Paul Maunders | Web log

In February of this year we invested in a startup called Furnish.co.uk, and I’m pleased to say that as of yesterday they have now gone live with their sleek new website.

Furnish.co.uk, as it’s name suggests, is a new way to find and buy luxury home furniture online. The site acts as a shop window for [...]

Today I have been attempting to set up Google Calendar so that it automatically synchronises with an iPhone and also iCal on a Mac computers. It was a bit trickier than I expected, so here are some of my observations. Hopefully they will help someone else!
Google Sync 
Here are some of the main things you need [...]

If you are an iPhone developer and have been running one of the beta versions of the 3.0 firmware then you might find that iTunes will not update you to the latest official 3.0 release, as it already thinks you are using the most recent version.
It’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally found out [...]

Installing
First, download the Yii Framework to somewhere sensible. I prefer to use subversion to check out the code:
svn co http://yii.googlecode.com/svn/branches/1.0 /usr/share/php/Yii
This will take a few minutes. Once it’s done, you can use the Yii Command Runner (yiic) to set up your web application:
/usr/share/php/Yii/framework/yiic webapp /var/www/html/appname
If everything went well, you should be able to access your [...]

Today I’m going to be helping one of our investment companies, ByteWire set themselves up with a subversion based development environment for their Street Crime game. They will use a straight forward workflow whereby they will develop and test their code locally on their iMacs, commit working code to a subversion repository, and then check [...]

If you are running WAMP and you want to be able to send outgoing e-mails via PHP’s mail function, then you will need to edit the php.ini file and change
SMTP = localhost
to
SMTP = smtp.yourisp.com
Replacing smtp.yourisp.com with the address of your ISP’s SMTP server, e.g. smtp.ntlworld.com. The php.ini is in the bin directory of the active Apache, [...]

If you factor Employee’s and Employer’s National Insurance Contributions into the total deductions made by the tax man, then most people pay closer to 30% tax than the headline basic rate of 20%.
The following graph shows the total % tax paid by an employer + employee for a given nominal gross salary. This includes income [...]

When designing an application – should you put each customer in a separate database or keep them all in one large central database?
When it came to start work on our new Clear Books accounting software last year, we had to make a fundamental database design choice between using a single database for all clients, or [...]

You can view the Google Spreadsheet with the raw data here.
Sources

Exchange Rates – Bank of England (GBP:USD XUQAUSS / GBP:EUR XUQAERS)
Real House Prices – Nationwide

The following graph shows the quarterly unemployment rate compared to real house prices. House prices have been adjusted for inflation and are given in 2009 Q1 prices.

Sources

Unemployment rate is from National Statistics Time Series Data – Labour Market Statistics – MGSX: LFS: Unemployment rate: UK: All: Aged 16 and over: %: SA
Real House Price is [...]