IT and finance blog

I have been using Tiscali (now TalkTalk) broadband services for more than 4 months. At the beginning everything was fine - I even was quite pleased with them, since they promised to connect me within 10 business days, but in fact I was on the Internet after just one week.

As some of you probably know, Google provides an "on-line office" - AJAX-based web application, which allows you to edit formatted text and spreadsheets on-line, storing them on Google's servers. There are some extra features, including change tracking, sharing of the same document with other Google users etc.

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

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.

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.

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

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:

In C++ you can declare class methods as const. The idea is that a const method does not change the value of instance' member variables (and doesn't call non-const methods on them).

Prices for both commercial and residential property seem to go up, especially in London.

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.