If you happen to be interested in a property that is being sold under the wrong post code and also not the name the property was originally registered under ( which isn’t uncommon with Gaelic and English versions ) , good luck trying to find any prices.

A really useful tool in the process of finding the official address of a property or which properties a postcode covers is the One Scotland Gazeteer, which allows one search at a time and shows the results on an Ordnance Survey map, giving you the UPRN ( unique property reference number ) the council use in their gazetteer and planning process.

I think making the prices clearly publicly available would clear matters up and not let home sellers go on the hearsay of what they thought their neighbours got.

Also a service that would show what the relationship between asking prices and selling prices, because some home sellers get a valuation report they think their property will sell for at least that price, well depending on location it could but if you are in a more rural setting the likelihood is you will be offered less especially with the current economic situation. If home sellers could see that properties in their village frequently go for under asking then they might not spend 2 year sitting on for sale.

The other problem with not easily accessible sales data is people think the market is stagnant which it currently is to a degree but not as much as people think. This is exacerbated by estate agents very soon after a property sells from their site, or in some cases just removing the listing and not indicating it sold, I would have thought sales were something to publicise to give potenial sellers confidence that you actually shift property. I was faced by a seller saying nothing is shifting where at least 1 property a month is shifting in just her village, but their is no easy way for her to come by that information.

The only way I know how much is shifting is by having daily web scrapers on the agent websites plus manual scraping and parsing of the  ROS site, which is beyond the average person abilities.

I wonder if there is any licensing cost associated with this data?

We setup one dongle and got data coming in fine, to Datawell’s RFBuoy application but on connecting the second device we would get a message from RFBuoy saying the second wfd ( Reciever setup file ) was invalid or both RFBuoy apps would hang. The strange thing was if you connected Teraterm to the dongle com port you could see the Hex data being transmitted on both.

After spending some time diagnosing this problem it became clear it was worth assigning specific COM Ports to the dongles and choosing low ones, I selected 4,5,6 as they are low but above the usual standard serial ports of 1,2 and 3 which is usually assigned to a modem if one is present. I also disabled any existing devices in device manager than might attempt to use those ports ( bluetooth devices are an example ).

After assigning the com ports I found restarting the machine was necessary to get RFBuoy to recognise all wfd as valid, it is sometimes necessary to write the com port manually in the wfd as the RFBuoy setup doesn’t always see the correct ports.

It is also handy to label the dongles, to aid testing, I labelled each dongle with the com port I had assigned it and the last three digits of its Device Instance ID or Device Instance Path in Windows 7. So you know which dongle is which COM Port.

After assigning the com ports each dongle appeared to reliably retain its own com port on XP, Vista and 7. If a dongle was removed and reinserted, the corresponding RFBuoy app would need to be closed and reopened to resume data reception.

If you have many phantom COM Ports in use, it is worth getting rid of them to have a blank slate to work from, There are details below on removing these, mostly changes to the registry, worth a restart afterwards and uninstalling your dongles from device manager if they already been given high com ports.

http://www.digi.com/support/kbase/kbaseresultdetl.jsp?id=274

To expand the disks I thought it would be a simple case of creating a new blank larger disk through the VirtualBox application, as you are making a new machine but not installing anything to it.  I created a disk of about 38GB and attached this disk to the existing Fedora VM and booted it with the Clonezilla iso in the virtual optical disk drive, I could then use device to device in Clonezilla to copy the Fedora VM leaving about 25GB unallocated at the end of the disk. ( Instead of Clonezilla you can also use the command line VBoxManage with the clonehd option to achieve the same ).

I thought the next step would be to use gparted to expand the root partition on the new disk, so I attempted to use a Gparted live disk but when you see the root and swap partition of the Fedora VM it is an LVM2 filesystem which can’t be resized or moved by gparted. I began to do a bit of research and got quite confused regarding physical and logical volumes and the various command line tools. The solution I used in the end was to attach the expanded Fedora VM disk to an existing Ubuntu VM and booting into Ubuntu create an extended partition using gparted for the unallocated 25GB, then load the Logical Volume Management ( system-config-lvm easily available through the Ubuntu Software Center ) tool, this allows that extended partition to be initialised and then added to the volume group that the root partition is on and then you can migrate the root partition to the 25GB volume.  You then have to run lvextend giving the number of extents free on that partition and after that run e2fsck and resize2fs, so the filesystem is aware of the extension. It’s not too tricky once you work how the tools can be used together, but it is hard to get my head around after being used to ordinary ext2 filesystems.

Briefer description using a Fedora live CD,  lvm tools didn’t come with my Fedora 15 live CD and I have issues installing software with the livecd running behind a proxy hence the Ubuntu VM install.

http://vicenteprogrammer.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/resizing-a-root-lvm-fedora-partition-running-on-virtualbox/

The modem I bought to go with it a Linksys ADSL2MUE I bought for price. Its an unreliable piece of hardware, I found some upgraded firmware for it not officially released by linksys, which allows you to do port forwarding on it and seems to work more reliably with the WRT54GL.

The installer ran kind of slow on it and unfortunately the partitioning part of the Xubuntu installer has a crucial bug init which causs it to crash at 15% of Installation while ‘detecting file systems’.

I had an Ubuntu Fesity CD so I ran the installer on that and it eventually installed, took the best part of an hour. Everything worked apart from the network card which is an old ISA D-Link DE 220p so I had no connectivity initially on the machine but managed to search for help on the problem and it works fine now.

Have updated Dapper on my Vaio to Feisty now, had to go through Edgy using Update Manager, don’t notice a lot of change, apart from some icon changes and better wireless connections.

Having been using Dell Precision, with its high resolution 17″ screen going back to 1024*768 feels cramped, enabled autohide on the top bar in Ubuntu and would like to do the same with the bottom.

Also downloaded qSynaptics which solved the tapping/clicking problem I had with the trackpad, you have to edit xconf.org and then run qSynaptics.

Noticed the Nokia 770 is for sale at Expansys for £75, kind of tempting would like an internet tablet but might wait till the N800 comes down in price.

Think I will get a Neuros OSD currently on sale from Expansys for £140.25

Really like the philosophy of the company, and it will be useful for ripping some stuff from the PVR I have stored and some stuff currently degrading on VHS and will be interesting to see how YouTube and other video downloaded off the net look on the TV.

Bought a Buffalo 500GB USB external hard disk ( £86 ), for freeing up some space on the VAIO and backing up photos across multiple laptops. Hopefully it should hook up to the Neuros ok. Thinking about getting a Linksys NSLU2 ( £58 ) for accessing the drive from the laptops.

I tried using ffmpeg and mencoder on Ubuntu to convert it, but never managed to get it working, eventually I came across Super by eRightSoft which has an extrememly dodgy looking site, but is a free frontend to the same codec tools.

I then used VirtualDubMod where you can add a variety of filters including rotate and save to xvid.

Picasa web albums not support video uploads as well, you can do a right click on a video thumbnail in Picasa and upload to web album, which is quite neat. I think the video elements still need a bit of work ( they distort the aspect ratio on the vertically shot footage ) but its nice to see the direction they are heading in.

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/faclair/sbg/lorg.php?facal=%s&seorsa=Gaidhlig&tairg=Lorg&eis_saor=on

Now if you type ‘g ceic’ ( without quotes ) into the address bar you get all the stor data translations of the word after g.

For an English to Gaelic bookmarklet use the location below and an appropriate keyword.

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/faclair/sbg/lorg.php?facal=%s&seorsa=Beurla&tairg=Lorg&eis_saor=on

Found this handy and thought  it was worth sharing

Its well done, I like reading the voices ex-pat Scots around the world and others that have learned it.

It came from the Cumrish blog site, Blogiadur which operates in the same fashion.

I was thinking about something like this for a while, its great to see it done so well.

Saoghal Gaidhlig that Michael setup complements it well from a Scottish Gaelic organisation perspective.

But there was something intensely annoying about his own pieces. Especially the way he had set pieces with a 23 year old helper who set up his livejournal for him.

His helper Tony said he didn’t even own a TV and Yentob said ‘thats nothing to be proud off’ well Mr Yentob there is nothing to be proud that you need to have a 23 year to setup your blog.

I’m sure it was designed to appeal to an older generation than me but I still found Yentob very annoying.

Having never spoken to an Estonian I wondered how this could be, then I thought for a second and realised it was from the Skype Test Call.

I never thought of her as Estonian.

Weird calling with Skype to its home.