Seeing as though my previous post seemed to help a few people, I thought I would update the blog with the calculations for the new 20% rate. Luckily this is a much simpler calculation than before and the numbers are much smaller!

So to calculate the VAT Content of a price, you simply multiply it by 1 and then divide it by 6, for the more astute amongst  you, you may already know that the multiplication by one is an unnecessary  step and therefore you simply divide a price by 6 to work out it’s VAT content. Many people would then subtract this amount from the total price to calculate the price before VAT, however as a programmer, if something can be done in one calculation then I will always prefer this method.

To calculate a price before VAT, you need to first multiply it by 5 and then divide by 6.

Using the same example as my previous post:

Price inclusive of V.A.T is £722

Calculating VAT Content

Divide 722 by 6, which gives the VAT content as £120.33.

This figure can then be subtracted from the total price, to calculate the price before VAT: 722 – 120.33 = £601.67

Calculate price before VAT

First multiply 722 by 5 and then divide that figure by the magic number 6, this gives the price before VAT as £601.67, which matches the price above!

To round of the validation you can add the VAT back to the £601.67 to verify the calculation, so 601.67 + 20% (x 1.2) is £722.

How to calculate for future VAT rates

To arrive at the 1/6 fraction I simply worked out the value of (0.2 / 1.2) to be 1/6. The two decimals are the VAT content 0.2  and the way to increase by 20% 1.2. So if the VAT rate were ever to increase to 25% the calculation would be 0.25 / 1.25 = 1/5.

Hope this helps at least someone, if you require further explanation then please leave a comment .

Well it’s been over two long months but I finally have broadband access back in my apartment. From where I left it last time I ended up contacting a senior member of BT to try and resolve the issue, I was put in touch with his assistant who worked with me to get it working.

One funny thing that happened around mid November was that my phone number was changed by BT, this meant that I could use my phone line yet my broadband still remained dead.

Even with the BT employee’s help it took a further two engineer visits to get my number back, which also coincided with my internet access beginning to work again on the 1st December.

In my infinite wisdom I agreed to a cease and reorder from Sky on the 20th November, which I then requested to be cancelled on the 2nd December after the problem appeared to be fixed. My Internet access continued to work flawlessly up until I left my apartment for the holiday period begining on December 12th.

However when I returned I had no broadband dial tone what so ever, upon further investigation with Sky the cease on my account had been carried out, meaning i now had to re-order which I was told could take up to 7 working days!

Well those days are now over and I am back online, yet I am still waiting for an explanation from BT as to why my line stopped working in the first place, I don’t really expect an answer though.

From this I have learned to keep on the back of customer service people as I wonder where I would be if I hadn’t throughout all of this, they seem to be able to cope fine with normality and problems they know about. Throw them an anomaly issue such as mine though and they really struggle to cope and they occasionally make things worse!

My girlfriend’s parents run their own business and on Saturday her Mum asked if I knew of a quick way of calculating the V.A.T content of a net value. She gave me the example invoice with a net price of £24,000 with the old V.A.T rate at 17.5%, she could multiply the net price by 7 and then divide by 47 to retrieve the V.A.T content of £3,574.46.

So I set about working out an analogous way of doing the same thing but with the new V.A.T temporary rate of 15%. I came up with two solutions, one will calculate the gross amount pre V.A.T and the other will work out the V.A.T content of the net amount.

Both examples Below use a Net value of £722, using the new V.A.T rate of 15%.

Calculate Gross using new V.A.T rate

This method simply requires you to multiple the amount by 20 and then divide by 23.

E.g: £722 multiplied by 20 divide by 23 = £627.83

We can verify this works by taking this value and adding 15% to it however you like, I personally multiply by 1.15, so £627.83 multiplied by 1.15 = £722, which confirms it works!

Calculate V.A.T content using new rate

To achieve this you first multiply the net value by 3 and then divide by 23

E.g: £722 multiplied by 3 divide by 23 = £94.17

We can again verify this works in two ways. First by adding this value to the gross amount of £627.83, £627.83 (gross)+ £94.17 (v.a.t content) = £722 (net). Secondly we can just calculate 15% of the gross value itself, as mentioned before I like to use multiplication. So £627.83 multiplied by 0.15 = £94.17, again it works!

I hope this helps anyone who may actually read this, if you found it helpful or have any questions then leave a comment and I will get back to you.

I should also probably note that this has nothing to do with who I work for and it’s completely my own work…

So, after one week of no internet access outside of work I am getting increasingly frustrated at the lack of interest in my problem from my ISP.

It all started on All Hallows Eve, when I returned home from work to find my usually reliable connection, dead. I check the status of the router (Netgear V2 DG934G) to find I have an ADSL sync speed much higher than my usually meek 4096Kbps (I actually pay for 16000Kbps, that is another story though!). Even though I have a sync speed and complete line stats, I am without IP address and the connection status is ‘CHAP AUTHENTICATION FAILED’.

I immediatley rang through to sky and after going through the usual steps their first line advisor asked me whether I would like to hold the line for a Customer Service Team Advisor (CST)  to assist me, or would I like to request a call back. A call back is where a CST team member will call you back within 72 hours of the request. Rather foolishly I decided the call back was the best option.

75 hours passed and I still was yet to receive a call back from Sky. I decided to ring back at this point myself and after another hour on the phone (waiting for level 1 support to forward me onto CST and then the wait for CST to pick up) I eventually got through to someone whom I thought could help. Thankfully I had made this call on my landline phone and not my mobile, or else I would be struggling to pay this months rent due to phone bill costs!

After this advisor trying to diagnose the problem with me, he decided to try and run a tone test on my landline phone. He called me back on my mobile and we ran the tone test. This test didn’t work and he said he was going to ‘escalate’ my ticket and I would hear back from BT within 72 hours. Again 72 hours passed and I didn’t hear a thing, I rang back to try to resolve the issue again, taking an additional one hour.

I pick up my landline and dial the number and to my dismay the landline cannot dial out. Upon futher investigation I discover that I cannot receive calls on the line either, yet I can call BT services such as 1471 and 1571 and I get a dial tone when I pick up the receiver. Strange.

I call the sky number from my mobile and I eventually get through to CST again. After finally explaining the issue so far to yet another advisor, he informs me the action taken by the first CST advisor was wrong and  that he was going to feed this info back to his line manager, to prevent any further mistakes.

I was then told to unplug my router from the socket and was promised a call back in 15 minutes after he had ran some tests on my line, to diagnose the real issue. Fifteen minutes pass and he does indeed call back, to inform me that he knows what the issue is. The problem it appears is due to a loop issue external to my apartment, which I had been telling them for the past week! He then tells me that he is ordering a BT engineer out to my home for the next morning (8am – 1pm)  which would be exactly 7 days since the issue started.

4pm came on the Friday and my girlfriend tried to dial out from the landline and it still appeared to be dead. Having no direct phone number for Openreach -  I again ring Sky, to be met by an hour long wait before being told that the engineer had reported the requested work was complete. This call happened to be with the most helpful advisor yet who offered to call me back when I was at home and asked for a convienient time to call back, which was around 8pm or so I thought.

He did call back and we worked out that it looked like BT had somehow connected my line to their own ADSL service as I was syncing at a BT defined upload speed (448 Kbps) apposed to my usual Sky speed (768 Kbps). This was causing the CHAP authentication error, as I had insufficient credentials to connect to the BT network, being a Sky broadband customer. I was informed I would have to lodge a fault directly with BT myself, which I duley did. Although he did warn that BT would de-activate the broadband on my line to get the calls working and I would have to call Sky to re-activate my line which would take the standard 7-10 working days.

The automated process of registering a fault with BT is actually very easy, you call their service and dial in the number of which you are reporting. They then run tests on the line and can tell you whether there is a fault or not, this is all without speaking to any human. After informing you that an engineer will fix the problem within one working day, they offer to notify of updates to your line and divert all your incoming calls to a phone number of your choice.

Well I did that on friday night at around 9pm,  yet I am still (at the time of writing 2pm Monday afternoon) to receive either a text notification or a diverted call and I know people have tried to call me on that line.

I’ve pretty much given up all faith in getting my Internet back anytime soon, for now anyway.

IE3 - IE8 under VMWare

The Problem

So here goes my first real blog post on here, I’ve not done this before so bare with me…

When designing this site I set out to make it as clean as possible, using no images within the main structure layout of the site and as always keep it standards compliant, keeping the structure and design of the site as separate as possible.

One thing all web developers/designers should come across at one point in their adventures is cross browser compatibility, it should be no problem and many modern browsers will render pages very similarly as long as the site rendering uses good standards compliant code. Unfortunately the most popular browser of the time is Internet Explorer, which is inherently poor at adhering to any standards but Microsoft’s own.

VMWare

As a Mac user with no native windows machines available at home, I rely on a virtual machine to get by and recently switched from Parallels to VMWare. As part of the switch I decided to dump my crap-infested VM images and create a shiny new image of my main test bed, Windows XP.

Rather than use a vanilla install I decided to use a cutdown customised install, namely ‘Windows XP Performance Edition‘.  I chose to do this as I thought and have yet to be proved wrong, that the lower resources needed by this operating system would increase the speed and overall stability of my aging first generation 24″ iMac. So far my assumptions appear to be correct and I can see a big difference in comparison to my old Parallels install, how much of this is down to VMWare and the freshness of the install I am unsure.

The Browsers

Getting the required browsers needed for thorough testing is a real pain with the introduction of Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft by default do not allow the existence of multiple versions of Internet Explorer to be installed in any one instance of their Windows operating system. So the following steps are relevant to Windows users as well as they will allow any user of XP (and possibly Vista?) to attain multiple instances of the blessed browser!

First of all upgrade the native version of Internet Explorer installed to the 8.0 Beta. Next thing to do is to go here , scroll to the bottom and choose the download method of your choosing for the Internet Explorer 7.0 installation. This installation required me to restart, I do not know if this is a standard thing or not.

After this is installed you now have IE 8.0 and IE 7.0 installed side by side, which is good but for full testing coverage IE 6.0 is required. To acquire the remaining browsers I used the Multiple IE installer available from Tredosoft, this install went without a hitch and all browsers work fine, albeit the rendering is poor for modern sites in versions five and below.

Alternatives for OSX

For quick little tests I tend to use a port of ie4linux, cleverly named ie4osx. I thought I would throw this in case anybody who may actually stumble upon this post has never heard of it, as it doesn’t often get shouted about as a solution.