I wanted a way to get into the guts of monorail so I offered to create a website for the occupational health company that my mum works for. It is very much a work in progress, you can check it out here ProHealthUk if you want to see the CRUD click the admin link. When the site goes fully live you will have to login but for the time being you can edit data.

So tonight at about 8pm I sit down on the couch with a beer when I hear a knock at the door. When I answer it there two ladies and a gent all smartly dressed in suits. The woman asks me to confirm my name and address as shown on her clipboard she then starts a vauge diatribe about how I could save money on my energy bills. At no point did she identify that she was from nPower. I learnt this from looking at the logo on her Id badge.

The lady's sales pitch continued for about a minute until I twigged what was going on. I asked her straight out "Are you offering to change my provider?" she seemed disinclined to answer the question so I asked it again. She said yes to which I replied I am not interested in changing my provider. She asked if it was due to the hassle, I said no I just do not want to change. That was the end of it.

What annoyed me was the underhand way in which the salespeople misleadingly explained their presence on my doorstep. If they had identified themselves as N-Power and offered to quote me a price for supplying fuel I would have given them a chance. I like the next person would always rather pay less for my fuel but I felt like they were trying to con me into changing without even realising I was doing so. I am now very unlikely ever to contemplate using n-power in future. They should stop this practice as they will get some very negative pr from people like me. IMHO door to door sales is about as low as it gets anyway.

Rant over. 

I am building a course booking system in monorail and in the process of uploading the source to google code. This is basically a way for me to understand the MVC approach to building websites using the castle monorail project. I figured the code may be of use to others tackling similar tasks or who just want to hack around with existing code to see how it works. I am not by any means a monorail expert so some of the approaches I have taken may be wrong or ill advised but that is kind of the point learning by experience is my favourite approach. Let me know if you spot any. All help gratefully received.

This will be a system designed to help administrators organise training courses. The initial need is for it to be able to handle first aid courses run by a health clinic.

The system will be used by non-technical admin staff who are familiar with email and basic word processing on windows pc's.

The development of the project uses the .net framework 2.0 and an MVC pattern with the Monorail Castle framework. It makes use of the Active Record ORM to handle data access. SQL Server is used for the database. I have elected to use nVelocity for the view templates. I have also elected not to write tests and use tdd. I know I should it's just that my brain cannot absorb that many new things at once.

The system allows new courses to be setup, new course types to be configured. Courses can be managed with new attendees booked on to courses.

If the courses are for certification purposes if an attendee passes the course the certificate issued can be tracked so renewal notification can be sent out.

The system allows attendees to be moved from one course to another and for their booking to be cancelled.

The system will produce reports for invoicing, courses and reminders for expired certificates.

You can find the project here:

http://code.google.com/p/centro/

Tools that cost $$$

Tools that are free

This has to be the funniest most original game reviewer on the web. He is also very knowledgable

• A Wii with wireless access to the internet
• The latest version for the Wii Opera Browser (You have to buy this $5/£3)
• A pc to install the Orb Software

Credit is endemic in the developed countries of the world, it is the oil between the cogs of the economy, if you remove access to credit what will happen?

Firstly even a worst case scenario would not see all lines of credit dissapear, applying for credit would become a more rigourous process both on the high street and commercially. Interest rates may increase this would have a knock on effect of reducing spending power and increasing the cost of production. The first place this will have an effect is in the housing market, typically this is the biggest loan taken out by consumers.

It is a well know fact in the UK where demand for housing outstrips supply that cheap credit (low interest rates) increases peoples purchasing power and thus causes house prices to rise. The banks willingness to lend money or access to credit is another factor, in the UK banks have been lowering the bar and increasing the ratio of income multiples. Five years ago the standard income multiples used by all banks was 2.5 x joint salary or three times single salary. This lending criteria was introduced by banks as a straighforward sanity check to prevent customers over commiting themselves. Increasing this ratio as quickly and by as much as 4.5 times joint salary and five times single was a bold move by the banks. It is understandable why they did it, more and more of the customers coming to them were priced out of the market and could not afford to get on the property ladder. They were creditworthy but could not borrow enough cash to buy the house / flat they wanted, the solution was simple but the consequences of the solution may be unpleasant.

Second mortgages and remortgaging your house can be an effective way to finance a purchase, the security of your home will often mean a lower interest rate, however, some consumers have deluded themselves as to what they can actually afford. The increased security of lending against your property will also mean you can borrow more than an unsecured loan. Finance and mortgage companies will pay less attention to a customers credit history and ability to pay if they can offer some security (their house), in this situation responsible lending is less likely to occur.

So what is the worst case scenario for the UK housing market? Well a house price crash, fuelled by higher interest rates and consumers inability to obtain credit. This could easily lead to a recession due to people repaying their more expensive mortgages not having any spare cash to spend on fancy meals and in the shops. We could re-live the 80's bust all over again. In the longer term this would probably be healthy for the economy by lowering house prices. The fundamental problem the shortage of good housing would not have been addressed, only the government can tackle this by removing some the restrictions preventing new houses from being built.

Update:
It turns out there is a bug in the SQL 2005 user connections counter. The counter is not reduced when a Service Broker task is ended. The result is the "User Connections" counter keeps getting bigger and bigger. SP2 has just been released but this is still an issue I guess MS may fix this in SP3

Data Provider Model

TJ V2 implements a data provider model at time of writing the only implemented data storage mechanism is XML. The XML provider uses serialisation to persist objects to the file system.