Jamie’s Weblog

Hilary and I were discussing amusing website names last night: mygirlfriendisafreak.com was the top candidate. However, today I realised that freak was too strong a word and other alternatives were considered: mygirlfriendisthecutestthingintheworld.com was a recent suggestion. Then I got a email from Hilary, after a very frustrating day at work: Start a website called mygirlfriendsjobdrovehercrazy.com [...]

Apparently, “Love Mark” is the technical bullsh*t term for brands that command a disproportionate amount of love and respect. Apple is the obvious technology example but Google also has an entry. This isn’t terribly interesting except that last week I referred to Apple as the “big, happy, cuddly, evil corporation” – it’s like the devil [...]

My supervisor pointed me to the 3rd UK-UbiNet Workshop in February 2005 so it’s likely I’ll be submitting a paper there (1-2pages, deadline 1st December, 2004). What he didn’t mention is that they held a summer school this year (where my second supervisor appeared) and the full slides are now available (208 pages, 19MB). It [...]

Technology Review has an interview with Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web. Disapointingly, the pdf of the article contains the tagline He Created the Web. Now he’s Working On Internet 2.0. Nope, he’s not working on Internet 2.0, he is working on the Semantic Web. Internet 2 is a completely different project – just like [...]

I am reading Neil Postman’s Technopoly, which is filled with interesting questions that us technocrats (and you technopolists and technophiles) should be asking. Personally, I find Postman’s views a little extreme and dystopian but he did provide an interesting quote: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was [...]

For all you Europeans who, like me, are confused about the Democratic Donkey and the Republican Elephant I have located the origins of these strange party logos.

The Guardian has a series of articles on life in 2020: housing, health, society, environment, media, religion, work and so on. An interesting (and surprisingly large) body of work.

Jonathan Schwartz announces the computing industry’s first $1/cpu/hr plan, which he alluded to earlier. This means that organisations with large computational tasks can now farm out their computational needs to Sun for the exact period of their task. I like it. I also really like the honesty with which Jonathan approaches the subject: We’re also [...]

According to Ofcom (the UK communication regulator), 2003 was the first year that TV subscription revenue exceeded advertising [via Radio 4]. Wow! I wonder what this might mean to the new batch of start-ups and their pondering entrepreneurs.

but Paolo got to it first (and even then it’s almost a month ago!): The Rules of Breakout Session Formation at the FOAF Workshop.