JDPFu.com 2025

In this Tax season, I find myself needing to share sensitive documents with relatively unsophisticated people and organizations. How should I share my files with them?

The Options

There are a few options to get those sensitive files to a provider. I will attempt to list the options, then describe the problems with each. Sadly, there aren’t any good solutions unless the service provider already has a solution setup. In my experience, be it an accountant, lawyer, doctor or shipping company, they do not.

1. Encrypted Email with PGP or OpenPG or GnuPG
2. Encrypted files, probably ZIPped attached to emails with a shared password
3. Encrypted shared file service – perhaps Dropbox or sftp
4. SSL Encrypted web portal with non-trivial userids and passwords

Sadly, there is no universal standard for sharing files, securely.

Came across this article form 2004 about a small business that dumped Microsoft after the BSA showed up and discovered 8 installed, but not used, pieces of software on their systems. Keeping up with software licenses is tough. The software marshals arrived, closed his business for the audit and found about 8 pieces of unlicensed software. $65K in fines and $35K in legal fees forced him to settle rather than fight.

The CEO got mad and told his IT guys to dump Microsoft. This was back in 2004. Back then, things were harder than today. That company doesn’t use any Microsoft products anymore, but they do use proprietary tools. Redhat Linux was their choice back then. I’d be curious to find out whether they’ve changed to CentOS on their servers or a different desktop.

Key Takeaways

Many of us prefer to use Open Office, OO, for our productivity applications, but most of the people we deal with do not. OO does a good job of supporting MS-Office file formats, but it isn’t perfect. I’ve caused format issues with my team and clients because I chose to use OO instead of booting MS-Windows just to run MS-Office. They were not happy that my touching the files screwed up all the paragraph formating or worse.

If your team uses commenting or any other advanced feedback features in MS-Office, give up on OO and load MS-Office for those times when you must use MS-Office.

Enough was enough for me. I’ve already paid for the MS-Office license, so running it under Linux would be ideal for me. WINE to the rescue. Below I’ll talk through the easy installation process and let you know what to expect in each of the apps after you get MS-Office loaded.

Let’s assume you are middle class and would like to retire as middle class. How much money do you need to support that lifestyle? What is the annual amount of that lifestyle today? $40K, $60K, $80K per year? Let’s assume $60K/yr buys you the middle class retired life. You won’t be jetting around the world every year, but you can afford to eat out and have a few hobbies.

I hope the tables turn out readable.

According to WINE, Quicken 2008 works under WINE – Wine Is Not an Emulator.

WINE Report on Quicken 2008

This means that many people running Windows who would like to run Linux have one less application holding them back. I’m not in a position to try this myself for a week or so, but I definitely will try it. According to the install hints, you just need a few Windows DLLs (from those old licenses you aren’t using) preconfigured in WINE to get it working. Only sound doesn’t work, which I see as a plus.

Watch the comments for my results. Cross your fingers.

Over the years, I’ve been using this blog to help myself remember how to do things and to share some great tools and techniques with you. I figure it is time to recap some of those articles whether they are computer, financial/retirement, or just interesting things.

So, 2008 is over. Thankfully. I saw my savings drop, er, significantly. By just looking at the numbers, I did some things right and others, very wrong.

What I did wrong

1. I didn’t get out of all stocks that lost 20% in July. I had a belief that July was the bottom and it would go up from there regardless of what others where saying and the actual ticker.
2. I rode most of these investments down 40+ percent and still own them.
3. I rode a single investment down 92% and sold for that loss on 12/31. The same day I sold it, it rose 4% – after I sold.
4. In May, I didn’t take as much of my profits in international investments as I should have. I did place a limit order that was never reached to sell on the next 20% gain. It was close to selling.
5. I ignored my rule to sell all whenever an investment drops 10% off the peak.
6. Much of what I did wrong was due to my traveling and paying more attention to non-financial life things. Some of that wrong stuff was lucky, this time.

What I did right

1. I rolled my 401(k) money into my IRA
2. That cash stayed in cash until August and missed all the loses. The cause for most of this was luck – I was out of the country.
3. In August, I started trading around my other positions, making about one trade every 2 weeks. This method takes advantage of wide swings in stock prices. In this volatile market, it worked. Very well, actually. 15% gains in 5-10 days, not bad.
4. Because of luck and the other things, my IRA barely lost 5% this year.

The numbers

I wrote the stuff above before I pulled the actual numbers.

Account	Result	Notes
Taxable Investments	-38.36%	No major transactions except buy of CVS in Jan and pulling some living money out
Roth	-10.40%	No significant transactions in 2008
IRA	-5.04%	Traded around positions in FAST, EWZ, CSCO

These numbers are better than I thought they would be. The -38% in my taxable account was better than expected even with me taking living and travel cash out the last year.

My huge tax loss was from ACAS, which was up 14%+ on 1/2/09 and 19% for the week. Nice.

Show your CEO the cost savings between Microsoft solutions (MS-Office, Exchange, AD, CALs) as you propose replacing them with Open Source Software, OSS, that include commercial support.

• MS-Exchange —> Zimbra
• MS-Exchange Calendaring —> Zimbra
• MS-Active Directory —> OpenLDAP
• MS-Outlook —> whatever client you like that’s free; Try Thunderbird or whatever Apple gives away or Enlightenment
• MS-Sharepoint —> Alfresco
• Shared Drives —> Samba and/or Alfresco
• MS-Print Servers —> Samba/CUPS with printer driver support
• MS-Office —> OpenOffice

Add up all that you’re paying for this stuff. Spend 2 hours researching what commercial support for the FOSS stuff costs – estimate $15k for each except those items that just work like OO, Samba and OpenLDAP.

MS Costs	FOSS Costs
$4.5M	$60k

Enough said? No? Ok, use Xen to host all these things. Your disk costs for EMC/NetApp/Whatever won’t change. Your clustering costs will require consultants … 1 time to setup until your team becomes knowledgeable.

Hardware? Use this as the call to virtualization that your organization needs already. When you’re all done, you’ll have half as many servers as before. You’ll probably save many, many more in actuality.

Training? When the CEO shares the overall cost savings with his team and it gets out to the every day workers, they may still complain a little, but they were complaining about MS stuff before.

Outcomes:

• huge cost savings for very minor changes to capability – you’ll need to judge that for yourself
• 2x hardware (or more) reduction
• ongoing software license costs cut by over 50% (just the MS stuff here – this doesn’t save on your CRM, SAS, Oracle costs)
• No Vista upgrade looming
• No desktop CAL and no desktop MS-Office licenses; well, you’ll probably have to retain a few. Or perhaps the CEO will mandate 1 Exchange server for him and his team, but everyone else needs to migrate to Zimbra.

Further, if you can replace WinXP with Linux (not everyone can), you’ll see

• No more “hardware is too slow” upgrades
• “Hardware broken” replacement cycle every 5-7 years
• Employees will use work computers for work, since the same programs they use at home won’t run without tinkering at work.
• There are many, many excellent FOSS programs that businesses use today. MS-IIS —> Apache; PBX —> Asterisk; many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, others.
• WINE will run many, many Win32 programs.

All of these replacements have support contracts available, so there is strong commercial support, should you need it. OTOH, if you have a small team of experts, you can probably get the FOSS versions up and running in less than a week and never need to pay anyone for support outside your current staff. This is idea for proof of concepts and other trials. If you are an enterprise looking for support, that’s fine – compare $15k-$30k per year to what ever you’re currently paying MS. I worked at a place where we paid MS over $5M/yr in support and licenses just for desktops (OS, MS-Office, CALs, AD).

Best of all, all those replacements don’t require MS-Windows. They work with whatever clients you like … well, that isn’t entirely true. Zimbra FOSS doesn’t do any calendaring with Outlook 2003 and perhaps 2007. Is that a bad thing?

Lastly, use this swap as a way to improve the way your company does things. Don’t just replace shared folders with samba – use a document management system like Alfresco and migrate users into it. To start, they can use it just like shared folders. Over time, you’ll get better as it and implement triggers for when documents arrive or leave the system. For example, you can have every document loaded into directory XYZ automatically converted into HTML and dropped into another folder. Or implement document review work flows. Start small but grow into the full capabilities.

The key thing with all these solutions is that the data is yours. It isn’t locked up in some proprietary format.

• Don’t like Alfresco? Connect to the repository with CIFS and copy all the documents out and load them into Documentum or back to shared drives.
• Don’t like Zimbra? The message store is just IMAP. Calendars can be exported with ICS. Contacts can be exported too. I haven’t found where the distribution lists and aliases are stored, but the DBs are OpenLDAP and MySQL. How tough will it be?

Whatever … it’s your data.

I feel bad for those who can’t throw MS completely out for whatever reason. For example, many of the telephony, scanning and fax servers only run on Win32 servers and only connect with Exchange.

Blackberry users – take heart – Zimbra has a Blackberry interface. Many other smartphones also have interfaces and there is a generic J2ME interface for all the rest.

How to install Zimbra on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I came across this article from my insurance company today that has tables and graphs the percentage of income that should be saved based on your age and approximate annual income.

The tables don’t cover all income levels and don’t address income increases over the years.

Many financial planners use 80% of your income as the target for retirement needs. People that plan to travel will need more. Quick summary for 80% replacement:

Age	Income	Savings Rate
25	$40K	10.0%
30	$60K	12.8%
35	$60K	19.6%
40	$80K	29.0%
45	$100K	42.8%
50	$100K	61.0%
55	$100K	97.0%
60	$100K	150%

Basically, if you haven’t started saving 20% of your income by age 35, then you are in BIG trouble!!! Plan on working until you’re dead, since kids and mortgages will prevent you from saving what is needed.

Table 3 in the article has the Assets Needed when you’re 65 to provide 80% cash flow. The table is in todays dollars and it assumes Social Security is paid and it is only for 1 person.

I’m worried that I over simplified this article, so take 10 minutes to read it.

• MI – Stock Screening
• Manifest Investing – Solomon’s Select Dashboard
• Manifest Investing – Tin Cup Dashboard
• Manifest Investing – Creme List Dashboard
• Manifest Investing – ETF Sector Radar Dashboard
• Manifest Investing – Fundamental Forecasts
• Manifest Investing – ICLWager Dashboard
• Manifest Investing – Challenge Club Dashboard
• Manifest Investing – Manifest 40 Public Dashboard

My public Watch List of stocks, assorted Mutual Funds, and ETFs.