November 3, 2006 | In Development | No Comments
As a post-graduate student I spent an awful lot of my time writing code in Fortran. This was mathematical code, proper stuff that put proverbial hairs on ones chest. I realised today that I missed those days.
I had need to sort a set of data based on a numerical field. This, obviously, required a sorting algorithm. While not exactly a seminal piece of coding, it actually stirred the scientist in me and I decided to write it from scratch (rather than use a library piece).
So I went away and did some research on different sorting techniques and their relative merits. In the end I Implemented a quick sort with in-place partition, and it felt good :) Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it made me feel better, like I had used my science-brain.
November 1, 2006 | In My Life | No Comments
One issue that I can get quite heated about is house prices. This is very much a big topic in Britain, and it has become a fact of modern life for my contempories and me that we cannot afford to buy houses. I am sure that it has always been the case that houses were expensive, of course they were, and this is certainly not the first time that house prices have risen above the affordability level of most of the population. However, I think we are facing a significant shift in the ownership and availability of housing in the UK.
The BBC News has an article on the Abbey offering a mortgage at 5 times the joint salary of a couple. Large multiple mortgages are not uncommon, but this is the first major high street lender to do so. It looks like the traditional 3.5 times salary multiple has most definitly gone out of the window. However, this does not make the houses any more affordable, just that you are tied to larger monthly payments.
I’m sure there are many complex reasons why house prices are continuing to rise. Personally I think the biggest issues are a lack of available properties (full stop), and an increase in buy-to-lets. Many people are releasing equity in their houses to fund a buy-to-let, or moving their money from more traditional investment schemes. This removes more properties from the market for first-time buyers and exacerbates the supply and demand economics.
Whether the property market ever settles to something more affordable I don’t know, but I can see a few possible scenarios evolving from this:
- We have a two-tier property society: the upper tier own all the property and the lower tier rent from them.
- Parents and relatives are expected to contribute massive financial backing to their offspring to buy houses. Unfortunately I can see this already with the media hyping an expectation to obtain large deposts from parents.
- People don’t buy houses until well into their 30s, with the knock on effects of starting families later in life.