Kind of off-topic for this blog, but since it is tax day, I thought I’d share this handy tax tip that I found at the IRS website in a document titled “How long should I keep records?”

For all of you folks out there that file fraudulent returns — if you want to do it strictly by the book, you ought to hang on to that return indefinitely. You know, just to comply with IRS recommendations:

Sure, it makes sense to disallow copying passwords from a password field, but disabling pasting is just being annoying.

News flash for developers doing this (such as Intuit, in TurboTax): I’m not thrilled about manually typing my 20 character random password. Just let me copy it from my password vault and paste it into your field.

In the case of TurboTax, it diminishes the value of data import if I have to type more characters for my password than there are numbers on the form to input.

TurboTax's castrated password field

I’ve read several novels in Amazon Kindle format (on an actual Kindle device, the PC client, or an iPad), and the experience is pretty good. But having now finished reading a technical book that way, I think there is plenty of room for improvement.

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I’ve been doing some work with Linux lately, a new thing for me, and feel a bit like I’ve been thrown into the deep end and told to swim. Today I updated Python to version 2.7 on an EC2 instance.

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