Steve Hemingway

I have split out the China content from the Herts Lettings website and loaded it into a new website, mingwei.co.uk. This now is my China property investment website.

It uses, Drupal, just like Herts Lettings. I loaded the SEO Checklist module, and the modules that it recommends, such as google sitemaps. It has the Printer-friendly pages module, as well as TinyMCE.

The last of these - a javascript html editor - is pretty cool, although it has strange effects on some linebreak filters.

The main improvement that I've made is to put in some proper navigation. What I never understood is that the Navigation menu is special - there is a block that can be used to display it in a way that cannot be replicated by any other menu. (There is no way to create a block that contains a specific named menu, that I have found).

Also there is a difference between a pure menu item and a page or story that is a leaf node. These display differently in navigation areas.

I still don't fully understand the operation of Primary and Secondary Links. The other odd thing is that a lot of administration links disappear when one logs out.

I am still learning about Drupal. I came very close to spending a lot of money on a web designer. I very much hope that Epsilis do the right thing when they start work on the Herts Lettings website.

Why is it that the performance and customer service of everything touched by Richard Branson is so execrable? There is no quicker way to vapourise customer goodwill. I never fail to be astounded when the grinning geriatric is named by so many young people as a role model.

For reasons I prefer not to think about I am a customer of Virgin Media. I used to be with NTL, and pure inertia prevented me from defecting to Sky when it was rebranded. The bill I receive is essentially a random number. I am theoretically getting a 20Mbit/s broadband package that never delivers more than one fifth of that download speed and a miserable 80 kb/s upload speed. Even when I test at a very quiet time (12:30pm) I get no better than that, and because the service is well used locally the contention is terrible: it is painful to browse a text-only website in the evening.

I rang to complain and after hanging around for about 20 mins I was offered a discount on my current package ('VIP' - I've never felt less like one!) from £85 to £67. I simply said 'my measured performance is terrible compared to what was promised, yet your technical department says there is nothing wrong with my connection' to the billing department. They probably hear this all the time, so if you are a customer want a to take advantage of the realism of the billing department I suggest you ring now. Please don't give them my name!

I have a confession to make. In spite of having blogged for a very long time now, I really don't get trackbacks. I have read the explanations at least a couple of times, but I continue to search for an understanding of exactly which problem they solve. I know they somehow allow a post to know about other posts that reference them, but I don't know how the connection happens. For example, if I put this trackback URL in my post here: http://mingwei.co.uk/cms/trackback/12 how does my mingwei page know that I've done such a thing. Do I have to click through on the link and depend on the referrer field being filled in correctly?

I feel daunted by technology. I don't really spend enough time with anything these days to feel I have a full grasp of it. I can remember many moons ago that I spent a lot of time reading books on Statistical Mechanics. I am not sure I ever got a full understanding of that. Almost certainly not. But I did feel that such an understanding was in my grasp, in principle. Now even something as mundane as the technology of the WWW seems beyond me.

I feel old.

This article, and, more interestingly, this podcast give argue that the consequences of Global Warming on species extinction will be modest. The basic argument is that only when populations are unable to migrate north (in the northern hemisphere) because of natural or man-made barriers, will extinctions occur.

The interesting thing is that the author of these views is not a political hack who is a professional climate-change denier, but rather an academic biologist who has been studying the impact of climate change on animal species since 1968. Interestingly, a major tool used by Prof. Botkin has been computer modelling, which he modestly admits is capable of serious errors. Given that so much of the argument for the potential damage to be caused is based around the interpretation of computer models, this warning is very salutary.

I went to a meeting at the village hall in Knebworth to hear about the so-called Knebworth Options Report.

I wanted to refer to my previous post, probably on livejournal, where I commented on the planning meeting where the Parish Council attempted to free themselves from the mandate they received at a meeting in 1996 binding them to oppose unconditionally any application for planning permission to develop on the Green Belt on the edge of the current village. As far as I can recall there was no enthusiasm for permitting development on the Green Belt at that meeting, nor has the Survey and resulting Knebworth Parish Plan.

However, once again the Knebworth Parish Council convened this meeting to push the idea of developing on the Green Belt. This time the Trojan Horse was the relocation of Lowe's, which they somehow believe they must help to fund. There is some concern about the congestion caused by delivery lorries coming to Lowe's, and it is equally clear from remarks made by Peter Lowe that they recognise that they have outgrown the site. Of course Peter would be delighted with the idea that he can get financial help from local government.

The plan involves, perhaps unsurprisingly, Henry Lytton-Cobbold selling off a considerable amount of his land for development. At 1.8 million pounds per acre net of planning gain costs this suits him very well. My doubt is that there is anything in this for the ordinary resident of Knebworth.

It was all conveniently ignored that in the NHDC Local Development Framework it was considered that further development of Knebworth was undesirable.

You are urged to view the evidence yourself at the following websites:

knebworthoptionsreport.org

A site to promote the idea, created by Knebworth House

Another site that Knebworth House wishes to develop

My views on the Knebworth Options proposals are as follows:

Greenfield development would involve 35-40% of 'affordable homes' which would bring hundreds of housing benefits claimants into the village.

I do not believe that it is the job of the Parish Council to get involved in subsidising the relocation of a commercial enterprise such as Chas Lowe's.

I strongly believe that it is not the job of the Parish Council to support the development of Green Belt land in order to benefit the Lytton Cobbold family to the tune of possibly tens of millions of pounds, whether paid to the Knebworth House Educational and Preservation Trust or not.

I believe that the Lowes site, which is on a main road that will become busier and busier with every passing year is the right place to locate community facilities.

I believe that with the government paying each GP in the UK more than a quarter of a million pounds a year they can jolly well pay for their own surgery. I cannot see that Knebworth really needs a GP's surgery anyway.

If you are a Knebworth resident I strongly urge you to register your 'vote' at the options report website.

Erm, some of you may have received a kind of chain letter invitation to a Facebook app called 'Are you interested'. I received one of these myself, but to install the app, to find out what it does, I had to send an invite to at least ten of my friends. Since I can barely scrape together 10 friends all told, a high proportion of you must have received this invite.

From what I can tell it is complete pants. It appears to be a kind of 'Am I Hot or Not' restricted to people who have installed this app, all of whom (including me?) appear to be total losers (sorry Eric).

Anyway, I will probably de-install the app., but for those who received the invite, and were prompted to visit my Facebook page, now you know the background to your invitation.

If I don't get around to sending you a hard-copy Xmas card, let me take this opportunity to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a very Happy 2008.

For those 1% of the population who are not yet on Facebook, and who are wonder what on earth I am wibbling about, you will just have to sign up and have a look at my profile, which you can view here. A restricted profile of me is available to those who are not on Facebook.

I never get feedback. Nobody comments, emails, telephones, trackbacks.

However, of the few people I know in RL who ever use the internet a surprisingly high number of them admit to reading my blog, at least from time to time. I assume that of those, at least a sizable minority will have at least a couple of sites where they can create a link. To this majority I address this heartfelt plea: link to mingwei.co.uk. I have now produced a first draft of the site and am desperate to get some traffic and page rank. Just visit, take a look, then create a link. I am more than happy to give you a link more-or-less anywhere on the site you'd like it. I have virtually no outbound links now and am wary of participating in any link exchange programmes that Google might view disapprovingly. But a few well-chosen link exchanges can surely do neither party to the exchange anything but good.

And don't forget that link: this means you!.

If the stockmarket is about to crash, can real estate be far behind?.. perhaps. This post contains links to a number of articles are bearish on Chinese equities.

I was guided to this blog by the Christine Lu who sent me an email in response to my facebook message... I wonder if I can become her friend. China Business Network is her publication.

Christine comments in her email to me:

One sector that is really hot right now and earmarked for a lot of growth is sustainable development projects. In particular, sustainable development or "green" residential and commercial projects in regards to real estate.

You can hear her interview with Aaron Newman here.
Certainly I believe working with China to improve environmental standards in their urban areas is a very promising avenue.

I am frequently underwhelmed when I use some new software package, and even more so when I use hardware. I frequently complain, bitterly, about the defects in IT products that I have to use.

Today's post is about a product that works. The software is TaxCalc, the version that allows a small number of personal filings. This had a slight fault in that it would not print, but an email to the support desk soon sorted it out ('internal' printing doesn't work with Acrobat 7).

The task should be reasonably simple. I still don't understand why I have to enter all my personal data (UTR, NI No., DOB, address, etc. etc. ) when the Inland Revenue's database clearly already holds this info. However, the online filing went without a hitch, in contrast to the product I used last time (Tax Shield Solo).

The nifty thing about this kind of software, from the vendor's point of view, is that you get to sell a completely new version year after year after year. At 25 pounds is not exactly a bargain, given that the total size of the market must be in the tens of millions, but frankly I'd pay 25 quid to avoid filling in a paper form every time. Especially as they never give the supplementary pages, and there are always long delays before they deliver them.

The UK Government waited more than 10 days before telling Parliament and the Public it has accidentally lost sensitive personal details of 25 million individuals.

Under current US laws, the Government would have had to notify immediately.

The petition calls on the Prime Minister to place a legal duty on public and private sector organisations, so that affected customers are informed immediately if the security of their personal data has been compromised.

Individuals have a right to know straight away when this has occurred to protect against identify theft.

Mandatory notification would make organisations more careful and more accountable for the use of personal information.

To sign this petition click here.

You probably arrived here because you had an email saying that I'd tell you what the family has been up to this year.

Bear with me as call centre operatives say. I'm working on putting some content here!

I have to record the fact that I went to hear Dr Peter Woit speak yesterday. The subject was essentially the subject of his book, 'Not Even Wrong'. I have not read it. I would love to read it, but I'm not sure that I will ever manage to do so.

This is an important book. Physics, the dominant science of the last century is in trouble in this area. It remains a hugely successful academic discipline, and its rigor and deep truth give it a status that all other sciences aspire to.

A few things from the talk stood out, for me:

1. Peter Woit said that most professional physicists had as much understanding of string theory as the average layman had about General Relativity,
2. That getting a superficial understanding of the field required years of study by the brightest students at Princeton,
3. That the last 30 years had produced any experiment that shows any problem with the 'Standard Model',
4. Peter's book 'Not Even Wrong' has gone into paperback - surely the first time a book (obliquely) about String Theory has done this,
   
5. Lee Smolin's book, 'The Trouble with Physics' causes books like these to be considered a zeitgeist, and therefore caused them to be reviewed in prestigious non-technical journals, causing them to have much higher sales than might have been expected,
6. That Cambridge University Press chickened out of publishing the book, although academic referees were evenly divided on its merits
7. That a junior faculty member at Harvard had issued death threats against Woit because of his published views on string theory (surely a first)

Entry originally made 23 April in Livejournal blog.

Gordon Brown has been accused of wasting £9bn of public money on his flagship tax credit policy, after official figures showed the Revenue made huge overpayments in the first three years of the scheme.

The latest data, produced by the Office for National Statistics, revealed that tax administrators wrongly handed out £1.7bn to families in 2005-06, bringing to £5.7bn the total amount overpaid since 2003. Much of it will be irrecoverable.

The Liberal Democrats said that their own research showed the true scale of the money wasted was much greater, and equivalent to one pound in every five paid out by the Revenue.

Why is it that this sort of thing, when it was discovered as recently ago as May, attracted such little opprobium?

The Tax Credit idea is that the payments mechanisms of PAYE can be used to pay benefits. Entitlements to benefits are roughly related to income. It also depends on a complicated slew of other life circumstances. A straightforward mechanism for helping people on low incomes would be to simply use their taxable income, which they have to declare to the Inland Revenue. This could be used to compute a cash sum to be paid. This system would be essentially foolproof, assuming that the system of collecting income tax works. It doesn't even require the PAYE system to work, which provides for collecting tax over the course of the year by withholding a proportion of income. But because of a few shortcomings - the need to vary the level of benefit over the course of the year, Gordon Brown chose the current system, with a complexity so great it is impossible in practice to operate it. Of course if one is on a low income, having to wait until the end of the tax year for benefit could be rather painful. Wealthier individuals don't worry about this because they can borrow. This is one of the many areas where the inability to access credit is a problem for low income people. I wish I knew the best solution, but it is hard to imagine that it could be more expensive, or unsatisfactory, than the Tax Benefit system.

From the FT, possibly only with a subscription, here.

Update 18th Dec 2007. HIPs are now activated. The market is in free fall, but this surely has more to do with the credit crunch than HIPs. However it is certainly the case that hardly anybody has benefited from these stupid packs, and I confidently predict that the delay between the offer and completion will grow, rather than contract, now that HIPs are finally implemented.

China is a wonderful story. It has astonishing potential, a highly-educated and motivated workforce, a legal system that is rapidly evolving into something that is pretty functional in terms of protecting property rights and generally encouraging investment and entrepreneurialism, and a flattish tax that is levied at about seven percent.

My preferred way to benefit from the flow of capital into China is to buy real estate, as regular readers will know. However other assets are likely to benefit from the continued economic boom in the country. Buying shares on the Shanghai stock exchange is difficult if you are not a PRC national. Buying them in HK is reasonably straightforward, although requires one to open an appropriate account in HK.

The interesting thing is that actually some of the largest and best-run Chinese companies are listed in the USA. This page gives you a great list to get started with. You can even see the price-earnings ration (P/E) and Price Earnings Growth ratio (the price/earnings ratio divided by its year-over-year earnings growth rate. In general, the lower the PEG, the better the value.)

The market in these shares is wonderfully liquid. Execution is almost instantaneous. 50% margining is automatic with Options Xpress.

You can even access a Google spreadsheet with PE and PEG ratios conveniently sortable, here, provided by Wall Street Networks

I have been a user of Mozy Home Backup for a while now. It is one of a half a dozen similar services, none of which I've tried, having been introduced to it by Francis.

I signed up for another computer yesterday and I was asked to spam my friends with this link. If you simply click through on this link (while closing your eyes if you are afraid that the pitch you will see will end up persuading you to sign up to Mozy's paid-for service) then I am given an extra quarter gigabyte of backup quota. Pretty good deal, if you ask me!!

My main incentive for writing this is just to tell you about a genuine free service from an honest supplier. If you don't want to click through, I won't be at all offended.

Drupal was possibly the the biggest discovery of this year. I may have come across it in 2006, but I only realised how good it was this year. My websites www.herts-lettings.co.uk (about to be made over by Epsilis) and www.mingwei.co.uk. The core functionality is modest, but there is a module to do absolutely everything. There is a brilliant community site where everything is documented and discussed, www.drupal.org. Drupal and siteground (www.siteground.com) make a wonderful combination.

China is the next discovery. I had never been to China before Sept 2007; I have been there twice since and each time I am more impressed by the sheer pace of development there. There is a wealth of the China real estate market, but one I rather like is Stephen Chung's Zeppelin Real Estate site, http://www.real-estate-tech.com/zeppelin_real_estate_tech.htm (this page gives links to recent newsletters, but you can easily navigate to the home page from here). There is a good deal of information on the China real estate market in English. You could do worse than start here on my site, although I must acknowledge that Google actually selects the articles.

The BT Internet Radio was the next discovery. This is probably not the best of the many radios based on the same internals, but it's the one they sell in John Lewis's where my father-in-law bought the radio for my birthday. The main reason I like to listen to this is that I can catch Rush Limbaugh on WABC. The sound quality is not fantastic, but for speech it is very clear.

The next discovery is Econtalk. I now eagerly await the next podcast from Russ Roberts. Listening to this podcast has increased my interest in economic freedom, economics and politics. I strongly urge you to download a few podcasts and enjoy the intelligent conversation that Russ Roberts seems always to manage to have with his guest.

The next discover I made in 2007 is undoubtedly older than all the rest. It is soup. Guided by Francis I discovered that cooking some vegetables, adding stock, can frequently produce a soup that is really quite as good as anything that comes out of a can, with really very little effort.