe County Justice of the Peace by a certain date in order to take care of my ticket. The paperwork that I was given gave me the option of taking care of the ticket via mail. By mail, my only two options were to plead guilty or to plead no-contest (with or without taking a driver’s safety course).

Neither of these options were satisfactory, since I did nothing wrong. When I called the court, I told the lady on the phone that I intended to enter a plea of not guilty; she instructed me to put that in writing and mail it to the court. Okay, fine. Done and done.

Shortly thereafter, I received a letter from the court stating that they had scheduled a Pre-Trial Hearing, for which my attendance was absolutely required. Most people I’ve talked with that are experienced in speeding tickets say that Pre-Trial Hearings are not required and that you should not go. After questioning the court via phone, they stressed over and over again that I was required to be there. Playing good citizen, I did what they asked.

The drive from Austin to Seguin where the courthouse is located was around 70 miles each way. This is not necessarily how I enjoy spending my time, but I figured I could go armed with enough evidence to have them dismiss my case. (While the officer was writing the citation, we took detailed notes of the surrounding circumstances, took pictures of the average speed listed by my cars on-board computer, etc.)

When I arrived, I signed-in and took a seat in the courtroom. There were two attorneys in the front of the room, meeting individually with people like me. There were probably twenty people in the room, so I was able to overhear the stories of most of them. It seemed that stories nearly identical to mine were commonplace.

I had prepared a statement so I wouldn’t miss any details. So when it was my turn to talk with the attorney, I just handed him my statement, and let him read. Here are the facts of the case, unaltered as I presented them to the prosecuting attorney at my Pre-Trial Hearing:

My wife and I were driving east on I-10, traveling from San Antonio to Houston. My cruise control was set on 69 MPH. As we were driving and before we were pulled over, we passed 3 separate cars on the side of the highway that had been pulled over by highway patrol officers. After seeing the first car on the side of the highway, I double-checked my cruise control. My car has two speedometers: one analog and one digital. The digital speedometer is one of six functions on an on-board computer. I switched the computer to the digital speed readout to verify the cruise control speed, which I had set by reading the analog speedometer. The digital speedometer read 69 MPH.

The time between seeing the first car pulled over and the 3rd car pulled over was around 15 minutes. Shortly after passing the 3rd car, I noticed a highway patrol car driving on the other side of the highway. I noticed this patrol car because the overhead, flashing lights were on. I estimate that the patrol car was around 200 yards away from me at this point. Also at this point, I was in the right hand lane, behind an 18-wheeler. My car and the 18-wheeler had been traveling like this for some time; that is, we were maintaining the distance between us.

After passing this patrol car on the other side of the road, I noticed in the rear-view mirror the patrol car was using the median to turn around to head in the same direction as our travel. At this point, I triple-checked my cruise control setting. It was indeed still set at 69 MPH.

After the highway patrol officer had driven up behind me with his lights on, I pulled over, offered my driver’s license and proof of insurance to the officer. The officer stated that he had clocked me on radar traveling at 85 MPH. As I had absolutely not been going this fast, I asked to see the radar. The officer then stated that his equipment did not save the value and that he could not show me anything that read 85 MPH.

At this point, I attempted to explain to the officer that I had my cruise control set on 69 MPH and that I had been following an 18-wheeler in the right-hand lane for quite some time. The officer stated that he did not want to argue about my alleged speed while standing on the side of the road. He then gave me the traffic citation, on which the alleged speed is given as 80 MPH. The officer did not offer an explanation as to why there was a discrepancy between the speed at which he allegedly clocked me, and the speed for which he wrote the traffic citation.

I have two supporting pictures. Both were taken after the citation was issued. The first picture depicts the average speed since the last time the average speed computer was reset. Without fail, I reset this computer each time I refuel the automobile. The second picture depicts the trip-odometer, which was reset when I refueled, less than 80 miles prior to receiving the citation. The gas station was located on 25291 I-10 West, where I refueled at 2:51 PM. The average speed, therefore, represents nearly 100% highway driving, on the stretch of I-10 where the citation was issued.

After reading through my statement and looking at my pictures, the attorney said that he could not dismiss my case based on the evidence I presented. He did, however, offer me a settlement. The same settlement, in fact, that he had offered every single other person that came into the courtroom to plead not guilty for a speeding ticket. The offer included a minor reduction in the fine (which came to a bit over $100 for me) and 60 days of probation. After the probation period, the ticket will be dismissed provided I do not receive another citation in the time period. Additionally, I am not required to take a driving safety course.

The decision basically came down to this: Did I want to make another trip from Austin to Seguin? If I would have not accepted the settlement offer, they would have set a legitimate trial date, and I would have been required to tell my story to the judge. The officer would be there to tell his side of the story (maybe). Further, the attorney told me that, were I to go to trial and lose, the judge would likely not allow me to take defensive driving. I don’t know how true that sentiment was, but I took the advice — a mark on my record without the ability to scrub it off is the last thing I wanted.

So…

Avoid IH-10 Through Seguin!

If at all possible, I recommend never driving through Seguin, Texas. This place does not deserve your time nor your money. A few other tidbits related to my speeding ticket lead me to this recommendation:

1. After receiving my undeserved citation, I begrudgingly continued down IH-10. Soon thereafter, I see yet another police officer pull over yet another automobile. This truck was going exactly the same speed I was at the time — just under the speed limit. I know because I was maintaining a comfortable distance behind him using cruise control. Further, he was behind and 18 wheeler, also maintaining a comfortable, non-changing distance between them. It seems to me that there was absolutely no rhyme or reason to getting pulled over. Perhaps they were just meeting quotas? It was the end of the month. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I do know that at least two incidents that day were bogus.
2. Seguin is crawling with DPS officers. Even if you normally are a 100% competent driver, never speed, and obey all of the rules, your chances of getting a ticket must be higher when there are more officers. You have to slip up sometime. Or perhaps be wrongfully accused.
3. When I was driving through Seguin on my way towards the courthouse, I was struck by how dilapidated nearly all of the buildings on the main road appeared. The courthouse, though — that’s an entirely different story. It was by far the nicest building that I encountered. Could it be that so many people speed through Seguin that their ticket revenue has directly supported the construction of a beautiful new courthouse facility? Likely. Given my experience, though, I wonder how many of those tickets were completely undeserved. Regardless, speeding ticket revenue seems like quite a profitable little enterprise.

Seguin, TX is a speed trap, no doubt about it. Avoid it if you can.

Other Recommendations

So, you’ve decided that there’s no other possible route for you to take except IH-10 through Seguin. Fine. Be prepared. You might want to drive on the feeder. But if you do get a ticket, I think that driving out for the Pre-Trial Hearing settlement offer is worth it. Why? Assuming that you get a similar offer to mine…

1. You might get a reduced fine as compared to pleading guilty or no-contest.
2. You might not have to waste time in a driver’s safety course.
3. The citation might not go on your record after a probationary period.

Of course, it is entirely possible that you are offered absolutely none of this, and pleading not guilty could be a complete waste of time. You need to weigh that possibility before you make a final decision.

In the End…

After taking the settlement offer, I walked out of the courthouse with the distinct feeling that I had just done something morally corrupt. I paid $110 to Guadalupe County for something I didn’t do. That’s wrong! I paid these people off to leave me alone! Gross! Unethical!

I guess I felt a bit helpless in the situation though. I felt that it would have a waste of time to argue. Gas money to get there and back (again), a least a half-day worth of my time, and the more-than-likely outcome ("you’re guilty because we believe police officers instead of normal citizens") seemed inevitable. It was entirely depressing. Innocent until proven guilty… or until you are beaten into submission by red tape.

The good news is that the decision is over with, the money has been spent, and I can get on with my life. And maybe someone out there with a similar situation will find this posting useful.

I was recently seeing how well a fairly long, extremely specific blog title was indexed by Google. My general thinking has been that niche titles will appear high in search indices when Googled word-for-word. That is, even without surrounding the query in quotation marks, I would expect that a Google search for:

moving maven repository metadata files

…would pull up my blog posting, simply because it matches the title exactly. Here are the surprising results:

As you can see, the upper-case search returns a link to my blog as the second entry. The lower-case search returns a completely different page. To be fair, I recently upgraded my blog from MovableType to WordPress. In doing so, I changed the URL structure. The link that Google found with the capitalized words has a Permanent Redirect (HTTP 301 status code).

What is going on here? I can think of only two possible explanations:

• Google is case sensitive, or at least has recently become so, and their documentation is incorrect.
• Google is not case sensitive. The URL change, regardless of the HTTP 301 Permanent Redirect, has caused the index ranking of the page to change. Perhaps the capitalized version of the query was sent to a server that did not have the updated index.

In either case, the results are confusing. I would expect that a Google search behave as per their documentation. Maybe someone from Google could trackback and let me know

In May of 2007, I bought the NeatReceipts Scanalizer document organization system. I must admit that I first saw this product advertised in Southwest Airline’s “Spirit” magazine. Like the SkyMall, I generally take in-flight magazines with a grain of salt. But, as I will talk about below, after considering the alternatives, I decided to take the $175 plunge.

Benefits to a Paperless Home Office

There are quite a few benefits to going all digital. Clearly you are reading this because you know (or think you know!) the benefits to paperless-ness. For me, the reclamation of physical space and the ability to easily organize (and reorganize) were the top reasons I decided to get off of paper.

Technology also makes it blindingly easy to backup your entire home office. Paper is really a single point of failure. What I mean is that if you store everything on paper, and, say (God forbid) a fire or other natural disaster strikes, all of your paper goes away. And unless you’ve copied everything and have it in some off site storage, you’re never going to be able to get it back. With a digital system, though, you should be able to backup your data to a CD or DVD and stick it in a fireproof safe. Fireproof safes are good investments, are or can be relatively small, and should be used to protect those — typically very few — things that are impossible or extremely difficult to replace.

Another popular and feel-good reason is that going paperless is greener: You can shred and recycle nearly all of the paper you would otherwise stash away. I’ve found that getting in the mode of shredding and recycling actually propels me to recycle more paper than I otherwise would have. In particular I’ve found that I shred and recycle nearly everything: junk mail, phone books, etc. Shredding can be extremely therapeutic.

This list could go on and on. And I’m sure you have a few reasons I didn’t mention. But don’t let all of these benefits stop you from considering some important pitfalls…

You Will Still Need Organization!

So we’ve established that you’re reading this because you believe that having a paperless office will make your life easier. The last section enumerated some of the benefits, most of which you probably already knew. These benefits are great, but all of this doesn’t happen by magic.

Namely, switching to a paperless organizational system does not preclude the need for organization. I think that many people out there view a digital archive system as something that will somehow magically make everything neat and organized. A magic bullet of sorts. But the fact is this: You have to think just as hard, if not harder, about how and why to correctly categorize and organize things with a paperless system. Why? Digital clutter.

For example, take a look at your desktop right now. (Your computer desktop.) How many icons are on it? I would suggest that if there are more than a dozen or so icons on your desktop, then you don’t really have a good handle on digital organization. I could be way off, but the overwhelming majority of people I’ve met with strong computer skills have under 10 icons on their desktop. I’m sure there are people out there that could prove me wrong, but I’d be willing to bet that a majority of people don’t really understand directory hierarchies, file systems, and other basic computing ideas that really help in organizing your digital life.

But fear not. These are skills that can be learned. And there are all-in-one software systems available that take some of this burden off of you. The system that I use — NeatReceipts — allows you to categorize, create folders, re-categorize, and sort all very easily.

To Buy a System, or To Roll Your Own

I highly recommend purchasing an all-in-one solution for a digital home office. When I was first considering going paperless, I though to myself: “I’m industrious. I can buy a scanner and set up a database. I’ll just do the setup work myself and save some money.” Dumb.

The whole point of software is to make things easier. And if you can leverage what somewhat else has already figured out, why not go that route? Neat Receipts has performed beautifully for me in this regard: The Neat Receipts scanner recognizes nearly 90% of the vendors I buy products from, and it automatically categories and records the data from the receipts. Further, the Neat Receipt system meets the criteria of Rev. Proc. 97-22 as set forth by the IRS. If you want to go paperless, you need to ensure that your digital system meets these requirements. Though I’ve never been through an audit, it is hard to imagine going into one without the proper documentation.

Good Point — What if I am audited by the IRS?

Will my paperless home office stand up to the scrutiny of an IRS audit? As best I can tell: Yes, your digitized receipts and records should provide all the firing power you need to document your financial past to the IRS. After a cursory search for something to back up this claim, I came across this document which discusses digital documents and how it affects corporate taxpayers.

Neat Receipts has some more information regarding a paperless home office and how it helps with taxes. Further, Rev. Proc. 97-22 (Books and records; electronic storage; imaging) available on page 9 of this document from the IRS.

If anything, having all of your important paperwork store digitally should make an IRS audit much easier to deal with. You should be able to quickly find everything for the year in question, and your software should be able to provide you with the summaries and calculations to corroborate your filing.

Paper You Shouldn’t Shred

Though the benefits of a paperless home office are many, there are definitely some things that you will want to keep hard copies of. For starters, the closing documents from any real estate you own are good candidates. Marriage certificates, diplomas, etc. Anything else I would just give a quick gut check: Does this feel like something you can shred or not? If not, keep it around. Obviously you want to keep these types of things to a minimum.

What is a good idea, however, is scanning these things anyway. This way you’ll be able to back them up and replicate them in the event of a disaster.

Also, one huge caveat: Back up your database before you shred anything! Just think about having scanned in a week’s or a month’s worth of paper, shredding all of it, and then having a computer malfunction. This would be completely unrecoverable. So, obey this three step process, every time:

• Scan
• Back up
• Shred

Okay, okay — How has it worked for you?

Great! There are basically two categories of things that need to be scanned. One, the backlog of receipts, papers, and files that I have lying around. And two, all of the incoming stuff that is generated normally.

For the backlog, I try to set aside 3 or 4 hours on a Saturday once a month, and plow through some of the old documents that need to get scanned. And to keep up with the continuing incoming stream of stuff, I set aside an hour or two a week to input all of the receipts and bills and such.

The space reclaimed is easily worth any overhead created by the scanning system.

Also, note that I am in no way affiliated with Neat Receipts. I just really like their product. Actually, I do have some criticisms — perhaps I’ll write those up in a another entry. One of my main beefs with them has nothing to do with how their product works. It has to do with their marketing. They seem to be intent on directing their efforts on corporate customers, especially those types of corporate travel-jockeys that generate a lot of expense reports. I feel like they are missing a huge market of people like me — just an average guy who wants to get rid of the paper in his home office.

There’s clearly no perfect system, but I’m a big fan of sitting on the shoulders of those who have already figured out reasonable ways of accomplishing things.

In Closing

Going paperless has a lot of rewards. Implementing a digital solution a little at a time has really worked for me. This is certainly one area in which you’ll want to do your research and make sure that whatever solution you decide on fits your needs.

This last point should be taken seriously though — putting a real value in the <scm/> element could lead to confusion. For my projects, I use an SCM section that looks like this:

...
<scm>
  <connection>scm:perforce://fake-scm-paths</connection>
  <developerConnection>scm:perforce://see-SCM-229</developerConnection>
</scm>
...

The point being that this is clearly a fake SCM location, but also points you to the reason why (SCM-229). This is especially useful when branching — you don’t need to update the SCM location in order to release your project from a branched location in source control.

Oh — one important thing to note is which version of the release plugin you are using. SCM-229 was fixed in version 1.0-beta-4 of maven-scm-provider-perforce, which is used in the 2.0-beta-6 version of the maven-release-plugin. So if you are not already explicitly declaring the versions of your plugins (you should be!), you’ll need to ensure your POM has this info:

<build>
  ...
  <plugins>
    ...
    <plugin>
      <artifactId>maven-release-plugin</artifactId>
      <version>2.0-beta-6</version>
    </plugin>
    ...
  </plugins>
  ...
</build>

Enjoy

I go to their Sign Up page. Here’s what I see (click to see it full-screen):

Wow. It’s definitely what you think it is:

Hitler is a verification word?!? Classy. I still don’t have a Facebook account.

[perforce@source restore]$ p4d -r /data/p4root -jr checkpoint.659 journal
Perforce db files in '/data/p4root' will be created if missing...
Recovering from checkpoint.659...
Perforce server error:
        open for read: checkpoint.659: No such file or directory
[perforce@source restore]$ ls -lah
total 5.8G
drwxrw-rw-  2 perforce perforce 4.0K Jul 24 14:28 .
drwx------  5 perforce perforce 4.0K Jul 24 14:11 ..
-r--r--r--  1 perforce perforce 5.8G Jul 24 14:16 checkpoint.659
-rw-rw-rw-  1 perforce perforce 4.1K Jul 24 14:28 journal

As it turns out, the -jr flag expects absolute paths for the names of these files. Once I made this switch, everything worked fine.

Anyway, we use a script to pull down artifacts from the official Maven repository (http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/). However, the script does not overwrite, and sometimes metadata files are duplicated. The resulting directory listing for an artifact might look like this:

$ ls -1
1.0
1.0-rc1
maven-metadata.xml
maven-metadata.xml.1
maven-metadata.md5
maven-metadata.md5.1
maven-metadata.sha1
maven-metadata.sha1.1

Obviously fixing the script to overwrite would solve the problem of these “.1″ files. But, I was curious as to how I could easily move the “.1″ files to their appropriately named counterparts. My newfound love for xargs made me think that I could do this in one cool command-line statement. Here’s what I came up with:

ls -1 *.1 | sed 's/.1//' | xargs -i mv {}.1 {}

Broken down:

1. I pass the “-1″ flag to ls, which tells it to print each item on a separate line. I filter ls to only show files that match the “*.1″ pattern.

2. Each line of output from ls is piped into sed, which just simply substitutes nothing for “.1″. We have constructed the desired file name.

3. Now, I can pipe each of these desired file names into xargs, and use the -i flag to substitute the standard input to the {} token.

Maybe there’s a completely obvious way to do this that I haven’t run across, but, like I said — newly discovered love for xargs, and everything looks like it can be piped into it

So, changing permissions for all directories below the current directory:

$ find . -type d | xargs chmod 2775

Changing permissions for all files below the current directory:

$ find . -type f | xargs chmod 664

The ‘xargs’ command is invaluable. It appends the incoming data from the pipe (in this case, the line-by-line results from the ‘find’ command) to the end of the command. So the above commands get translated to:

chmod 664 ./some/file/or/directory

…for every file and/or directory. Obviously you should change the permissions to whatever is appropriate in your situation.