As I began processing why we were late, I immediately started looking for ways to shift the blame. Why did Google Maps have the exit number wrong? Why doesn’t Chick-fil-A have the location of new restaurants in its restaurant finder? Why wasn’t there a giant cow on top of the building to make it easy to spot? And suddenly it occurred to me that I had fallen into the blame game. I was asking the wrong questions.

In his incredible book, QBQ, John G. Miller talks about asking the The Question Behind the Question®. So I started asking the right question. What could I have done differently? I could have left earlier. I could have double checked the directions. I could have contacted the Kyle Chick-fil-A to make sure I knew where it was. And I realized that it wasn’t Google Maps’ fault. And it wasn’t Chick-fil-A’s fault. It was my fault. I could have done something. I needed to practice personal accountability.

Whenever we choose to practice personal accountability, we’re going completely against the tide of our culture. Articles like this one about blame shifting the BP oil spill make it abundantly clear – we’re not interested in solving the problem, we’re interested in finding someone to blame. That prevents us from finding the failures in ourselves (and gives us a person for the lawsuit).

When you are faced with situations in your life that don’t go the way you want, ask yourself, what could I have done differently? And what can I do in the future to make sure this doesn’t happen to me (or anyone else) again? And then fix it. Because it’s your problem now.

So what did I do? I sent email to Chick-fil-A suggesting that they add maps to their restaurant opening pages. And I did some research and found out that all the major mapping software has the wrong exit for Kyle, Texas. So I’m going to contact Kyle and let them know since they have more clout than me to try to fix it.

And I’m taking the kids to Chick-fil-A for dinner. We didn’t make the grand opening. But we can still have a great meal.

As noted in previous posts, this version primarily focused on coexistence of multiple CCKs, as well as updating the proxy configuration to match Firefox 3.6. I also added some usability enhancements, including the ability to open an existing configuration.

The most interesting feature I brought back is the ability to hide a CCK so that it can’t be uninstalled. Here’s some background.

With Firefox 3.5 and previous, there were two options you could add to your extension that only affected it if it was installed in the same directory as the EXE – hidden and locked. Locked preventing the extension from being uninstalled (but it could still be disabled – so kind of useless) and hidden preventing it from being seen at all (which of course prevented it from being disabled or locked). Mozilla removed hidden for Firefox 3.6 but left locked behind. What I’ve done is made it so that if you specify locked, it means hidden. This was the easiest way to make this work and has the nice side effect that if in your deployment, you need to hide other extensions, just mark them as locked.

Support for the CCK Wizard is provided through Google Code.

Enjoy!

Do you need to do even more customization of Firefox for your organization? That’s what we do. Contact Kaply Consulting.

Tired of Capital Metro’s Epic FAIL around commuter rail? Show how you feel with MetroFAIL merchandise.

You can read about it here.

One of the things I do in my spare time is facilitate Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. I’m also one of Dave’s Certified Counselors. One of the situations that comes up a lot (especially this time of year) is people getting large tax refunds. They don’t understand why large tax refunds are bad and they don’t understand how to use the allowances or exemptions on their W-4 (PDF) to reduce their refunds. I’d like to try to clear things up. Note that I am not a tax professional or an accountant, and your situation may be fact dependent. If you need specific advice, your should go to a professional.

Why tax refunds are bad

Just to be clear, tax refunds are a no interest loan to the government. Every dollar you get in a tax refund is a dollar that you could have taken home at some point during the year. I see people struggling to make their bills month to month, but getting large refunds. They don’t realize that they could be bringing that money home in their paycheck instead of waiting to get it in April by changing their allowances. This would help a lot of their struggle.

What are allowances?

Before we talk about reducing your refund, we need to clear up the concept of allowances vs. exemptions vs. deductions, since this is what causes much of the confusion. The W-4 form (PDF) allows you to specify your allowances (sometimes called exemptions). It also provides a some worksheets to help you try to figure out your allowances. Most people rely on these worksheets to figure out their allowances without looking at their overall tax situation. These worksheet attempts to guess what deductions you will have on your taxes so that it can then compute how many allowances you should take. It might work if you are filing a 1040EZ (PDF) or have a simple tax return, but for most people it simply doesn’t cut it. So how do I determine my allowances? We’ll go into that in a minute, but let’s again define our terms. Allowances or exemptions are about the amount of money that is taken out of your paycheck during the year. Deductions are about things you deduct from your income when you do your taxes.

So how do I determine my allowances?

Generally it is pretty difficult to predict your taxes for the following year. So what we are going to do is attempt to use the refund you got this year to modify your allowances so you get less of a refund next year. We’re going to do that using a worksheet I created. This worksheet will allow you adjust withholding allowances interactively to see how they will impact your take home pay. Let’s take a specific example (Note I completely made these numbers up.)

Bob is paid weekly. He makes $1000 dollars a week. He does not contribute to his 401(k) and he does not have any health care expenses taken out of his paycheck. He is single and is not claiming any allowances, so the government is taking out the maximum amount of income tax. He did his taxes and he discovered that he got a $3000 refund. He wants to know how he can take that home instead of giving it to the government. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Figure out how many paychecks you have left this year. Bob is did his taxes on April 15, so he has approximately 38 (52-14) paychecks left this year.
2. Divide your refund by the number of paychecks left in the year to get the additional amount you want to take home each paycheck. For Bob, this is about $79 (3000/38).
3. Fill out the information in the worksheet using a current paycheck. This is to verify that the worksheet is computing your data correctly. For Bob the government should be taking out $169.70 each paycheck for taxes. He can look at his paycheck to verify this.
4. Change the withholding allowances on the worksheet to adjust your take home pay so that it is increased by the amount you want. For Bob, our target is $832 ($753+$79). By adjusting the allowances on the spreadsheet, we see that five would take us over our target, four would take us under. Most people would rather get a refund, so Bob should set his allowances to four.
5. Fill out a new W-4 form (PDF) and submit it to your payroll department. Some companies might provide an online way to do this.

Note that you can also use this method to take home money during the year if you know FOR SURE you are going to be getting a tax credit. For instance, if you adopt a child, you get a tax credit of $10,960. Instead of waiting to get that as a refund, you can simply adjust your allowances so that you get that money during the year. Only do this if you KNOW the adoption will be finalizing before the end of the year!

Some people might find that because they give a lot to charity or have a lot of deductions, that they might need to set their allowances over ten. When you try to do this, your employer might say something scary about needing to notify the IRS if you go above ten. Don’t worry about it. It’s just a formality. There is nothing wrong with going above ten allowances as long as you are not doing this to try to avoid paying taxes during the year. When I adopted my children, my allowances went way over ten. It’s not a big deal. The important thing here is not to use this method to take home all your money and then pay a lot at tax time. If you do this, the IRS will start requiring you to pay quarterly taxes. Our only goal is to reduce our refund.

Finally, if you know you are going to be paying capital gains or some other extra tax, this computation might not work for you. So be careful.

So to summarize. You don’t want a big refund. Take your money home during the year. Use my 2008 Withholding Allowance Calculator to figure out how to adjust your allowances.

_{Nerd Note: The amount of each withholding allowance is based on your marital status and your pay cycle. It is also dependent on the specific amount of your pay (the percentage changes as your pay goes up). If you are curious how this works, you can read IRS Publication 15 or just read my JavaScript code.}

Before I talk about the conference, I want to talk a little bit about some really cool technology that was in the Seaport Hotel. It’s called Seaportal. Seaportal is a machine running Windows XP Embedded that provides web surfing, office applications and free Voice over IP. It uses OpenOffice for the office applications and Internet Explorer for the web surfing. I was curious about the mix of open source and non-open source, so I contacted the IT department. The answer was what I expected. They picked OpenOffice because it saved them money on licensing, and they picked IE because it was a part of the embedded stack that came from their vendor They didn’t want to add extra software to the stack, which makes perfect sense. The IE also came pretty well customized by the vendor, although they did have to work to figure out how to do more customization with the registry.

All in all, I was VERY impressed by their solution and found myself using it a lot to avoid turning on my laptop when I needed something quick. My only complaints would be that using IE 6 is REALLY painful and that they need to be more current with adding interesting plug ins and things. For instance, I couldn’t watch TV shows from abc.com because it uses some proprietary plug ins.

If you stay in Boston, stay at the Seaport and request a room with Seaportal to check it out. Now on to the conference…

Started out the conference on Wednesday by attending “State of Ajax” by Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer. Good talk. Awesome pie chart about where web developers spend their time that I wish I could find to show you. (Their State of Ajax talk is not on the Ajax Experience slides page.) I disagreed with their assessment of JavaScript tools. There is more to life than Firebug.

Next up was Kevin Survance from MapQuest. This keynote was awesome. Kevin is an excellent speaker and he gave a great picture of what MapQuest is doing to reinvent themselves. He talked about the new MapQuest which is in beta right now. I find it funny that despite the popularity of Google Maps, the term MapQuest is embedded in our culture similar to Kleenex. On a side note, I talked to a couple MapQuest developers about microformats and I’m hoping they’ll put them on the site. I’m planning to do an Operator action for the new MapQuest beta.

From there I went to the Aptana IDE presentation. This presentation was disappointing. The presenter just wasn’t the right guy to do this, and there was actually too much demo and not enough slides.

After lunch I went to the Google Gears talk, and it was interesting, but there really wasn’t much that I couldn’t have gotten from reading documentation on the web, so I went over to catch the tail end of Accessibility and Internationalization with Dojo. Good presentation, but it was folks on my team, so what did I expect.

After lunch I went to “iPhone and iPod Touch Web Development” which was a horribly named presentation, because it was basically a plug for Aptana. This session should have been simply combined into the other Aptana presentation.

Skipped the next round, but caught the Silverlight presentation later that afternoon. What impressed me most about the Silverlight stuff was the tooling. Microsoft really has the tooling down.

Thursday I started with “Introduction to jQuery” by John Resig. This was great. I finally “get” jQuery and hope to start messing around with it soon. Really showed off how useful Firebug was for jQuery development.

The “Ask the Ajax Experts” panel was interesting, but everyone involved in this session needs to learn a little bit about how a panel works. Basically with the VERY long answers and the number of questions that Ben and Dion asked, there really wasn’t much time to get questions from the audience.

Next up was my session on the Ajax Toolkit Framework. I thought it went well, although I need more content for my presentation. I was 20 minutes short.

After my presentation, I skipped out to meet with a friend over at IBM Research.

Friday morning I didn’t have a lot of time before my flight, but I caught Aza Raskin from Humanized talking about the ZIA or Zen Internet Application. This was a really interesting presentation that really got me thinking about the best way to do microformat UI. I’m still thinking.

Other interesting notes were meeting Mark Finkle in person and getting to see the qooxdoo folks again.

Next time I’ll plan less stuff on the side and go to more sessions.

This presentation will be about using Eclipse for JavaScript development, with an emphasis on the work we did to embed Mozilla in Eclipse and provide access to various browser tooling, including JavaScript debugging, CSS tools, etc. We’ll also talk about JSDT which is the new JavaScript editor we are working on for Eclipse.

If you are in town, look me up. My presentation is Thursday at 2:10.

qooxdoo is a very cool looking AJAX toolkit that’s actually been around quite a while. Right now it’s more geared toward building an application from the ground up. The widgets look amazing! Check out the demo. Incidentally, the RAP project is using qooxdoo to render RCP applications in the browser.

When I first heard about Jazz, I thought it was yet another bug system. Boy was I wrong. This is a very cool tool set that helps people collaboratively build software. It’s being used by the Jazz team to build Jazz. You should take a look.

That’s all for now. Next up is a week at home and then off to Ajax Experience. See you there!

PLEASE create places where I can simply POST vCards or iCals or microformats or JSON or something else to your services to add contacts and calendar entries. I’m not a web app, so I can’t get an API key. And I shouldn’t have to maintain login state when the browser is doing it for me. All I want is an easy way to add stuff to a logged in users account. Is that too much to ask?

With Yahoo! calendars and contact, as well as Google Calendar, I have to resort to undocumented URL syntax. Google Contacts I can’t do anything. 30 Boxes requires that the ics file be physically located on a server, although they have a URL syntax that kind of works.

It doesn’t even have to be a POST. If you could come up with some straightforward URL syntax, that would be great. Trying to figure out the stuff you guys have put together so far is incredibly painful.

So please. Help a guy out.

What’s exciting is that we final got all through all the legal hurdles so you can now download one package that contains the entire environment, with stuff that isn’t relevant to ATF removed. So just download the M4 milestone from here, unzip it and you can try it out. If you want to see how it works, you can check out the demos, but note that we are in the process of updating those to the new version.

I’ll be at AJAXWorld next week talking about this project so feel free to look me up. I’ll definitely be at the ATF presentation on Monday at 5:40 and I’ll probably be hanging around IBM booth on the Expo Floor at other times. If you want to set up a time to meet with me about something specific while I’m out there, feel free to contact me.