Jamie’s Weblog

[via danah] If you’re a PhD student and writing a blog (possibly about your research or things around it) sign up to PhDweblogs with other like-minded procrastinators. To be honest, there’s little value to doing this but it might help you find other losts souls or drive more traffic to your blog (and you can [...]

My brother pointed me to an article (actually two) in today’s Irish Times [subscription or the dead-tree copy required] about the funding shortfall for Media Lab Europe (the spin-off of MIT Media Lab, located in Dublin). I left MLE almost exactly 1 year ago (my contract was up) and although I don’t remember those 2 [...]

Here’s another stupid idea I won’t be working on (but feel free to have a go yourself): Raindrops make noise. They make a little noise as they hit the concrete, a little more when they fall into a puddle and quite a lot when they hit cars, flat-leafed bushes and giant metal sun-blinds (as seen [...]

I noticed in my last post that I spelt favourite… well, pretty much like that. The American spelling if often ‘favorite’, which got me thinking… what is the difference in usage according to Google? favourite: ~ 3,790,000 hits favorite: ~ 13,900,000 hits I guess the American’s win (again!) but I think I’ll keep the ‘proper’ [...]

Breakfast is easily my favourite meal of the day. I enjoy making it – it takes only a few minutes and is wonderfully filling. I enjoy sitting down and eating it, usually by myself since Hilary is out the door at 7am, listening to Radio 4′s Today programme or reading something. In fact, I don’t [...]

The Urban Pollution Project aims to map the environmental aspects of our cities by using a distributed sensor network, potentially attached to bicycles. There’s a paper on the project’s website or an overview article on TheFeature.

Today, a fellow postgrad asked me if I knew of a good discussion and definition of pervasive computing. Of course, you could go back to Mark Weiser or find a million other definitions in papers, research proposals and probably blogs, but the first thing to occur to me was a recent post by Anne Galloway. [...]

After yesterday’s debacle at the House of Commons I’m hearing a lot of calls to remove the “men in tights” and replace them with armed police officers. Now, armed police are good at a number of things, most obviously they are well equipped for shooting people. However, one of the the main benefits of armed [...]

I’m beta testing Netbeans 4 and making my (very small) contribution to this open source tool. I don’t think my needs are extensive enough or I’m not anal enough to nit-pick every last detail. So far, I’ve filed a few bugs and encountered quite a few more but the latest Q-build is really good. Beta [...]

The underdog rarely gets to take a bite out of the topdog in the computer industry but AMD recently outsold Intel in the desktop market. I have no grudge against Intel but I’ve found AMD processors to offer much better value — and I’m all for supporting underdogs.