Jamie’s Weblog

mmm… sometimes Eden is like that
Raffi has a little rant about the working conditions at MIT Media Lab. I work at Media Lab Europe where the primary benefit seems to be getting slightly better paid (a bit, I think) and getting standard EU holidays: 1.666 days/month. I understand 2 weeks holidays in the [...]

VoIP is not ready for prime time
Clay Shirky notes (on Boing Boing’s mini guest blog with no permalinks ) that VoIP is nearing prime time. Well, that may be so in limited environments - under utilised 100Mbps office Ethernet or possibly those fancy ADSL connections everyone (outside Ireland) seems to be able to afford. [...]

You can whistle for it…
The Recording Industry Association of America want the Register to remove this letter. Who exactly do they think they are? I realise that the Internet crosses all national boundaries but this attitude by the RIAA is ridiculous. They don’t control all global music content, nor do they don’t have [...]

A strange matter…
passed through earth, entering via Antarctica and departing 0.73 seconds later in India. Another event occurred in 1993 when an object entered south of Australia and sped thru the Earth for 0.15 seconds. Scientists believe it may have been “strange matter”… life is weirder than sci-fi.

EDGE is coming…
but does anyone care? EDGE is the successor to GPRS providing faster bandwidth and acting as (yet another) stepping stone between GSM and 3G mobile networks. I’m not actually sure if EDGE will become widespread as operators with 3G licences will most likely deploy 3G as soon as possible without the [...]

AAMAS Proposal
Giovanna Di Marzo recently sent a workshop proposal entitled “AAMAS03 Workshop on Engineering Self-Organising Applications” to the Engineering Self-Organsing Applications working group mailing list at Agentcities.net. Sounds very interesting and I’ll certainly be trying to submit a paper for this! (the fact AAMAS is held in Melbourne this year has nothing to [...]

Public WLAN for Ireland - at last!
It seems O2 intend to deploy WLAN hotspots around Ireland in collaboration with Bewleys, Jury’s and CIE. So we can probably expect these base stations to appear in hotels, Bewley’s Cafe’s, train and bus stations. Especially nice since I live next to a Jury’s hotel
Eircom apparently also [...]

Here’s an odd thing
The KVM shipped with the J2ME Wireless Toolkit doesn’t accept static variables of the form:
class A {
  public static final A = new A();
  public A(){
  }
}
I guess this is due to the preverifing done post-compilation. Odd.

The sad demise of technology
It is not only gadgets which have a limited shelf life and an unshakable destiny to be condemmed to the scrap heap. The last Vulcan likely to fly again will probably never get the chance to do so. The Vulcan was a huge delta-winged bomber left over from the [...]

Steven Johnson has a Blog
Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing this out. Steven’s book “Emergence” is a great introduction to a facinating area of research; networks and emergent systems. Steven notes how dangerous Bambi actually is. Bill Bryson made a similar point in his book “Notes from a Big Country“. He [...]