For all of you who need a bit of help with their Variance Analysis equations (BMAN10632) here is a simple way to remember them, discovered by me and Vikash 13 hours before the exam, procrastination champions :p

Just in time for the exam I know hehe

With the exception of Sales Volume (see vi) the rules to follow is

i) If the variance deals with money paid into the company

Variance = (actual – flexed) x something (see iii)

If result is positive the variance is favourable
else the variance is adverse

ii) If the variance deals with money paid out of the company

Variance = (flexed – actual) x something (see iii)

If result is positive the variance is favourable
else the variance is adverse

iii) If you looking for volume :

something = the actual unit price/rate
of the variable factor ure looking for

else if you looking for price :

something = the actual unit quantity/volume
of the variable factor ure looking for

iv) For Sales Volume Variance the formula is :

SVV   = (actual units sold – budgeted units sold)
* contrib per unit [from orig. budget]

v) Actual Profit = Orig. Budget + Fav Variances – Adverse Variances

I hope this helps Share with who-ever needs help.

OK, so over at OnThisIsland we had a problem arise from the fact that our first-image-fetching function was killing our server. We had warnings flying in from our hosting company, and pages slowing down to unbelievable speeds. After a bit of investigation we realised that on each archive, home or search page, this function was called about 10 times, making it search through 10 different articles to find the image EACH time it loaded.

What we did was make it store a custom field automatically on its first load. (We also made it return a default image as we were using timthumb.php to resize images on the fly and didnt want to resize externally hosted images).

Here’s my version to get the first image from an article. Its partially based on the Wordpress Recipe and some ideas of my own. Hope you find it useful.

<?php
function getImage($post){
$externalimage = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘external’, true);
$gthumb = get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘gthumb’, true);
if ($externalimage==”TRUE”){
$returnimg = “http://www.yoursite.com/default.png”;
} else {
if ($gthumb==”"){
$szPostContent = $post->post_content;
$szSearchPattern = ‘~<img [^\>]*\ />~’;

// Run preg_match_all to grab all the images
//  and save the results in $aPics
preg_match_all( $szSearchPattern, $szPostContent, $aPics );

// Check to see if we have at least 1 image
$iNumberOfPics = count($aPics[0]);

if ( $iNumberOfPics > 0 ) {
for ( $i=0; $i < 1; $i++ ) {
$img = explode(“\”", $aPics[0][$i]);
$returnimg =  $img[5];
//    ==> Added to combat server performance.
add_post_meta($post->ID, ‘gthumb’, $returnimg, true);

};//end for
};//end if no. of pics more than zero
} else {
$returnimg =  $gthumb;
}; // end if gthumb is set
}; //end of if externalimage
return $returnimg;
}//end function getImage

?>