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 in accounting programs, such as Quicken, Microsoft money and so on, to retrieve statements. Currently many banks don’t support those programs, since there is a considerable security risk if someone steals the login credentials
• Can be used in special monitoring scripts, which can send you alerts if your balance goes too low or there are some unusual transactions

For banks there is obviously more headache in developing and supporting the right applications and also issuing and troubleshooting the extra credentials. Maybe they can find a good business model for the service in the end, such as small extra payment or provision only to better clients as an intensive.

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.

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 your Drupal to use PHP5 and not PHP4, which is a good idea if you want slightly higher performance and better handling of Unicode, you will need to make adjustments to your .htaccess, since by default files with .php extension are handled by PHP4. Simply add

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 machines might not have that much memory available, the process fails and causes the upgrade to fail as well. An error, similar to “Error 1718. File was rejected by digital signature policy” will be produced.

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.

An article in EconBrowser tells an interesting and probably worrying story of an employee pension fund for the City of San Diego, USA.

In short, a legislation was passed, that used any fund’s profit above 8% to increase the final payments to the employees, without any requirement to invest additional money into the scheme. For years it worked quite marvellously, since markets performed exceptionally well and the fund made 8%+ easily. However, when the profits went down, it was realised (surprise, surprise) that the scheme had accumulated a substantial amount of liabilities without proper cover.

Looks like Yahoo! follows closely Google - they have now something called SiteExplorer - very similar to what Google provides via Webmasters tools.

Most important, they now support sitemaps , which is very convenient.

A review of the latest budget speech from the small business point of view has been published .

A simple Q&A article about the budget is available on BBC.

According to LINQ FAQ (see question 5), F# is listed among the target languages for Oscar - the next generation of Visual Studio, together with C# and VB.NET. This is quite encouraging - I am really happy to see the OCaml clone to succeed on .NET platform. This will make .NET even more attractive to me, since it will be possible to do development in a “proper” language and still have a very rich and well supported library.

A very interesting article in The Guardian tells the story of a nice elderly couple from Ashford, UK, which has built a property empire worth £280 million. It’s simply amazing what you can reach, if you start at the right time and in the right place.