Jamie’s Weblog

I guess I’m not the only one worried about technology’s impact on the environment: The Guardian has an article in their Ethical Makeover series on gadgets and some tips on what you can do if you’re concerned about this. They mostly focus on TV’s, stereos and computers. Here’s one interesting fact: A 24kg PC requires [...]

Last week, I was reading Claude Fischer’s To Dwell Among Friends. It’s a fairly interesting book on the social networks of city dwellers with tons of statistics. What really stuck me was the assertion (and accompaining evidence) that the people you dwell among are not your closest friends. The argument go as such: Friendship is [...]

Programmers used to complain that C/C++ made producing stable applications too difficult because the responsibility of memory management fell to the developer (and humans get things wrong – often). Now, programmers are complaining because Java, which handle low-level memory issues for you, makes developing speedy, responsive applications too hard. Does anyone else think that (us) [...]

I think I’ve mentioned this before but I want to again blog about the environmental cost of technology. I’m no luddite or tree-hugger and neither am I some technology-obsessed, sunlight-deprived geek (feel free to disagree at any point but I do worry about both technology and the environment. Despite the fact that I’m only just [...]

The first beta is out. Time to get testing breaking it!

I was listening to Radio 4 this morning (again! does this make me old now?) and the discussion about how Great Ormond Street are considering commisioning a rewrite, or sequel, of Peter Pan. Apparently, the copyright for Peter Pan was transferred to GOS back in 1929 and is due to expire in Europe in 2007 [...]

[Warning: Techie java post. This is a reprint of a post I made on the JDIC forum] I’d like to voice my experiences with using the JDIC TaskIcon API and the open source SysTray4J project. Here’s a brief comparison based on my experience usually JDIC TaskTray (recently) and SysTray4j (a few months ago), mostly on [...]

Here’s a beautiful simulation of the BitTorrent P2P distribution network (I can’t remember where I got this link from). It isn’t particularly scientific but it is a great tool for showing how BitTorrent can decrease the load on source servers. The simulation is a Java applet written in the Processing language, which I mentioned a [...]

Number 38: banjaxed

My position paper was accepted for the 1st Workshop on Friend of a Friend, Social Networking and the (Semantic) Web in Galway (no prizes for guessing why I submitted Anyway, I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t have enough results for a full paper but hopefully I’ll be able to meet some interesting people, have [...]