Monthly Archive for June, 2010

Lies, Damned Lies & Stats

'everything is ok'

Spotted a strange conviction-based FT article from a week past today. The author believes we’re in the middle of a new bull market (‘stage 2′) and it’s really just a question of when we begin the next move up…

In conclusion he says we shouldn’t panic because of the following 3 ‘key positives’: Continue reading ‘Lies, Damned Lies & Stats’

Debt Disconnect

The Debt Drug

On Friday I questioned the validity of relying on a single, relatively unreliable and untested measure as a leading indicator. At the risk of sounding like an economist that is not to say I disagree with the conclusions made.

Indeed watching the UK consumers’ response to their emergency ‘austerity’ budget may be a useful predictor for the likely US retrenchment, whenever Obama decides (or more likely, is forced) to follow suit.

Though rather than being a function of the consumer, there is a case to be made that the next major index movement will come from a government’s inability to pay it’s bills and hence stopping the stimulus-led consumer ‘growth’ story in it’s tracks.

Continue reading ‘Debt Disconnect’

UK as a Leading Indicator for US

When America sneezes the UK catches a cold.

Such has been the accepted logic in financial markets for decades now. The logic being that as our largest trade partner outside of the EU – together with it’s sheer scale – it’s health directly affects the well being of companies on this side of the pond. A one-way heuristic that may well be about to be reversed at least temporarily.

Continue reading ‘UK as a Leading Indicator for US’

Newspaper Paywalls

Interesting analysis on the viability of newspapers online from local political commentator Owen Polley over at 3k Versts.

Correctly Polley points out this is in a way make or break for print media, Continue reading ‘Newspaper Paywalls’

Fooled by Randomness, part 1

Weekly Indicator Growth Rates

I don’t read too much into Mark Hulbert’s commentary over at Marketwatch. Although a contrarian he chooses to place a large emphasis on correlations that simply do not stack up imo.

Continue reading ‘Fooled by Randomness, part 1′

Browse with Confidence?

IE6 not detected on microsoft.com

Perhaps, when attempting to convince users your browser is rock solid haxor-proof, it’d be advisable to demonstrate to them that your sites can detect which browser they’re currently running?

Debugging ‘Responseless’ HTTP Requests

When developing AJAX or Facebook web apps a lot of the time requests are fire and forget i.e. they are awaiting no specific response information from the application. Therefore we have no simple dump to screen solution for debugging our apps.

One workaround would be to save details to a db where they could be retrieved for analysis at a later time. This makes the data persistent but normally for debugging this is overkill. Log frameworks exist but sometimes incorporating third party software in is just bloat, especially in single developer projects.
Continue reading ‘Debugging ‘Responseless’ HTTP Requests’

Friday Linkdump

Take deep breath and…

Agree?

High Contrast Image
I just got me some contrast

true UI innovation – prefab Continue reading ‘Friday Linkdump’