Calculating IRR (Internal Rate of Return) for your investments

In the last couple of days I have been trying to understand what IRR means and how one would calculate it. I could be wrong here, but, from my understanding, its a measure of effective rate of interest for your investments and is one of the factors to be accounted for when making investments.

I have first come across this here. Although, this explains how to calculate the IRR, the spreadsheet mentioned on that page is locked. Even if it were to be open for edit, I wouldn't be too comfortable sharing my investment details there. I have been looking online to find ways to calculate IRR and have realized its quite simple. Here is how you go about calculating it:

1. You'd need Microsoft office installed. But, if you are a free/open source user like me Open office would do equally good.

2. Open a spreadsheet, list your investments as. Column A: years, Column B: investment made.
* For all payments being made make negative entries i.e., if you are investing 50K during a year. The entry should be made as -50000. Any yielding returns should be made
as positive.

3. Use the in-built formula/function to calculate the IRR.
* A better tutorial for MS Office users is available here.

Hope that helps.

./M

Flashing your HTC Hero with custom ROM in three simple steps

Caution: Please do this at your own risk. You can run into problems like: data loss and complete damage to the phone.

This is quick summary of how I flashed my HTC Hero phone with a custom ROM based on Eclair 2.1(India):
1. First and foremost, to flash your phone with a custom ROM you will need to root your phone. Please read here how-to.
*Make sure you take a back-up before you proceed with flashing your phone*
2. Steps on loading custom ROM on your HTC Hero are available here.
3. The custom ROM that I loaded was downloaded from here.
Another ROM based on Eclair 2.1 (CKDroid 1.5.2.1) is available here.

Happy Flashing!

./M

15 Mac 'under the hood' commands

15 very useful under the hood terminal based commands for Mac: http://www.macosxtips.co.uk/index_files/terminal-commands-for-hidden-mac-os-x-settings.html

./M

Mozilla Firefox command line tweaks

A very useful reference of command line shortcuts for Mozilla Firefox:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments

./M

All about .htaccess

If you have been involved with maintaining a web site, you must have for sure heard or used .htaccess. The most common use of .htaccess would be to set up access restrictions to the directories under your www root and setup up redirects. But there a multitude of other things that you could using .htaccess like setting up re-write using the apache's mod_rewrite. To find out more and learn all about .htaccess:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml

Almost a comprehensive guide on .htaccess. There are other very interesting apache user guides on the last page of the guide.

./M