Introducing BBC Null. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this new station? Just me then.
Latest meme going round. I’m not sure what the point is other than to make your Facebook Status Updates feed look completely random…
Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Just as happened here, there is no page 56 in my book. Well, there is but it’s completely blank. So I’ll use page 57*, where there are five headings which will have to suffice as sentences.
Anyway, this is mine:
Can you tell testers sometimes can’t help testing things? 
In case you’ve been under a rock, the rate of VAT in the UK changed today from 17.5% to 15%. It will remain in place for 13 months, until the 1st January 2010.
In an odd coincidence, the 17.5% rate has been in place for 17.5 years. However it’s left as an excercise for the reader (to say nothing of the developer and the tester) to wonder how many modules, applications, web sites, point-of-sales code, and other items of software in Britain have this value hard-coded?
Although the Chancellor only gave one week’s notice of the change, this would not have posed a problem to those savvy enough to have written software that determined the rate of VAT from a config file, global variable, or some other kind of lookup. Easy-peasy fix. Minutes.
For those who hard-coded it however, there’s going to be a lot of cleaning up to do. Of course, that doesn’t just apply to code. What of static text and images on web sites? Banners that mention the end-user price? Have fun!
Take the opportunity not just to do a quick search-and-replace fix but to make VAT a variable because you’ll be doing this again in 13 months.
Anyway, that’s just the digital world. Now you realise why people put “+VAT” on signs and in catalogues. Future-proofed!
Bonus points for anyone who can find old prices still online (must be a live site: do not use this or this).
As a final note, beware of stating the saving the customer sees as 2.5% — the difference is actually 2.13%