Income Tax Return Forms 2010

So, September came and went away. The time to file your Income Tax (IT) returns has been extended till 15th October. Traditionally, you download return forms (and wealth statement form as well, if applicable); fill them by hand and submit in person to IT office. However, eFiling has been made possible by Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) for the last few years.

The FBR portal is not bad (considering the overall deteriorating situation of almost everything in Pakistan). The portal allows you to export/ import your data for offline filing via MS Excel; except for one minor problem: several sections of the sheet are protected by a password! Yes, you read it correct. I repeat: the Excel sheets which you have to fill for your Income Tax returns are password protected!

A few weeks ago, there was a letter to the editor on precisely the same topic in Dawn.

If you are using Excel 2007, the menu option to "unprotect" or unlock your sheet is Review -> Changes -> Unprotect Sheet. It will ask you for a password but FBR's website gives you no clue as to what the password is. Fortunately for us, cracking Excel passwords is not hard. There can be many password which can unlock one sheet. In the case of FBR's eFiling Excel sheets, one such password is AABABBABABBW.

A macro to crack Excel passwords in general is provided below (author unknown):

Sub PasswordBreaker()
    'Author unknown
    'Breaks worksheet password protection.
    Dim i As Integer, j As Integer, k As Integer
    Dim l As Integer, m As Integer, n As Integer
    Dim i1 As Integer, i2 As Integer, i3 As Integer
    Dim i4 As Integer, i5 As Integer, i6 As Integer
    On Error Resume Next
    For i = 65 To 66: For j = 65 To 66: For k = 65 To 66
    For l = 65 To 66: For m = 65 To 66: For i1 = 65 To 66
    For i2 = 65 To 66: For i3 = 65 To 66: For i4 = 65 To 66
    For i5 = 65 To 66: For i6 = 65 To 66: For n = 32 To 126
    ActiveSheet.Unprotect Chr(i) & Chr(j) & Chr(k) & _
        Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & Chr(i3) & _
        Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
    If ActiveSheet.ProtectContents = False Then
        MsgBox "One usable password is " & Chr(i) & Chr(j) & _
            Chr(k) & Chr(l) & Chr(m) & Chr(i1) & Chr(i2) & _
            Chr(i3) & Chr(i4) & Chr(i5) & Chr(i6) & Chr(n)
         Exit Sub
    End If
    Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
    Next: Next: Next: Next: Next: Next
End Sub

Happy filing!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Shortcomings of Blogger

So, you have a blog on Blogger and you think that the since Blogger/ Blogspot is owned by Google, it will automatically be optimized for Google search ranking? Wrong! Blogger sucks at Search Engine Optimization. There are many workarounds to overcome Bloggers weak SEO handling but why its so complicated is beyond me.

For example, their is certain weightage of the <meta> tags, specially the description meta tag written as follows:

<meta type="description" content="Shortcomings of Blogger when compared to Wordpress and Typepad"/>

While you can add such a tag for your Blog (by editing HTML of the template you are using) but don't you need a separate description for each post? Does the Google owned blogging service allow that? Yes, but its not scalable at all. You can use conditional tags which compare the page URL with the post title and then write a description for that post; something like the following:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://blog.thejaywalker.net/2009/05/going-to-sweden-for-studies.html"'>
<meta content='A must read if you are going to Sweden for higher education' name='description' />
</b:if>

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://blog.thejaywalker.net/2005/09/pakistani-students-in-sweden.html"'>
<meta content='A general profile of Pakistan students in Sweden' name='description' />
</b:if>

But so many-ifs are not only hard to maintain they are plain ugly. Why not just provide a Description field when you are editing your post so that you can write the right meta description tag with your post?

More information on adding meta tags to blogger is the next step for the eager soul. Also, Meta Tag Generation "tool" might be useful for some.

More on other shortcomings in some later post...

Zombies!

First, it was parthenogenesis of Komodo dragons, and then I came to know about the same for sharks. Now, we have zombie cockroaches and spiders.

There is a creepy video on YouTube which is a must see (if you can stand creepy stuff).

The 99 Feet Man

I have come to know that I can only grasp a little when flooded with information. So happened with my recent purchase of Labyrinths of Reason: Paradoxes, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge. The book is about "scientific method" and its shortcomings. By scientific method, the author, William Poundstone, means beginning with a hypothesis and coming to some conclusion by experimentation and empirical evidence.

I have read quite a few chapters. So far, this is the best thing that I learned from the book (reproduced in my own words):

Suppose, I claim that no human being is longer than 100 feet. Since we don't know the exact details of how height of human beings is controlled, there is no direct proof of the statement. Naturally, we'll have to resolve to inductive reasoning. That is, each example that you see will strengthen your "belief" in the claim. You see Mr. A; ok, he is shorter than 100 feet. You see Mr. B; he is just 6 feet. He also confirms the hypothesis, and so on.

Now suppose that you see a 99 feet man (perhaps, in a circus). Theoretically, that should strengthen your belief in the hypothesis even further (as 99 < 100). But in practice, this example shakes your belief!

I have become a fan of William Poundstone. The first book of his that I came to read was How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle. I bought it because I had heard that they ask weird puzzles in MS interviews. But I was pleasantly surprised to see that half of the book was on the history of the term IQ, the formation of the silicon valley (trust me, it's very interesting), and a general discussion on what puzzles show and what they can't.

Another Instance of Parthenogenesis!

As if the Komodo Dragons' virgin birth was less surprising, this time sharks in captivity have reproduced asexually!!

A more detailed article on the phenomenon can be found here.

Downtown Dubai

It's more than a month since I arrived here. This place is crazy and getting crazier. Property prices are shooting up like anything. Traffic congestion is an every-day experience. People travel for more than an hour to reach their office. And they are constructing buildings like these (yet to be occupied) in such traffic congested areas:



Dubai Marina

All this construction is going on in the desert. I know nothing about geography but the mere thought that they are extracting oil from the underlying earth just scares me!

Even more scary is the widening gap between the rich and the poor.

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As a side note,

• Salman Kasbati was here for a few days. I met him after two years!
• Earlier, Umar Siddiqi was here as well. I didn't have time even to see him. Alas!
• Meanwhile, the so called "developed" world continues trying to control every aspect of our lives. This is the worst form of terrorism.

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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost)

Gmail Blues

I discovered something interesting today. I used to get emails sent to someone with a similar user name as mine on Gmail. That is, some emails sent to myFirstName[withoutDot]myLastName@gmail.com reached me. As I have a dot between my first name and my last name, I usually forwarded the email again and was satisfied that the real recipient has gotten them. Today, I realized that if Gmail is messing up email recipients, some of my *important* emails would also be going to wrong addresses.

But I discovered that Gmail ignores "dots" in email addresses! You can put as many dots as you like and it doesn't matter.

The Leader in Pakistani Text Books?

A news story on BBC: نصابی کتاب میں جارج بش پر نظم. For those, who can't read Urdu, the peom is available as an image on the page. It has been included in the textbook for 11th grade in Pakistan; combine the first letter of each line to see why people are disturbed.

Child Prodigies

In case you missed this story on Slashdot (or in the other case if you are not a regular Slashdot reader), an eight year old Korean boy has been admitted to Physics department of a Korean university. Not surprisingly, both his parents are teachers. You can find the original news here.

In terms of family background, the story is not very different from that of Muhammad Hussain Tabatabai of Iran, who memorized (and understood the meanings of) complete Quran by the age of 5. Both his parents know Quran by heart. The same is true for the child from Vietnam who is a chess grandmaster at the age of 10 - his parents used to play chess amongst themselves and he picked it from them.

There is a story on TIME Asia which tries to analyze "if prodigies can be created?" You might also be interested in knowing about a family of child genii in England, born to a Pakistani father (and Malaysian mother) - though, one of the girls, Sufiah Yusof, has run away from home due to her father's over-ambitious attitude. Perhaps, BBC wrongly reports that both the parents are from Malaysia.


Does that mean these kids get a natural lead in the race of life? Well, how is it different from a child born with a silver spoon in his mouth - one who can spend a life without caring about hunger, insecurity, etc? Perhaps, one needs to analyze the definition of "finish line." Perhaps, we all have different start and finish lines - it doesn't matter if somebody has started ahead of us.

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Ejaz Asi reports his views about the earth quake casualties.