Land Registry house price data April 2018

I’ve uploaded the latest Land Registry house price data to my website. I’d read stories of annual house price falls but the Land Registry data is showing a 3% annual increase. The Land Registry numbers are a few months behind other house price indices so a fall may be on its way in a few months

One month later and TSB online banking is still a disaster

One month ago TSB tried to migrate their customers to a new online banking platform. Things didn’t go particularly well and although the media have lost interest in the problems, as a TSB customer and IT geek I’m still interested in what’s happening and thought I’d touch on a few of the issues.

The most glaring issue is that my mortgage account still doesn’t appear in my list of accounts. I assume I still have a mortgage since the payments are still being taken from my current account but there has been no sighting of it since the ‘upgrade’.

A few days ago, I tried to login, only to see an error message, <div>Sorry, we are currently experiencing technical issues. Please try again later.</div>. Not being able to login isn’t great but not totally unexpected given the recent troubles. Displaying HTML tags in your error messages is a fairly minor issue but suggests a lack of attention to detail that can lead to more serious issues down the road.

Now lets go under the hood by firing up Dev Tools in Chrome. The first error I saw was complaining about Symantec certificates which Chrome will stop supporting in a future release. Let’s hope someone at TSB renews that fairly soon before things break properly.

But the next set of errors are slightly more concerning, WebSocket connection to 'wss://127.0.0.1:3389/' failed, something on the web page is trying to connect to a server on my local machine! I can only assume this is some kind of debugging code but should definitely not be getting pushed out to their production system.

Next we have a failure to load a locale file for US English, which is odd since I’m set up for UK English. Again, nothing serious but shows a lack of attention to detail.

Finally, let’s run the page through Lighthouse, the Chrome web page checker. The performance score is a mighty 18 out of 100. This seems mostly due to Javascript and CSS that isn’t bundled together and isn’t being loaded using async or defer, meaning everything has to load before the page can be displayed.

And that’s what I found spending a few minutes on the TSB website, who knows what could be found if I was an evil hacker wanting to steal some money

Converting KML file to shapefiles

For a long time I’ve been searching for some code that I can use on my website to convert the various KML postcode files that are available. Since many of these files are generated on the fly, I didn’t want to use a one off convertor. But I’ve always failed to find anything that will do the job. Since I don’t know the internals of shapefiles, it’s not something I wanted to write myself.

So I’ve kind of given up, but if you need to convert any of the KML files yourself, then this tool may be useful. From my admittedly not very thorough testing, it seems to do a good job of the conversion

Land Registry house price data March 2018

I’ve uploaded the latest property data for England and Wales from the Land Registry to my website. Annual house price inflation has been slowly creeping up and now stands at 3%. Sales data is harder to get a handle on since it can take months for all the sales data to come through but it looks like sale may be dropping off a little.

Land Registry property sales data for February 2018

My server is still crunching through some of the numbers but most of the England and Wales house price data for February 2018 is up on my site. There’s very little to report, annual inflation remains at just short of 3%, number of transactions remains at a steady level

My response to every anti-cycling article ever

If it’s not some Daily Mail article complaining about cyclists not using a cycle lane, it’s someone starting up a petition demanding cyclists should pay Road Tax (sorry no links but I don’t want to give them any encouragement). But one thing remains the same, the arguments put forward in the comments sections of these articles are always the same tired ill-thought out complaints. So rather than repeat myself on every article, here are my responses to the most common issues

Cyclists should pay road tax

The most common response to this is that road tax doesn’t exist, which is accurate, if a little pedantic. But we all presumably understand that Vehicle Excise Duty is charged based on the pollution caused by the vehicle, and I presume we can all agree the pollution generated by a bicycle is pretty much zero and hence the VED payable by the cyclist would be £0? OK, make us pay VED, I have no problem with that.

Beyond that, like most cyclists I own a car, for which I’m paying VED. I also pay Council Tax, Income Tax and VAT. I’ve just paid a big chunk of change in Stamp Duty to buy a house. Like most cyclists, I’m already contributing whilst helping to reduce congestion by using a bike instead of my car for every journey.

All cyclists jump red lights

Yes, some cyclists jump red lights, just like some drivers jump red lights. Just like some pedestrians do stupid things like crossing the road without looking. Cyclists are not an homogenous group. I suspect the problem here is that drivers feel that cyclists get away with jumping red lights. Here’s the thing, if a cyclist jumps a red light and causes an accident, the chances are he’ll come off worse or if he hits a pedestrian is unlikely to cause life changing injury. If someone in 2 tonnes of steel causes an accident, the chances of injury or death are much higher. So, with limited resources, the police are going to concentrate on the potentially more dangerous group of road users.

Cyclists should use the cycle lane when one is available

First up, there is no legal requirement for a cyclist to use a cycle lane if one is available. You can argue about whether that should be the case, but it is. But more importantly, a lot of cycle lanes are not fit for purpose. Take this example of road rage on Priory Lane in South West London. The driver gets insanely upset that the cyclist isn’t using the cycle lane (how stressful is driving BTW, get a bike, you’ll have much more fun…) but the cycle lane has a couple of problems. You have to give way at every junction along the road, of which there are quite a few. And when travelling South, it’s on the wrong side of the road. So if you are a confident cyclist, chances are you’ll use the road.

Or how about this 5 metre bit of cycle lane. Am I really expected to use that?

But these cycle lanes probably do work for some less confident cyclists and that is perhaps what drivers need to understand. Cycle lanes are not built for every cyclist, some are there to encourage more people to cycle, because that would be a good thing, right?

Cyclists should be required to have insurance

I’m almost in agreement with this. I’d have no problem getting insurance. But then what about the kid who has just got a shiny new bike for Christmas, they aren’t allowed to use it because their dad forgot to get insurance? Again, I am assuming encouraging cycling is the aim here

Cyclists should have number plates

Yeh, why not, if that floats your boat…

Converting Strava segments to FIT files

Strava Premium users who own a Garmin can sync their favourite Strava segments with their Garmin device automatically. But that’s not an option available to free users. Apparently this site used to be able to generate the FIT files used by Garmins but Strava made some fairly radical changes to their API that broke that site (and many others).

So I’ve added a FIT file export to my Segment Explorer. Due to rather inclement weather I’ve not been able to test this out on the road yet, but downloading the FIT file and shoving it in my Garmin\NewFiles folder displays it in my Segments list so it seems to work. If you authorize my app then your PR time will also be included in the file.

Update – You can now add a goal to the generated FIT file if you generate the file from the segment details page

Land Registry data for January 2018

I’ve uploaded the latest property data for England and Wales to my website. Like a broken record, I can report that house prices continue their gradual rise ever upwards. Sales volumes are holding steady.

UK postcode data February 2018

I’ve uploaded the latest UK postcode data from the ONS to my website. Let me know if you spot any anomalies

Land Registry data December 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest house price data for England and Wales to my website. Not much to report, sales are static, prices continue to inch upwards

House price data for November 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest house price data from the Land Registry to my website. Prices continue their slow march upwards, although some areas of London have gone negative.

UK station usage data 2016-2017

I’ve updated the UK station data on my site to include the usage data for 2016-2017

Land Registry house price data October 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest house price data from the Land Registry to my website. Prices continue on their slow march upwards

GB postcode data for November 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest postcode data from the ONS to my website. I’ve also added the Index of Multiple Deprivation field to the CSV downloads.

Property sales for September 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest property sales data from the Land Registry to my website. Prices continue to creep slowly upwards

Adjusting Strava KOM speeds for gradient

I’ve been wanting to improve the algorithm behind my Strava segment chooser for some time. Until now it’s been based off the number of riders who’ve attempted the segment and the power output of the KOM. It gave reasonable results but had to ignore any segments whose KOM didn’t have any power data recorded (either from a power meter or estimated based off the rider’s weight and speed). And although more power means more speed, a heavier rider will have to output more power to go at the same speed so the power output isn’t the perfect indicator of how difficult a KOM is to beat.

But using speed also has its problems. 20 mph on a flat segment is generally not going to win any KOMs but 20mph on a 10% gradient may well do. Adjusting the KOM speed for the gradient of the segment has been my aim for a while, but I haven’t had a chance to look at it until now.

Since I now have quite a few segments in my database, I thought it was time to analyse KOM speeds against gradient. I put each segment in a bucket based on its gradient and calculated the average KOM speed. This gave me the following, rather surprising graph.

For gradients between about –2% and 10%, things work as I’d expect. The steeper the gradient, the slower the KOMs are. Beyond that, things get a bit weird. Steeper uphill segments get a little faster and steeper downhill segments get a little slower. I have a few ideas about why this might be (more mountain bike segments, the terror induced by a steep downhill) but nothing definitive.

Whatever the reason, I decided to ignore segments outside –2% to 10%. The graph in this range can be approximated to a straight line so calculating an adjusted speed is fairly easy. I’ve applied this to my segment chooser and the results are, er, much the same as before…

Property data for August 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest property data for England and Wales from the Land Registry to my website. Prices continue to rise at a slow pace

Convert a list to a comma string

It’s nothing special, but I’ve found this useful in the past and probably will again so here for my memory bank is a function that converts a list to a comma string

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace Utils
{
  public static class ListHelper
  {
    public static string ToCommaString<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, string separator = ", ")
    {
      var builder = new StringBuilder();

      foreach (var t in list)
      {
        if (builder.Length > 0)
          builder.Append(separator);
        builder.Append(t);
      }

      return builder.ToString();
    }
  }
}

House price data for July 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest Land Registry house sales data to my website. Annual price rises seem to have settled at about 1%

GB postcode data for August 2017

I’ve uploaded the latest batch of postcode data from the ONS to my website. It all appears in order, but let me know if you spot any anomalies