Author: Olly

  • Audio Adverts on the New Myspace

    Myspace Audio AdvertsYes – i heard them you sneaky little buggers!

    There seems to be nothing on the internet about them starting to roll out audio adverts, but we use Myspace through headphones at work – and we’ve all heard them more than once now!

    I’m not pissed off – its nothing compared to how bad Spotify Free bombard you with adverts – the Myspaces adverts seem to be totally random,  once in a blue moon and hardly noticeable. Maybe thats the point? Maybe they’ve made them subtle and almost subliminal so that we don’t notice them but they stick in our minds (not the case, i heard one 3 mins ago and now can’t remember what it was for)

    Many people have questioned how the new Myspace can make money as they dont visually display any adverts – and you don’t pay to use it… There are articles dotted about the internet that state they pay different royalties than other people – but they still gotta pay em.

    I didn’t think it would be long until they started putting some kind of adverts on there.

    Ah well, 100% free streaming music with an advert once in a blue moon – it’s better than a punch in the kidneys 🙂

  • I was surfing your emails…

    Surfing my emails, eh...

    Should i be worried?

  • Remove text from end of cell content in entire Column – MS Excel

    We’ve been working on a large project now for a good 3 or 4 months for one of our customers, and the final stage of the project is to add a load of free listings to their new directory style website.

    We have the bulk data in a spreadsheet and i have spent a good few days sorting the content out so that each column contains the right data (such as ensuring the street from each entry is in the “Street” column etc.

    I needed to duplicate the postcode column and remove the last part of it so that i had a “Postcode district” column so the import would place the listings in the right part of the directory (the last category level is “Postcode district”)

    However, there are 1776 entries!

    I spoke to an Excel specialist who solved my problems 🙂

    (more…)

  • Removing the VAT from a VAT Inclusive Price

    Ok, so we just spent the last 30 mins figuring out how to remove the VAT (20%) from a VAT inclusive price.

    The reason for this, is a customer of ours has an awesome online shop made by us – and all his prices are INCLUSIVE of VAT/Tax. He trades internationally, so we’ve been working on a cool EUVAT/Vat Exempt module so that (example) if someone buys from the EU and is EUVAT registered, they input their EUVAT number, the site instantly checks it for validity and if its OK removes the Tax/VAT from the order.

    It has a whole heap of other “conditions” with it, but thats not the reason for this blog post.

    We wanted to bulk remove the vat from his products, but our initial plan fell flat on its face, becasue;

    £100 + 20% VAT = £120

    £120 – 20% VAT = £96

    Ah.

    The reason for this is that 20% of 100 is not the same as 20% of 120….

    So we racked our brains for all those formulas and junk we learnt in school, and asked a few friends who mostly pointed us to cool websites that seemed to do the job – but we were still no closer to actualyl figuring out what the formula was..

    Then all of a sudden, bingo!

    One of the lads figured it out, and here it is;

    (total_price/(100+VAT))*100

    So, as we break it down…..

    (120/(100+20))*100

    (120/120)*100

    1*100

    £100

    Bingo! 🙂