Recession? --Bah, humbug!

My take on the conversation about Britain following the US into recession is that ours is a very different economic situation to that of our cousins on the other side of the pond.

American house prices fell because the American housing market had more houses for sale than house buyers with money were creating demand for. Building and planning laws in the US are a lot different to those in the UK so when people over extended themselves to buy houses they couldn't afford and were unable to make the mortgage payments the market became saturated and prices dropped and the whole vicious cycle of bankruptcies ensued.

In the UK, our situation is more of a correction. We too had lots of people buying houses they couldn't afford, so that when interest rates rose, a few camel's backs were broken. The difference here is that when these properties were returned to the market, they were snapped up by investors who still had deep pockets.

UK house prices are not about to drop, they are going to continue rising. We still don't have enough housing on the market and that isn't about to change quickly. As long as that's true (and I predict it will remain true for a few decades still), home owners can rest assured that their investment is safe. Meanwhile all those folks who fell off the ladder are about to get some hard knocks schooling about buying a house they can afford.

Self certifying your IIS 6 website for SSL

Every time I need to enable https / ssl for a development or staging server I spend 30 minutes googling for instructions. Now I'm blogging just to remind myself how it's done:

Install the IIS 6 Resource Kit referenced at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/840671 from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=56fc92ee-a71a-4c73-b628-ade629c89499

Obtain the site Id of the website you want to install the certificate for by clicking on the Web Sites major heading in the left hand side of the IIS admin tool and view the "Identifier" on the right hand side for whichever site you need. This is the site ID. further instructions at: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/archive/2005/07/29/421058.aspx

Run the following command replacing www.example.com with the host header of your site and 123456 with the site id obtained in the previous step (the /V:365 indicates that the certificate should be valid for 365 days, adjust accordingly):

"C:\Program Files\IIS Resources\SelfSSL\selfssl.exe" /T
/N:CN=www.example.com /V:365 /S:123456