"yesterday"

Random reading

Could interest rates be staying low for a bit longer?

Having been involved in several post-hack investigations on small sites, this is an interesting idea for a seminar on dealing with a data breach, shame I can't make that day.

Development (and dealing with updates)

Had an annoying issue trying to run the PaTMa test suite on my recently upgraded Bionic Ubuntu machine:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Unable to load the SpatiaLite library extension "mod_spatialite" because: mod_spatialite: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Which took far too much googling to find a similar bug report and corresponding code commit that fixed the same issue for someone else.

The important bit being that SPATIALITE_LIBRARY_PATH setting now needs to include the .so at the end of the filename.

Crime Data

Imported the last couple of years of crime records into PaTMa, which will now be shown on prospects. The display is currently basic and will get better but it's already a useful extra data point when considering property purchases.

Too much food

Might have eaten slightly too much cake for lunch! Liz and I were supposed to be taking a few hours off this afternoon for an afternoon tea, but we still have a child off school so had to reschedule that. So instead Liz purchased some very good and very large pieces of cake for us. Definitely blown my calorie target for today!

The over eating was made even worse by dinner which consisted of an extremely large pizza! Delicious but way too big.

Roughly 500 calories over my daily target!

More reading

Read the latest analysis from the Uber self-driving fatality - apparently the car could have reacted in time but it's emergency braking systems were disabled!!

Really enjoyed the latest cakewatch episode that I listened to while cleaning the kitchen tonight. Lots of really interesting discussions about truth in politics and things that could be damaging democracy at the moment.

Also listened to the latest Startups for the rest of us and was particularly interested to discover Zencastr for recording remote audio.

And just for the fun of it, a lighter take on a privacy policy.

Time

So what have I actually done today!?

A couple of hours on assorted emails, I'm finishing the day with only two emails from today still pending and several from previous days dealt with, so definitely progress.

A couple of hours working on consultancy projects, including a dreaded GDPR mail-out for one client. At least they decided on a fairly sensible and short message that just informed their customers they've considered GDPR and to email back if they have questions. Other things included putting some site updates live and contributing to a discussion on performance for a data wharehousing system.

About an hour on assorted house/landlord work.

Two and a half hours writing (but not finishing) a blog post and adding a new subscription option to PaTMa - for £50/month you can now choose to pull in bank records to automatically pick up rent payments and also send documents for electronic signing. Except those features aren't actually finished yet, so really that subscription is a pre-selling option at the moment. If anyone chooses it, I'll contact them directly and provide a few weeks of discount while I get the features finished and working for them. A great option if you'd like to be at the cutting edge of PaTMa (and PropTech) development!

Finally there's the 1.5 hours or so I spent on PaTMa development, including the mod_spatialite issue above but also fixing the "excluded" prospects list for free accounts and work on importing historic crime data.