There is an open source .NET wrapper for (former) SleepyCat Berkeley DB file database system - you can find it on SourceForge . more »

The chances for another interest rate rise this month are not very high, but still possible, according to Reuters . The house prices are growing, and even if we are spared this month, before the end of the summer the interest will almost definitely go up. It is hard to say whether this will actually cause the prices to go down - the rate has already been increased a few … more »

An article on Reuters, lap dancers have to pay their own VAT, similar to other self-employed. more »

Mozilla and eBay are working on a way to improve shopping experience of Firefox users, accessing eBay's auction sites in some of the countries, according to this press release . It is really nice to hear, but I personally think that the best tool for eBay is the JBidWatcher - the open source auction sniper. more »

In C++ you can declare class methods as more »

I think it would be great if banks provided "read-only" access for on-line banking - a set of credentials, which can only be used to view the current state of the accounts, but which would not allow to execute any operations. The advantages of this approach are: Much smaller risk when you want to check your balance from a less secure place (Internet cafe, library computer, your PDA)Can be stored … more »

Prices for both commercial and residential property seem to go up, especially in London. According to this article on Reuters, there is a surge in office space lettings in the City and other places in London. And another one discusses house prices, which seem to be unaffected by the latest lending rates rises by the Bank of England. more »

There used to be quite a few problems, when installing Drupal on GoDaddy's shared hosting. There is a lengthy discussion of the related issues. However, recently GoDaddy fixed a few most serious ones, in particular, they gave users permission to invoke MySQL "TABLE LOCK" command, which was the greatest problem of all. So if you deploy Drupal on GoDaddy now, it should be a very straightforward process. If you want … more »

A nice story about one guy, who used to be a trader and decided to quit for good. The moral of the article, in my opinion, is that not everyone should play on the financial markets. Not really surprising. more »

If you tried to install Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio .NET 2005 (aka KB926601), via Microsoft Update or manually, chances are high that the upgrade failed. The reason is that the deployment MSI package is almost 500M large. Before the actual installation process begins, Windows tries to verify the package. In order to do it it needs to load it into a continuous block of memory. Since even modern … more »