Mohamed Ibrahim’s Blog

Toll brothers reported that they expect further revenue decline in 2008 first quarter. I heard yesterday on WTOP news, that they even expect the market to go into worse conditions. I’m on the contrary seeing signs of things getting better than at least the previous quarter. I’m not saying that we’re getting out of the pit yet, but at least during the previous week I’ve been getting calls, email requests and contacts through the website from people looking to buy, in a rate higher than the last quarter.

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Words used in URLs give tips to search engines about the content of the page. It also helps advertises figure out what the page is about. A URL that looks like node15 isn’t really optimized for search engines.

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My hard drive on the old server were almost full. The postgres database grew to be almost 100GBytes, and I had to do something otherwise an anticipated server crash is on the way. The solution I had in mind is to use the old server, which already has two 150GB hard drives. Making one volume using the two drives can be accomplished in several ways, the easiest way is to create a logical volume out of the two. The other way is to make a software RAID 0 array. In RAID 0, the kernel stripes the data across the hard drives, so a sector gets stored half on each drive. This in theory should lead to twice the throughput, however SATA and IDE are serial devices so the bottle neck will be how fast is your SATA or IDE device.

So it took me a while to set up the RAID 0 array on the box using UBUNTU and the reason is that we have to use the server installation CD. The GUI desktop CD does not have the RAID option - or at least I wasn’t able to figure out where to find it. On the server CD, the easiest way is first to create two identical partitions on the two hard drives, and select the partition types as RAID. An option will then appear that says something like “Create a software RAID device”. You can use that to include both partitions in the RAID device. Remember that you must have a small /boot ext3 may be 100MB, and swap partitions.

There was an obvious increase in performance over a single drive, although I did not measure before and after but from what I see the intensive hard disk operations that used to saturate the drives when monitored by atop no longer does that. My interpretation is because the peak bandwidth of the SATA controller is larger than any hard disk by itself plus we have buffers in every hard disk, so effectively we’re using twice as much buffers.

Moving the database and websites took almost all the night, I started pg_dump on one machine over ssh, piping on the other side in a psql process. I stayed two hours after I started it, then I gave up and went to sleep. In the same time I had processes running to sync the files and my subversion repository.

I am a news addict. I like reading news and listening to news a lot. At the start of my day, I listen to news in the morning during my morning routine. I have speakers mounted in the bathroom ceiling and the radio tuned to 103.5 wtop news.

Today I heard a commercial about lennar announcing a 4.9% fixed loan, with lots of disclaimers following the announcement. Check it out. I’m not related to lennar by any way nor I will benefit from anyone taking a loan from them.

I knew mortgages with even lower rates than that … all the way down to 2.5% fixed. I haven’t researched lennar’s loan, but from my previous research those very low rates are negative amortization loans. It’s those loans where the real rate is something like 6%, you pay only a smaller amount and rest gets added over your principal. So in reality, your principal grows and is not paid off.

If that 4.9% is not a negative ammo then it would really be a good deal! you know, the inflation in the united states is between 3%-5% i.e. money loses value at 3%-5% a year approx. If someone is giving a loan at 4.9% then they’re really pushing their risk level high - unless there’s a catch in there. If you add the effect of inflation plus the cost of the loan (salaries and wages to people working on it, commissions, originations …etc) a 4.9% fixed amortized loan is definitely either barely breaking even or a losing deal for the lender - I really don’t know how they’re making it happen.

Recently, I rediscovered atop. It is an excellent command-line tool (just like top) that shows some advanced statistics including disk usage and swap page faults per process. For the disk usage to work per process a kernel patch is currently required. However, even without the kernel patch if you know which processes running on your server you’ll be able to guess which is utilizing the disk more.

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The reason to sell or buy real estate should be the need to do so. Either you moved due to work, you have a loan that will reset and you won’t afford it any longer (although you can also try refinancing), or you’ve got a bigger income and can easily upgrade to a larger home.

Don’t sell or buy real estate just because you’re afraid of the market. That’s my opinion for the everyday person - not the investor.

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This is an updated chart to the posts I had made earlier. At that time I was hoping that the curve pointing up is pointing to a recovering real estate market, but actually it looks like there are minor cycles repeating and we’re still going down. Worse, those minor cycles seem to repeat every two years - and now we are in a minor cycle trough.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking about whether mixing text and image ads is really profitable. The case that most advertising companies (like Google adsense, adbrite and lots of others) make is that allowing image ads in the same ad unit as text ads is usually better because they compete in price with text ads. But, my understanding is that image ads will only show if they beat the highest text ad price. I tried to analyze and see whether the final profit will be larger in case of mixed ads or not and I found conditions for image ads to make more money if allowed to compete against text ads in the same ad unit.
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“Too little too late” This is the phrase that I’ve been hearing continuously in the news both for reaction of the government to stimulate the economy with tax rebates, and today with the federal reserve decision to cut the interest rate by 0.75%.

Why does the federal reserve need to cut the rate? Our economy is based on ever increasing credit. If people don’t borrow, there will be no money i.e. DEBT=MONEY CREATED IN THE SYSTEM. The reverse is true, repayment of a debt destroys the money created, which is the same thing that happens when a mortgage goes to foreclosure - the money gets destroyed.

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MRIS has an excellent statistics tool, which is publicly accessible. It can show the housing market statistics in every zip code. The last time I ran the statistics I had 1 out of every 10 units selling. I just ran it now and in my zip code 20876 at the end of Dec 2007, 11 units sold and 202 units active - that’s 5.4%. It’s really not dim as that in all areas, once you get closer to DC, and lower the price bracket the rate of selling goes higher. In Arlington it is approximately 47%, which mostly contain condos. However, you have to price right and aggressive pricing is not an option in most cases.

Those number are very important in case you’re selling your home. You need to know your possibilities of selling your listing i order to determine the correct price. It is a very hot investor/buyers market, but not any buyer can now buy! If you are a seller, think twice before you counter offer.

As usual, I saw the update icon in Ubuntu’s taskbar so I ran apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade, and as I read I found an update for freenx. When dpkg was installing the newer version it said that the configuration file node.conf is different. I pressed D to run diff on them to see whether the old problems were solved or not. I believe this package should be bug free almost for every one.

The package sources I’m using are:

deb http://www.datakeylive.com/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://www.datakeylive.com/ubuntu gutsy main

Since I updated the website this weekend and it’s been downloading images from MRIS non-stop. In a previous post I said that I had around 900,000 images. I later on discovered that I had dangling images whose listings were deleted. Since this weekend, the update script downloaded almost 820,000 images from MRIS and inserted those binaries inside bytea fields in postgresql. I was expecting things to slow down, however I don’t feel any slow down since the process started. It seems the postgres team really optimized the b-tree indexes to the extreme.

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A lot of work was done this weekend. Although I refer to it as a lot, yet the amount that is actually reflected on the pages is small. I changed the way mibrahim.net is reading the media from MRIS to a better way, since MRIS update of photo manager.

The old sneeky way that I used was to increment the last digit in the main photo URL. It worked great for most of the listings, and in very rare cases it did not work. After the photo manger update, I noticed that the number of misses started to increase and by further research I found that MRIS now stored more images in the database - i.e. there is no weblink to the media and those images can only be retrieved using a RETS query.

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Ok… I was trying to do this in my home network, and for the very first moment any one trying to do this will think about using a samba share. There’s another way, which is much simpler.

Set up the cups server and allow internet printing from your cups server. Go to your windows, add a printer and use http://IP-address-of-linux:631/printers/<PrinterNameInCups>

That’s it ! choose the correct printer driver from the windows drivers, mine was HP1100 LaserJet.  It worked flawlessly with on troubles.

On the windows side I’m using XP and the linux side is ubuntu gusty.

Too many people mistakenly make themselves liable to pay capital gains taxes when they exchange an investment property with another. They simply haven’t been told about the 1031 tax exchange, the law which enables you to reorganize your investments without actually paying capital gains. Lots of people also mistake the 1031 tax exchange as a way by which they will not pay taxes well they say taxes and death you can’t run away from them. Simply and in summary, the 1031 tax exchange tells the IRS that you really did not stop investing, it is just that you found a better investment and re-organizing your money. That said, it means that you’re not going to take any money out of the property.

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I’ve been reading more lately about financing. I mean the core of money, where it comes from and how it gets killed, not just real estate financing. I’m surprised by a lot of what I read, and actually hope that others take the time and understand the pillars of our economy in order to know how to plan for his or her future.

I watched some videos on Google video: Money As Debt , Money banking and the federal reserve . Although sometimes those videos generalize their talk, yet after doing some research I found that a lot of it is actually true. The fact is we are dealing with non-existent money.

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What is the homestead tax credit?

Exactly like it sounds, it’s a credit you get back. Why would the state do so? In my opinion, they’re trying to limit the speed by which tax assessments are growing relative to the speed by which home prices grew in the past five years, resulting in higher tax rate for residents. It is mainly targeted to benefit home owners who live in those residents.

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I found a flyer today in my mail box from empire financial titled NO PAYMENTS FOR 6 MONTHS. The flyer read ‘Move your buyers into their dream home without making a mortgage payment for up to the first six months with the buyers’ Bonus Mortgage Program’.

I think it is good that many finance companies are trying to make the secured loan market more innovative. Sometimes to complete sales one is required to keep all those type of programs in the back of his head, although I’m not seeking financing myself - yet my buyers are, and sometimes I need just to point them out to some loan programs that I might know, and they don’t.

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It’s really bad. I really feel bad from what Microsoft is doing, locking vista if they felt any change. There should be a better way to verify their licensing. They should basically lower their “false positive” rate as it looks like they’re hitting innocent people as well.

Yesterday we had a power surge at home. I noticed around 10 am when the website was not responding. When I went back home, I found both the webserver and my gateway machine both having errors and ubuntu halting at “run fsck manually”. Luckily, I was able to fix the webserver without a re-install. I have keep daily backups from both my postgres and mysql databases by dumping them around 4:00 am daily. The dump is stored on a separate hardrive, which gets unmounted after the dump completes.

I had to re-install the gateway machine. On the good side I got to re-install gutsy instead my older feisty installation. No data lost, as I keep my /home always on a separate partition, I only had to re-install the OS.

To prevent future damages and save time, I bought a UPS 900KVA , which should be fully charged when I go back today. Also, I got a KVM switch, instead to moving the monitor, keyboard and mouse connections over the four machines.