Robert Casto Software Developer and Performance Engineer

By now everyone knows the big problems in the housing market. What you probably don’t know is a rule that will probably make things worse. It was designed to protect Fannie Mae, but it is having the opposite effect. It is making things worse and will prolong the pain of this housing downturn. Worse yet, it will devalue the loans Fannie Mae has bought even more. You can only value something as much as someone will pay for it. The foreclosed homes are sitting on the market even longer because investors can no longer buy as many homes.

RULE: Investors may only have up to 4 investment property loans as per Fannie Mae. It used to be 10.

PROBLEM: Investors are unable to buy homes and they they sit on the market. Getting loans to buy these homes has gotten very expensive.

RESULT: Homes are going to be on the market much longer and the housing market is going to remain repressed for much longer than it should. Investors would love to buy homes but they can not. People who want to sell are unable to find people who can get a loan. The value of homes will decrease much further as a result because investors will have to use more of their own money to buy a house and will want a greater discount as a result.

What should Fannie Mae do? Put the limit back to 10. I am not suggesting that they raise it higher than 10, but there are a lot of people who would be willing to buy homes right now because of the low cost. Another thing Fannie Mae should do is not allow these loans to be less than 20% down. This will ensure that the investor has money at stake and not the 0% down or 5% down that got everyone into trouble.

Finally, they should require that the foreclosure proceedings are more quickly executed. In Ohio, it takes about a year for the entire process to be worked out. In that time the house has been empty, unkept, and is loosing value because of damage, copper being stolen, water damage, and a host of other problems because it the house sitting vacant for so long. By the time these homes are back on the market everyone is loosing a ton of money, especially the banks, and an investor who wants to buy has to do so at a big discount because of all the repairs that will be needed. If the house was pushed through the foreclosure process in 2-3 months, the houses wouldn’t be in bad shape and they could be sold at a better price.

Posted under Rants, Real Estate

Joel Spolsky’s book about how to hire smart people should be read by management everywhere. I loved the ideas he had for how to treat developers. I once took a job with a large company and was told that I had to use a computer that was crashing without warning every 20 minutes to an hour or so. They could not replace it until all the steps for dealing with the trouble had been gone through. After 3 weeks, everything option had been exhausted and I was finally given another computer that actually worked.

At other companies I am told that larger monitors, bigger hard drives, split keyboards, and other hardware items are too expensive or are not in the budget. I don’t understand how companies can spend $60,000 per year on a developer but not spend $2000 on hardware to make sure they are productive. I can see frivolous items like 30 inch monitors costing $3000 being rejected. But if a developer says they need a 28 inch monitor that costs $500 at COSTCO, why not get it for them? If they want a $100 mouse and keyboard, why not get it for them? They will be happy to come to work using the latest and the greatest tools that can be bought, and will be that much more productive. They will definitely think twice before leaving a company that is so nice to them making sure they are being taken care of.

Now Joel goes as far as taking employees to a Broadway play, trips to scenic places, and much more. There is no way I would want to live in New York City. But I definitely like the idea of what he is trying to do and respect the reasons for him doing. My hope is that others will pick up on what they are doing, especially in the Midwest.

Posted under Rants, Software

IBM came out with an article discussing how to improve I/O performance when copying data from disk to an output stream. This looks to be very useful, especially for web services that must serve data that is relatively static. The article did not mention whether the technique could be made to work on Microsoft Windows.

New transferTo() method for copyingDisk I/O straight to Network I/O

My interest in this technique is with systems that must be updated with data from corporate servers. Pricing data, new products, inventory changes, and much more all need to be broadcast to thousands of machines across the company network. For Point of Sale (POS) machines at company stores, corporate servers have trouble handling the thousands of tiny files that must be transmitted. Eliminating the overhead of taking the data from disk to the I/O should cut in half the amount of time needed based on the performance metrics shown in IBM’s article. This could allow a machine to service double the number of clients it could serve.

Posted under Software

Google Chrome is a new web browser built by people who know web services, web software, web ads, web… well, you get the picture. Why did they build yet another browser? Because in my opinion, it needed to be done. Instead of one big program that holds all the web pages, you get lots of little programs, one for each tab. The browser they build becomes essentially a manager of lots of little browsers. Why is this a good thing? Because sometimes

bad things happen when you load a web page containing say the latest mega-monster-video-game. Instead of all your tabs going away, just the one that was being bad goes away.

This might not seem like a great thing but I think it is. As a software developer and programmer of web sites, it means that the web pages I create will work better, work faster, and just plain work. I won’t get calls any more because something went wrong while someone was in the middle of using my website.

So what is this part about Big Brother you say? It has to do with the EULA. That is an acronym for End User License Agreement. When you install this great piece of software on your computer and use it, Google says they own every piece of data you look at. Everything you enter on a form. Everything you surf to is theirs. Don’t believe me? Take a look at some of the news out there. This article has a copy of the text from the EULA itself. Here’s another article, and another. If you want to see the EULA your self, then here is the location.

It is stuff like this that really gets me fuming. They come out with a great tool, but then have to mess it up with legal garbage like this. Hopefully this will get sorted out and the offending clauses get fixed. Until then though, I won’t be using this great tool.

Posted under Software