Steve Hemingway

Willem Buiter is a wonderful blogger. I cannot recall seeing his entries printed in the paper. He produced a wonderful post recently about how the Treasury conducts itself. I don't suppose he is always right. Someone with such a breadth of coverage surely could not be. He has had Martin Wolf write articles explaining why he disagrees with him, which at the very least shows that he if he is wrong he is interestingly wrong.

This post is notable if only because of its (surely unique in the FT.com) use of the verb to asperge (click on the link to find out what it means) and in having a title which is in latin. The freedom of the blogger definitely results in a more interesting copy.

I have downloaded standard mandarin. This comes with the Lua Meng seal of approval, and seems pretty good, but to be honest I haven't really spent a lot of time using it. It is hard to get back in to the habit of study at my age. I am, as you will have guessed, having a go at learning Mandarin. At my current rate of progress I should be ready to take 'O' level by the time I am 100 years of age.

I have called a huge number of construction companies with remarkable lack of enthusiasm for an industry that is close to meltdown. My key problem is understanding who does what. It seems that there are really very few integrated builder developers out there: the industry is very vertically segregated. I was warned a month ago by John Myers that a lot of main contractors were 'management only'. I suppose I'll discover more, but it is proving to be an expensive process.

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This article on Building is pretty astonishing. It explains that houses built for sale to private individuals are of too low a quality to be offered to the poor. The idea that it is not acceptable for poor indigenous Brits to be offered sub-standard social housing has moved to a different level. What we now have it the assertion that it is unacceptable for low-income tenants to have to put up with private sector standards.

Words fail me.

The credit crunch has hit the high street The UK love affair with shopping has proved to be a key factor in the economic prosperity and urban regeneration of the last decade. But the global economic downturn, along with a shift towards shopping online, has seen a High Street slowdown that is having a knock-on effect for the flagship shopping centres that in the past have often been centrepieces of urban regeneration. "There's far more capacity out there than ever before and demand is relatively flat," says retail sector analyst Richard Hyman of Deloitte, a consultancy, warning that retail-led urban regeneration may be over for good.

This post on skyscraper city describes the content of the programme. There is a link to the downloadable audio file in the post. It is well worth listening to.

Local authorities are desperate for the revenue they receive in business rents and the notorious Section 106 planning gain payments so they have huge incentives to grant planning permission for retail schemes, and in some cases will give away car parks and similar land owned by the council as an incentive for the developer to agree to the scheme, greatly to the advantage of the developer, and of the elected officers, but not to the advantage of the long-suffering council tax payers.

http://update.linksys.com/lela/install/lela.exe is where you can download the Linksys Easy Link Advisor. It is a terrific tool that is slightly beta flavoured. If you have a Linksys router I recommend you get it. It works great with my new WRT160N.

Amazingly I bought the router because the review on Amazon said that it came with this great network management tool. I then discovered that the software was free to download by anyone, and works with any router, including Netgear ones!!!

I have been using Vista for getting on for a year now. My overwhelming impression of the operating system is that it is unusably slow. Everything I read about it on the web is that is has some wonderfully clever technology to make it run faster.

I tried various performance tweaks. I have two gigabytes of RAM, which should be enough, but I put in a fast USB memory device to give my system a 'turbo boost', i.e. an extra (solid state) disk to hold the sectors cached by superfetch. None of this made any appreciable differerence and my system ran unusably slowly.

Finally I decided to bite the bullet and disable Superfetch all together (I used these instructions). This had the most astonishing impact on the performance of my system.

I do not know why superfetch does not work for me. "Your Mileage May Vary" as they used to say, but for me the impact of setting a byte in the registry from value 3 to value 0 has made an astonishing difference. I have a sneaky suspicion that it is because I have a *lot* of applications running the whole time. Certainly Word, Excel, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Nomadesk, Skype, MSN and so on and so on. Taskmanager informs me that I have 93 processes running. Other users I've observed seem to want to close applications when they've finished editing a document. My attitude is 'well, I'm going to edit another doc soon, or make further edits to the one that's already loaded; if the app is not used for a while it will be paged out anyway, so why would I bother to shut it down'. Maybe that's the wrong attitude. When it comes to Skype, YM, MSN messenger and Nomadesk.

Anyway, I'm too busy to make blog entries, but I just had to report this success as I've been searching for a way of making my Vista PC perform even approximately as fast as my XP machine for ages.

I am now tempted to switch off prefetch in Vista to see what happens.