Let 10,000 Wolfenstein projects bloom!

Just reading a post by John Carmack where he talks about porting his old Castle Wolfenstein code to the iPhone. Since he open-sourced the code several years ago there's been a fair bit of development, with several open source projects adopting, adapting, and going off merrily on their own sweet ways.

He reveals that he finally settled on Wolf3D Redux, and then drops the fabulous line, "I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things". Sheesh! If that developer ever reads his email, he'll be kicking himself to the moon and back while weeping tears of blood! I'd sacrifice whatever parts of my anatomy are not strictly necessary for coding to get that kind of offer, and I think 99% of programmers out there would do the same.

So I foresee an immediate uptick of sourceforge projects dedicated to porting, cleaning, remodularising, abstracting, translating and just plain messing around with that old Wolfenstein code. Just on the offchance you understand...

Cherie Blair hired to sue RBS and Sir Fred Goodwin

This looks, on the face of it, highly suspicious. North Yorkshire Council and Merseyside Council, hmm... They wouldn't be Labour councils by any chance? And Cherie Blair???? There's more than a whiff of a stitch up here, this is presumably Harriet Harman's doing. I'm only surprised that Cherie Blair is lending her name and her skills to such an enterprise.

Britain poised to tumble

I am deeply dubious that the answer to our economic problems lies in encouraging banks to lend. Rather, since the reason they won't lend is that households are overburdened with debt, to such an extent that a large proportion of existing loans may never be paid back, the answer to me seems to be to play things quietly: to let people reduce their debts — over years if necessary — until financial health is restored. Only then can growth resume.

To put it in more familiar terms: if you've binged so much that you're lying puking in the gutter, with a cirrhotic liver and clogged kidneys, then a hair of the dog is probably not the right answer.

I also doubt recent claims in the media that the government will stand ready to claw back any excess liquidity should inflation reassert itself. I think they've calculated that a decade of inflation at 10% or so will nicely reduce all those personal loans to manageable proportions, and at far less political cost than a decade of real financial prudence.

That's not a popular analysis. Indeed I expect most commentators would scoff at its naivety. Certainly, insofar as the original personal debt problem has led to other problems such as a dearth of commercial lending, I suppose it may be reasonable to try to resolve those separately. But I don't think that trying to give the old wheel one more turn is going to get us anywhere, other than the poor house.

So it's nice to see that at least some financial professionals agree with me: house prices 'could fall by further 55 per cent' say Numis Securities, a leading City investment bank whom I've regrettably never heard of till now. They put it rather better than I've been able to:

"The Prime Minister and Chancellor have publicly stated that they want banks this year to lend at 2007 levels... We think this is a crazy policy, given that too much debt was one of the prime reasons why the economy has its current problems."

"The bankruptcy of the UK is a very real probability as the UK Government is trying to stimulate a greater debt burden in a grossly indebted economy."