Jamie’s Weblog

A long time ago, in a land far far away, in a company now deceased… I was looking for a way to distribute the source code for our application so that it could be compiled and optimised on the clients machine… but without giving them our source code. I had heard of something called ‘shrouded [...]

[this is a bit of a brain dump. no editorial control was exercised] There was a period when graduating from college with a compsci degree and a knowledge of a industrial programming language (C, C++, Java, VB) meant a good job and good salary. You were in demand. I can remember graduating in ’98 with [...]

All that money which AIB collects off me in monthly account charges won’t end up in Microsoft’s coffers in future. AIB are transitioning 7,500 desktops from Windows to Sun’s Java Desktop System (essentially Linux+GNOME+Java). It’ll be interesting to hear how the end users manage the transition – one of my friends in Ireland provides branch [...]

I’m having a rather pensive day so please bear with me. This morning I was thinking about the nature of skills, technology and the likelihood of a serious disruption to our world (asteroids, police states, wars, climate change, etc) during my predicted lifetime. But I don’t want to talk about that now (hint anyway: we [...]

Last week I ripped another batch of 40-50 CD’s from my collection and I was listening to a random selection of these this morning. It’s not often you hear Altan playing a trad selection (Clan Ranald/J.B.’s Reel/Paddy Mac’s Reel/Kitty Sheain’s) followed immediately by Metallica’s ‘Fuel’. A bizarre start to the morning reflecting my slightly bizarre [...]

but since Mary Michaela Mike has already linked to my photos I thought I post the following picture of him after the Women’s Mini Marathon in Dublin.

I use Netbeans to develop Java applications both at home (how sad) and work. For sometime I couldn’t figure out why it ran much faster on my old 1GHz/256Mb laptop than on my new 2.6GHz/1Gb work pc. Today I remembered the golden netbeans rule: Turn off any module you’re not using. If you are not [...]

was my old blog which I used for about a year way back in 2000. Dave Winer is shutting down weblogs.com (err.. well actually it’s already gone) and I must admit I’m not too bothered by this. The site was old and the service superceded by Blogger, TypePad and a million other sites. Frankly, it [...]

It wasn’t so much a holiday as one of the few chances we now get to catch up with friends and family back in Ireland. We (myself and Hilary) had a wonderful week but naturally we’re now back in Southampton asking many ‘why’ questions: Why am I doing this PhD? Why are we living in [...]

Last night myself and Hilary went to see Harry Potter, The Prisoner of Azkaban. It was pretty good entertainment. What I didn’t appreciate was the message warning us that we were going to be observed by staff with night-vision goggles. Now the cinema is a public place so no one has a right to privacy [...]