Implemented Friend Connect on the blog

∞ published on 17 May

Have you ever been sick and tired of how many sites around the web require that you enter in details about who you are, just so you can use certain features of the site? Are you getting sick of giving out your email address or having to keep track of usernames and passwords all over the web? Sure, something like KeePass makes it a little easier to keep track of, but its still an inconvenience.

With the progression of social networks such as Facebook, lots of people are finding it really annoying having to keep track of all this information. You go to many different sites and you set yourself up on all these different sites just so you can continue to participate in the discussions with your friends there. But wouldn’t it be easier if you didn’t have to do that all over the web?

Well, Google has offered a way to change that. Their Friend Connect system allows you to use your Google, Yahoo, Twitter, AOL, orkut, Plaxo or any OpenID account to participate in sites all over the web. Using Google’s Friend Connect system, you can log in to sites without having to share your private information with those sites, but still offering the site master an assurance that you are someone real, not just another spammer.

Friend Connect offers lots of features that are traditionally only on social networking sites like Facebook. In fact, where something like Facebook offers a single place that tries to aggregate everything and you have to go to Facebook to see it or participate, its kind of the opposite with Google Friend Connect. You take the social network with you to Friend Connect enabled websites.

And this is one of the reasons I’ve started adding the features to this website.
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I’m blacklisting iPhone users

∞ published on 10 May

I really dislike the iPhone. Not because its technically inferior to other devices (although, if you take away the flashy interface, it really is) but because of the attitude of most of the people that have one.

For many its their first experience with a modern computing platform. Smartphones have generally been primarily business products used by management or high ranking sales staff. So when a pseudo-smartphone like the iPhone comes along, many people are amazed by the device and what can be done with it. What they fail to notice is that everything they can do on their iPhone, I can do on my Nokia E71 and E90. In fact, I can do even more than the iPhone allows with both my two devices. For example, turning my Nokia device into an ad-hoc Wifi access point to share my 3G data connection so my iPod Touch can access the internet via wifi when I’m out and about. You can’t even tether your laptop to your iPhone via Bluetooth without jail breaking it first, let alone any device via wifi.
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Markets start to slip as major currencies start to decline

∞ published on 27 Apr

So hot on the heals of my post about the Australian tax revenue, I was sitting around today reading the news and what do you know, we’re starting to see things happening faster than I expected. Maybe my original statement of “by May” could prove true after all. Who knows.

What I do know is that this weekend analysis in the financial columns has almost mirrored my speculation. I think I need to stop this navel gazing and start putting money into the markets. At this rate, I could make a killing. Then again, I’m only looking at very broad trends and not the individual specifics.

Lets start with a small little notice in the NYTimes that I almost missed.

After almost two months of gains, the stock market declined modestly last week, although a rally on Friday helped to mitigate the losses.

On Friday, the Federal Reserve disclosed its methodology in the stress tests it has conducted for 19 banks to determine whether they are prepared to cope with a continuing economic downturn. The results of the tests were not revealed.
[...]
For the week, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 55.04 points, or 0.7 percent, to close at 8,076.29. The S.& P. 500 index dropped 3.37 points, or 0.4 percent, to close at 866.23.
^{Stocks Slip, Despite a Friday Rally - New York Times}

Thats not so bad. Less than 1% drop. No biggy right? Until you realise that the Friday “rally” closed up nearly 1.5% from where it opened and still closed 60 points lower than the previous Friday. So until that point, the market for the week was down nearly 3%. When you consider that through October and November, 3% losses were not unusual, you can see that the downward trend is still there, but easing off a little as the year progresses. The rally is going to start turning soon.

But its not just happening on the Wall Street markets. The UK is feeling the results of their tax cuts last week as well.
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How much is that?

∞ published on 27 Apr

Ever wondered how much money was being spent on the current financial crisis? Ever wondered how long it would take to pay it back?

“There are 86,400 seconds in. . . . . one day.
1 million seconds in. . . . . . . . . 11.5 days.
1 billion seconds in. . . . . . . . . 31.5 years.
1 trillion seconds in. . . . . . . . .31,500 years.
The next time you read in the papers something about a trillion dollars, consider that that number represents a-dollar-a-second for 31,500 years, from the age of mastodons and woolley mammoths all the way down to the present!”
^{1 War = 1 Trillion Dollars - How Much Is That? - AfterDowningStreet.org}

Lets take a look at how much that is and break it down.
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Aussie brings in less tax revenue, decline restarting

∞ published on 26 Apr

I started this post weeks ago and originally I was going to update my posts about the similarities between the 1920s economy and the economy we’re seeing today. Those two posts alone account for a significant amount of search traffic to this site for some reason.

Unfortunately, the update I have been writing got huge. In fact, it got so large I decided not to bother posting it and will instead put together a research paper that will take quite some time to compile, simply due to free time constraints and my health.

What I did want to discuss was an article I found on the Bloomberg website for Friday. Something that, combined with a whole heap of other factors, supports my previous statements that the current increase in the stock market values are just a correction to make up for the precipitous drop back in February.

Before I get into that, I just want to say that I think those in the US that are going on about Tea Parties and tea bagging the President are idiots. Those folks are worried increased taxes after 8 years of a President who did nothing but decrease overt taxes while spending money that didn’t exist. While I don’t agree that increasing taxes right now is necessarily a good thing (I’ll explain shortly,) I think those of you in the US that are complaining about it really need to stop and take a hard look at just how little tax you actually pay compared to the rest of the world. And how much your Government is spending. You have been running up debt for the past 8 years that you had to start paying for sometime… Its just unfortunate that it coincides with the rest of the economy collapsing. But then again, the level of tax is partly to blame for the US economy slumping anyway. So get over yourselves and start concentrating on what really matters.
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