lando.blog

There has been much talk of a property price crash in the UK, and what with the sub-prime crisis creating a credit crunch it seems that we may well be on the verge right now. Whether it actually happens now or even in another couple of years, well, who knows? But it will happen. It’s simple economics that I learned at school. When the bottom falls out there is no place for the top to go but than to fall. When the first home buyers are priced out what is left to finance the top? Nothing. Now that the credit crunch is finally stopping people from lending x 5 their salary or more it looks like the price will keep falling. I like the quote from the BBC news:

However, the falling cost of property may not be the immediate salvation many would-be home-owners are banking on.

Jonathan Davis, managing director of chartered financial planners Armstrong Davis Ltd, predicted the credit crunch would eventually be good news for those priced out of the market - but advised first-time buyers to wait.

“Don’t touch property with a bargepole for two or three years,” he advises.

“Prices are likely to fall by 30-40% over a four-year period nationally.”

If this turns out to be accurate, then many young people will feel they have already hung on long enough.

I have heard tons and tons of things from those making a fortune out of property complaining that “property is not a right” (The Sun - Mackenzie) and that people should have to work hard to be able to own a property. Who is to say that someone on £28k/year is not working their ass off. In fact I would like to take a guess that the people who have to work the hardest are those that are on the minimum wage. They aren’t basing it on how hard someone works but on how much money they earn. That’s not right at all. Everyone should have the opportunity to buy their own home. All your salary has to do with it is whether you get a mansion or a terraced house.

I do feel slightly sorry for people who might end up losing a lot of money, but the truth is that investments are always a gamble. It’s the people that maxed out their loans to get their own home who I feel sorry for. The people who lent and lent to get a gazillion properties I have no sympathy for at all. When it was going good people made a fortune, but now that it is going bad they want the government to help them out. Property should come down in price. Whoever says different is because they have a vested interest in it staying artificially high.

Well, lets wait a few years to see if prices come down by 40% and finally get ourselves a house. I have friends on £40k+ who find it hard to pay the mortgage. It’s just ridiculous and I think our time is finally coming.

I have managed to secure a contract with ze Germans and will going to Stuttgart (south Germany) for the next 5 months. So if any of you fancy a good beer on a freaking good weekend then I would love you to pop over (Carl, John, Helmy, Mike, James, Svend, Ian and everyone else). I will be leaving in the next week or so and will be coming back at the end of September so you have plenty of time to sort something out. There will be a sofa and some floor space available (enough for at least 3 people to share) so get your weekends booked and lets have some good times. I will be emailing you all at some point so that we can organise something.

I came across Google’s application engine on blogs today and after taking a look, all I can say is wow! What is it? Well for those familiar with Amazon’s web service’s it is very similar to their Elastic Computing Cloud allowing you to run your applications on their infrastructure, providing immense distribution, speed and scalability. Google have now gone one step further allowing you to host your application for free. The free account provides 500MB of storage space and enough bandwidth and CPU to serve about an average of 5 million impressions/month. They are going to be introducing paid for schemes later after official launch from what I understand.

I rarely get excited about product releases from companies, but I must admit that this does excite me. Imagine the possibilities available to average programmer Joe who couldn’t hope to get their idea out before. Now you can release an application for free and get extremely decent speed (well that’s what they say but I am sure it will suffer problems at the start) and then scale it up as and when needed. I honestly think that this will change the start-up landscape quite dramatically and am looking forward to what people do with it. I mean even if you do not want to host your main application you could use it as a messaging platform, content delivery system or anything really. You could even use it as a communications platform for standalone applications which you would have been a pain in the past to setup.

Currently their framework is in Python but they say that they hope to add more languages in the future. Some people have been moaning about this but I think Python is a great language so aren’t really bothered. For what Google seems to be offering I am willing to learn something else if that’s what I have to do. Look how neat the code is anyway. It looks very nice and easy enough to understand.

I have tried to sign up for a free account but they have all been taken as they are only offering them to the first 10k developers. But I have signed up on the waiting list and hope to have something to play with by the time I get some space. You can use your own domain name or one of the google apps sub domains. I have enough domains spare that I am sure I can find one to use

There are some imposing restrictions in place at the moment, which is understandable, that could be annoying such as any request that takes longer than a “few seconds” will be terminated and no more than 1000 results may be returned. But these are in place to make sure that the system remains reliable under load. I am sure that these restrictions will be dropped for paying members once in place and are understandable for completely free accounts.

One of the coolest things is that there is an authentication system that you can use that will allow you to authenticate users using their Google accounts. It allows you to create more seamless Google applications if that’s what you want and provides another system for those that might want to implement their own. Being able to use Google accounts is definitely a good thing because there must be millions of people out there with one already and could help you to convert more users if they don’t have to sign up to another service once again.

Well all I can say is that I am looking forward to getting an account and it being properly released to see what people do with it. Until then download the SDK and try a few for yourself.

I have noticed more and more that there are a number of really useless new applications coming along all the time. Actually, I believe that almost all web apps are useless (although a lot are fun if not useful). As you might imagine, I read the tech blogs and news quite often and always find them littered with the latest and greatest website to waste your time. All these tools all offering something different and hoping to make my life easier. If I started to use these many apps available I am sure that it would have the complete opposite effect and make my life that little more complicated.

Now do not get me wrong, I like quite a few applications that are out there but I still have no use for them even though I have tried (twitter, Facebook etc). I also admit that I liked Facebook much much more before they added applications. Can you even think of just two slightly useful applications? No, thought not and I am absolutely fed up with littered profile pages that were once so clean and elegant. It has turned into MySpace with way too much going on to actually comprehend. The online applications that I think are useful are the Gmail and Wikipedia’s of the world that actually provide a very useful service (apologies to the other applications that are very useful, its just that I cannot recall all of you).

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Well, I finally got my bank account verified so that I can start to take payments but now I am waiting until they test my store to make sure that it integrates correctly :s. I swear, if its not one thing its another. I remember reading that it should only take about 2 days and so far it has taken five. I am fed up having to complain about the service. If you ever create a web application and want to handle credit cards yourself I recommend looking elsewhere. I needed to go with Worldpay partly because I needed a merchant account, but once I have the trading history I will get my own and then choose the Payment Service Provider (PSP) on merit and integrate everything nicely. I will say one thing for Paypal though, they have done a good job with their service as it easily integrates into your app and so have Google with checkout. Although, with Google you do need your own SSL certificate, but if you are doing anything with user data in the slightest this is a must anyway so it’s not really a problem.

I mentioned a while back that I had the beginnings of a new web framework in Java, and I have managed to get a little bit more work done on it since then. It’s still not ready to launch anything but as soon as it is I will host it on my machine and let you take a look. I have always been a great believer in not reinventing the wheel, so you might be asking “why the heck have you done this then?” and the answer is I never intended to do it. I started playing one day, and then started playing some more, adding this and that until it turned into a mini project.

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Those that might read my blog often will notice that I have been changing the theme often as of late. I have not been happy with the various themes that I have been using but believe that I have finally found one that I like. About time hey? ;)Not much to tell really except that I am still looking for some work to bring in some money. After all, your savings won’t last a life time will they? There are some developments in this area but nothing that actually stands out. There is talk of me doing some work for the brilliant folks at Intergral GmbH (Germany) but nothing has come about just yet, although I do hope that they have some work in the UK that needs doing. It is always a pleasure working for them.Other things have been coming along painfully slowly and I am beginning to get annoyed. It just seems that as I solve one thing another one just pops in its place from no where. I can understand why so many just give up! But I will carry on regardless. After all, it’s all got to work out one day (we hopes )

Well, what can I say? SmellBeautiful.co.uk is all ready for release but my bank account has still not been verified. They keep saying that they have deposited two small amounts into my account but they are not in my account. The unfortunate thing is that I can not take payments until this is done. Hopefully it will be finished next week and I can finally release. It’s definitely been a long time coming and I am looking forward to its release. My one tip though is not to get anyone to develop the system for you and just do it yourself. I got someone to do my system and I have still had to pretty much finish off all the features and style myself. I don’t want to get into it to much but I was not completely satisfied with the service I received and in the future would just do it myself. I thought that it would save me some time but it ended up costing me money and still my own time so I have not benefited. In-fact you could say that I am worse off which is probably correct.

Anyway, what doesnt kill you makes you stronger. At least I have learned one way not to do it in the future.

Well Jagex (the company I used to work for) have released their online mini games portal Funorb. It is a collection of single and multi-player online Java games, with community offerings such as forums and in game chat. They have done a good job with the design of the website and I also like the game start up graphics. They just seem to have polished off things nicely which is what you expect for a product that you hope to charge for.

The pricing is key as it is a very competitive market with some sites offering some very good games for free (Kongregate springs to mind). I honestly do not know how this part of the company will fare. I personally would say that they will have a hard time, but you never know. If they build up the community well, offer their own inspired games (rather than knock offs of past games) they might have a good chance. Their advantage though is advertising it through Runescape.com and offering joint price packages (which they are doing). They have millions of customers already through Runescape and is an amazing opportunity to cross sell Funorb.

You have to wonder though how this will affect their partnerships. They have some huge partnerships (affiliations) with existing mini game sites for marketing Runescape. I can guess that some of these partners have directed a large number of paying subscribers to Runescape and probably probably still do. So how will they feel about Jagex entering their own market. Will they really want to send traffic to a competitor? I really do not have any experience in the mini games market so can comment really whether the games in Funorb.com do compete with what their partners are doing. But using a little common sense you can tell that there is going to be some disagreements somewhere.

But good luck Jagex. I am interested to see how it all goes.

Well, its been a while since I have written anything (again ). I have been literally rushed off my feet. I have almost got Smell Beautiful off the ground and have to spend this weekend entering the products etc and then finishing off the worldpay account stuff. I have been spending this week so far tucked away in Hanley library working on Digaset trying to finish the prototype. It is definitely coming along but it will take until the end of the week to finish it and get something working to show people. It wont have anywhere near the functionality that it will have, but it will hopefully show people what we are trying to achieve.The amount of work that I have managed to do this week proves that I need an office. I have managed to get so much more work done at the library than I do at home its unbelievable. No screaming kids, no distractions, just a quite work place. I am looking forward to getting somewhere that I can call work. So, much more work to do. Hopefully Smell Beautiful will be released in about a week, so there will be many more long days to come. I look forward to start earning some money though, rather than it always going out of my account. I don’t care if it doesn’t cover all my costs as long as it reduces them as I will last that little longer than I could without the extra money