This is unbelivable! I have received 155 spam messages in one day! The world is going crazy.

Despite high prices and rising interest rates, recent figures from mortgage lenders show that the property market is acutally booming, writes BBC. I personally find it hard to explain, taking into account the fact, that the affordability levels are falling throughout the country, and especially in large towns, and the first time buyers often require parents’ help to get on the so called property ladder.

In London, according to many lenders, estate agents and analytics, the rise is even higher than in other parts of the country. I feel that only the recent inflow of workers from the new EU countries, such as Poland, Baltic states etc., prevented the market from falling, since the demand went up and not enough new development was in place.

For years I wanted to run the personal finance manager Gnucash on Windows - in my opinion, it is way better than Microsoft Money or Quicken. Unfortunately, it was only available under Unix. But it seems that now, with the release of version 2 of the application, it is possible to compile it on Win32. So in a few months we might have a stable port of Gnucash for Windows.

It is quite strange - Google has robots.txt file, while both MSN and Yahoo! do not. It would be interesting to see, what other high profile sites have robots.txt and what do they put there.

Following a tribunal ruling, the Financial Services Authorithy , UK’s financial regulator, will have to pay legal costs of two men it tried to fine in the so called Cyprotex case, reports BBC.

If we believe the schedule , Fedora Core 6 should be with us this Tuesday. In the past the Fedora team honored their own deadlines, so hopefully we will enjoy a new rollout of the wonderful Linux distribution.

An article on BBC , published in 2000, but still relevant today, shows, how automobile fuel is taxed in the United Kingdom. The current duty figures, somewhere between 70% and 80%, are among the highest in the world and can explain, why petrol is so expensive in the country, despite the fact that there are oil fields in the North sea.

A recent article on BBC cites an interview with the former Sony executive whines, that the Japanese industry is losing to competition, mainly from US. But reading into the article further reveals, that the main victim of the battle between Sony, Apple and Microsoft is actually the executive himself, who apparently didn’t get along well with the newly appointed welsh replacement.

It is really amazing - so far my spam filter has prevented more than 3,500 spam comments! See here for more info on the issue.

Open source is making its way into breweries! An OS beer recipy is available on freebeer.org , and beer based on it is being sold, mainly in Scandinavia.