Blogging your documentation

Some time ago I had an extensive contract doing FileMaker development work and I looked around for a way to easily keep notes (that were going to be useful to someone else!) on the work I was doing.

For a long time the answer was text files – very fast to update, search and very free flowing. However I wanted more, so I tried some blogging tools … finally settling on blosxom. This tool won because it stored the blog entries in plain text files – nicely future proofing the documentation in case blosxom wasn’t available/functional/wanted or whatever else.

Now I’m looking to do the whole thing over again on a different project and this time I want to use blojsom. Not least because Apple are now rolling blojsom into OS X Server, also because it seems to have a sizeable community behind it and partially because it is something new.

So – the stumbling block has always been getting Tomcat up and running on OS X. Today I’ve dug up some links to help – specifically MacSophia seems to have been here before, and pointed on further to mamamusings for some specific guidance.

Much mortgage news

Check it out – our mortgage industry is growing up. If we can just avoid the sub-prime disaster going on in the US at the moment

Also interesting is that Warren Buffet in his latest letter to shareholders mentions that he’s on the hunt for real estate agency businesses at the moment.

Adelaide Bank’s interest-free mortgage

Adelaide Bank has launched a mortgage product that lets borrowers buy a [sic] 20 per cent of home without having to make interest payments.

Fancy an interest-free loan to buy a house?

But when I heard about ’shared-equity mortgage’, no such fears invaded my senses. All I could think was, ‘that’s interesting’, ‘good idea’ and ‘can’t-wait-to-see-if-and-when-it-will-ever-happen’. [...]Yesterday [...] Rismark and RP Data announced the launch of new property price indices and a residential property derivatives trading market.

Adelaide Bank has created a website just for the mortgage called at efm.info

The indices by RP Data are only available for pay, of course – what do you think this is? A marketplace where participants can see the data?

In his book Irrational Exuberance, Robert Schiller wrote about the potential beneficial uses of a derivatives market in residential property. Imagine you buy a house in Sydney – you could then use derivates over say Melbourne property to provide a kind of insurance against a drastic fall in your property. Naturally it would be possible to trade these derivatives in a more reckless manner, but nobody would do that, would they? Hmm.

Updates:

• thread on the Somersoft forums discussing the new mortage product.
• Betting the House – a column from Schiller on managing homeownership risk
• Aussierealty.com is another shared equity product