William Reardon’s Blog

You know I feel bad for? The software developers that work for the IRS.

It hadn’t occured to me until I saw this:

IRS has targeted Feb. 11, as the potential starting date for taxpayers to begin submitting the five-related returns affected by the legislation. The February date allows the IRS enough time to update and test its systems to accommodate the changes without major disruptions to other operations related to the tax season.

Think how screwy the tax code. Nutty exception & clauses left & right.

You requirements are established by a horrible committee — the U.S. Congress. You get no say in requirements (you’re a programmer, not a Senator!).

You work for the government and are paid government wages. Hell, you work for the IRS. So even your friends don’t like you.

You & all your coworkers live in constant fear of a “flat tax.”

Why do they do it? Why not quit & go work on Turbotax?

At least there, you’d get stock options.

UPDATE: In case it wasn’t clear, I have NOTHING but the highest regard for the these dedicated, determined, intelligent, hard-working individuals. Please please please, for the love of God, don’t audit me.

I recently stumbled on Project Euler, a series of various mathematical/programming challenges. A lot of them can be solved quite easily in Perl, such a problem 5:

What is the smallest number divisible by each of the numbers 1 to 20?

I’m sure there’s a more elegant solution, but I figured, heck that’d be easy to brute force. So I whipped up a few lines of Perl. Here’s my first pass:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
my $value = 0;

my @divsors = reverse(2 .. 20);
EULER: while (1) {

  $value += 20;

  print “$value…\n” unless ($value % 1000000);
  for my $i (@divsors) {

    next EULER if ($value % $i);

  }
  last;

}

Anything like while(1) always makes me worry about an infinite loop, so I threw in the status line & watched it.

Happily, there was no infinite loop & it terminated.

0.0001 seconds later I realized what an idiot I was.

The programs goes through all the hard work of figuring out the value and then… well, nothing.

I forgot to add a line to print it out the final value.

So, in a nutshell, my first attempt worked — all the heavy lifting bits were correct — but it was worth naught as I overlooked a trivial bit.

Sadly, this is apt microcosm of my life.

A thought experiment on various November matchups…

Most Happy with Either: McCain vs. Obama

Least Happy with Either: Huckabee vs. Clinton

Most Lopsided Democratic Victory: Paul vs. Obama

Most Lopsided Republican Victory: McCain vs. Clinton

Your picks?

I’ll give you a moment to figure out why this is annoying & why my life sucks.

UPDATE: Wow, I have to give the hat tip to Erika for this and Barb for this. The crazy thing is I literally searched for hours. Thanks guys!